Day one!

I woke up at 5:30 am so I could be ready to work at 7:00. Katrin showed me a barn where there was a couple of yearlings and a mare in foal and she had me groom them and muck the stalls. While I finished the mare’s stall, Katrin showed up with a horse and put him on a horse treadmill I hadn’t noticed. It is a very strange contraption but all of the horses they put on it didn’t seem to mind. They all had to walk on the treadmill for 25 minutes.

I groomed some more horses and was starting to think that that was all I was going to do when Katrin told me that I was to ride a horse! She was a big, sweet six year old mare named Angelina. It had been almost a week since I had ridden a horse so I made a lot of mistakes, but it made me a whole lot less homesick.

They do a lot of weird things here that will take a long time to get used to. I have to pick the horse’s hooves before they even step out of the stall and people also pick all of the hooves on one side of the horse. You always have to apply hoof balm and Vaseline to their nose when grooming. Horses get turned out for an hour, either longed or walked on the treadmill, and ridden. Cleaning absolutely everything after you use it, which I hate.

I was served lunch by Marion’s mother, but I couldn’t eat it because I saw it had pork on top of it. I had the realization that as a vegetarian, I would unintentionally be on a diet while here. I knew this already, but my stomach ached as I had not had a full meal since Monday. Eating hasn’t been a priority lately.

After lunch I had to clean out all of the automatic waterers, so I met all of the horses in the barns. Then I chatted with my mom and Chris and the day was finally over.