Day-to-day Journey: Feeling Pretty Hopeful

As we drove in the car headed toward Marion, Indiana, excitement and adrenaline coursed through me. With the trailer in tow behind us and a 3 hour drive ahead, my trainer, my mother, and I were on the path to somewhere that we had never been to look at a horse. It had been a few months of looking before I had found her ad: Pretty Hopeful a.k.a. "Hope" is a red dun Quarter Horse mare, 15.2 hands tall. The ad included a video of her jumping; any novice could tell Hope loved her job. Well things were looking pretty hopeful :) until we pulled up onto the owners property. At first my heart fell like a rock. The place looked kinda run down: I had been expecting a nicer facility. But, we had driven three hours, so I was going to look at this mare no matter what the outside of the barn showed. Upon entering the barn, I was most pleasantly surprised. The barn was wonderfully kept: complete with wood stalls, a locked tack room, a wash-stand stall, a stall for tacking up, and catwalks for the hay above the stalls. All was clean and swept, the mark of a organized horse woman. The owner lead us to Hope's stall. When she walked her out, Hope was certainly cute. With a white blaze, and dun stripe down her back, and more red stripes on the inside of her legs, Hope was most definitely a dun-colored horse. My trainer asked the owner if she would lunge Hope, and the mare did well. Then the owner tacked her up and rode her western. She said that Hope had been used as a Western Pleasure horse but had been riding hunter/jumper for the last 3 years. The mare was clearly built as an up-hill English horse :). I hopped on her and my trainer gave me a mini lesson, complete with a small vertical (a type of jump). After much discussion in the barn's heated arena-viewing room, we decided to take the horse home on trial. Long story short, we trailered Hope home (we boarded her) and gave her a try for 2 weeks before making our final decision After the end of the first week, we knew that we had a unique mare on our hands. Hope is an extremely willing and CALM 6 year old. Mares are often 'crazy' at times, but Hope is one-of-a-kind. So, all in all, the choice was a hard one. Size. Silly, silly, size. That seemed to be the only thing that was going to be a large factor in our decision Hope is 15.2 hands tall (we measure her at her original home in Indiana), but I am a tall girl (my father is 6.5 ft). Yet Hope gives me confidence, just the confidence I need when I jump. She clears the jumps with elegance and ease, but she doesn't gallop off on me or get TOO excited. Thus, after vet-checking her (she came out 'clean') we bought her. So, now I have a wonderful horse that I love to death :)

*Hope's show name is Pretty Hopeful, that should explain the title of this post*

All I have to say is, "Thank you, God!"