Saddlebreds!!

This one looks like Hokus....in an alternate universe!

I was SO excited to find that the (original) weekend we were going to Jimmy Buffett there was a Saddlebred show that weekend.

Let me back up a little here and explain......we bought these tickets 2 months or so in advance, as Jimmy was going to be in LAS 2 weekends in a row, we picked a weekend and bought tickets. Flash forward to about 3 weeks before the concert and John ends up with a check ride the morning after the concert at 5:40am. Sooo we decide the prudent thing to do would be to buy tickets for the weekend before (even though this cost an enormous amount of money, better than screwing up due to lack of sleep and having no job right?) so he could go and not worry about staying up late. That's what we did and it worked well....then he decided that we should go the next weekend (after all we still had the tickets, and I think he wanted to see if I actually would kick it of a heart attack after non-reving to LAS 3 weekends in a row) and that we would leave the concert early, which we did and it worked fine. But the day of the concert I was flying solo as he got called on a trip, at which point I found the Saddlebred Show!!!

This has to be my favorite horse of the show!

When I first started taking riding lessons 20 some years ago (gasp am I really that old??!) I started learning on Saddlebreds, which I rode and showed through college. In fact when I bought Neeko (our reject TB) I was also tossing up the idea of getting a Saddlebred. I love these horses, and I love the people that love these horses. They are a great group of people, and of course the horses have great personalities! Sadly I learned that New Mexico isn't exactly Saddlebred Mecca.....at all. I actually dragged John to the state fair when we first moved here because they had a "Saddlebred Show." Not so much....one horse in every class...the same horse....Saddlbred's it seems are not popular here. So it's been a good long time since I have been to a "good" show. This show was great! It was at one of the casino's that has a huge indoor arena, and I could just sit there and watch...which I did for 4 hours until the show ended. It reminded me how much I LOVE these horses and how much I miss showing them!