The Donkeys of Doom......

So earlier I scraped some of the mud off Maverick and Gandalf and went for a hack with a friend, Karen, who's housesitting for the mother in law at the moment. She's not had a lot of riding experience so I put her on Gandalf.


Maverick decided to be a git right from the start. Luckily I'd already briefed Karen and told her that G just ignores his shenanigans.....

He spooked at a road sign, a bird, a piece of (inert) plastic, a man with a wheelbarrow and a cat and that was just in the first five minutes! Then we got into the vines, he immediately decided he wanted to go for a run so we had an argument because Karen can only do walk and trot. At one point he was doing a nice piaffe.....

So we went back out onto the road alongside the vineyard, there were some scary men trimming the vines who had had the audacity to hang their dangerous coats on the fenceposts, there was a pile of terrifying grape skins just SITTING THERE LOOKING AT ME FUNNY, and we went past some other horses who were galloping round, he couldn't cope with that either.

So we went up the steep track up the hill, I thought that might wear him out a bit and he'll have less energy for buggering about. Which was fine until we got to the top and a bloody great white dog launched itself at the fence we were riding past. Off went Maverick, I made no attempt to stop him knowing that just makes him worse and hoped that Karen would have the sense to hold on tight - once Mav had decided to stop (he never goes far) I look back and there's Gandalf just standing there looking at the noisy dog, hadn't budged.

So we carried on, I thought that's the end of the excitement, how wrong could I be?

On the way home we were going down the hill and suddenly we came round the corner to see 5 donkeys in a field. Maverick for some reason is terrified of donkeys. They of course came up to see him, he was actually shaking and no way could I get him to go forward so ended up getting off. He does this incredible snorting like a dragon thing when he's really scared, head in the air, eyes rolling, Karen thought it was hilarious! The donkeys of course found all this fascinating and followed us along the fence which made him sure they were ganging up on him to jump him and eat him......

So I stayed on the ground till they were out of sight......

A couple of pics, couldn't get many as I didn't want to lose my iPhone during a spook.......