The first day he came in riding his black mare Magic and driving these two big draft horses, a gelding and a mare named Thunder and Lightning. I'd never seen blue roan draft horses so of course I thought they were cool. He wasn't even touching Magic's reins, just guided her with legs and seat...
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After that, they went to work on training them to pull this sled. I was really impressed with the number of steps they broke it down into before they finally hitched them up. This is the final result, and even then they aren't really hitched to it. The girl in the picture has a rope in her hands that's hooked to the singletree and it has been dallied around the front bar of the sled and that's all that's holding it. If there was any sign of trouble, she could let go of the rope and they would just pull free of it. This picture shows Parelli getting Magic to put her front feet on the sled and walking along with it as it's moving. She is one more well trained mare I'll tell ya! Can you say "Closed Course. Professional Driver. Do Not Attempt this Yourself." ;o)
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There were some twin sisters who came out and did some really impressive liberty work. One of them worked with the Thunder and Lightning, the draft team, and the other worked with Barnum and Bailey, the two minis. They are SO cute!
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This is a picture of a paraplegic girl who's been training out there to try to make it to the olympics. This is one of Parelli's horses that he's going to let her use. The saddle is special made with a handle on the pommel and special thigh rolls and velcro straps to hold her legs to the fenders and her feet in the stirrups. They put her up there and got her set and she took off and you could absolutely not tell that she was any different than anybody else. She had such a good seat and posture. She had some special cues to get the horse to go or to change gates since she couldn't use her legs to do so. It was really neat and there was not many dry eyes in the place when she got done.
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Saturday night they fed us dinner and had a dance and here's a picture of it just getting started. There were 2500 people in attendance and this is just a fraction of them who were brave enough or drunk enough to get out there and dance. The band was really good though. We stayed for a while and watched and then went back to the room and crashed. We're pitiful old farts I think.
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Here's a view of the big covered arena where it was held. It's absolutely huge and is really cool the way it's built. If you've ever watched him on RFDTV, this is the building they show a lot. They were recording the whole thing so it should be aired some time soon and y'all may get to see me on there because as you can see, I was directly across from the camera the whole time. We even got to help make a Parelli/RFDTV Christmas commercial while we were there. It was so funny because Linda's horse Remmer kept freaking out when the crowd started singing "We Wish You a Merry Christmas". He was used to applause and crowd noise and stuff like that but I guess even the professionals can't prepare their horse for EVERY thing that might happen, especially mass SINGING. Pat's horse Magic never moved a muscle though. But he kept flubbing his lines so we got to laugh at him too.
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This is the view out the end of the arena. It was absolutly AWSOME!
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Here's a pic of our little group. That's Aleta on the left, then me, then Elizabeth and her husband Richard. We had a blast and they were really nice traveling companions.
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And here we are leaving the last day. It rained at least once every day and you could see it coming over those mountains, which are no telling how many miles away and are the same ones shown two pictures back, for 30 minutes or an hour before it got there. The mud was atrocious since everybody was parked in a field. They were having to push/pull cars out all the time. But it was fun and I'd go back, if only to sight see, in a heartbeat!