Lauren and Lucky Read Free

riding lesson on Saturday mornings, I’d go mad! I wish I could be you and always have girls to hang around with, and my own pony to ride and spend time with whenever I wanted to – it sounds like heaven to me!”

    When I said all this to Arabella, she just shrugged and said, “Yeah, I guess so.” She didn’t seem that enthusiastic, but I know she was only playing it down so as not to rub it in. We fell asleep soon after that, so we didn’t talk about it any more.

    Normally I hate getting up in the mornings, but it was brilliant this morning ’cos it was the first day of waking up at Pony Camp.

    After breakfast we grabbed some lead ropes from the tack room and went straight off up the lane to the upper field to catch our ponies. I went up to Lucky and gave him a pat and a carrot and he let me catch him straight away. I also helped Bea get her lead rope on Cracker because the clip was quite stiff and he kept moving his head about, the cheeky boy! Gracie was being a bit flighty and kept running away from Arabella, so she asked Lydia to catch her instead.
    It was so nice all clip-clopping back down the lane with our ponies and grooming them in the barn together, all chatting and joking – just how I’d imagined Pony Camp would be!
    For our dressage workshop, our group sat at the picnic benches outside the barn. The secondSally appeared, we started bombarding her with ideas for our routines, and asking questions about the compulsory movements.
    â€œHang on! Hang on!” she cried. “I’m glad you’re keen, but one at a time!”

    So we shot our hands up like we were at school, and got into fits of giggles about that. Once she’d answered our questions, Sally explained that most people find it easiest to make up the routine first and then choose music to go with it. You can have two or three different tunes put together or stick to just one, if it fits well. She gave us some really good advice, which is to think about our ponies’ personalities and choose the movements that suit their strengths rather than the ones that highlight their weaknesses (so me and Lucky won’t be doing any halt to canter transitions then!).
    Then Sally sent Leonie to the games room to get some rulers and pencils and paper, and we all copied her scale drawing of the arena off the whiteboard, like this

    We started chatting to each other and sketching in a rough plan of which set movements we could do and the best order to do them in. There was lots of rubbing out too, when we realized that you can’t link certain ones up very easily! There weren’t enough rubbers to go round, so Arabella broke hers in half and shared with me. We had this good idea of doing a twenty metre circle in trot in the AX half of the school so that when we’ve done thecircle we can go into canter in the AF corner and it should look really cool. Sally came and leaned over us and said she liked that idea, and we felt really pleased with ourselves!
    In our lesson this morning we worked without stirrups so we could improve our balance for the dressage. Mischief did a big plunge when he went into canter and Marie almost went out the side door, but she managed to grab the pommel in time!

    We worked on the set movements again and I think me and Lucky are actually improving. We had a go at the 20 metre circle in trot and then at getting canter in the AF corner, the sequence Arabella and I had thought up. It worked really well, so we’re definitely putting it in our routines! We also tried out trotting down the centre line, then doing medium walk fromC to E, then going back into trot at E. Sally’s right, it is tricky when you start putting things together and trying to hit the markers.

    I also remembered what she’d said about Lucky needing preparation so I sat up tall and gave him a few extra squeezes with my legs to get his walk more active before I asked for trot. It worked on the third try