Cayuse 2021

 This ride turned out to be an excellent lesson in reading the materials. I didn't do that. And it bit me in the behind.

I knew we were going to be late hitting the road. The home purchase *still* had not closed, and I had finally managed to find an engineer to re-inspect. The engineer was coming at noon on Friday before the ride.

I did email the ride manager to alert her I knew I'd be very late. In my mind, this meant I'd told her I wouldn't be there in time to vet in on Friday night. But I didn't read the ride materials with any particular care, and largely skipped over anything that wasn't explicitly labeled as "rules" for this specific ride. After 18 years competing in endurance, it seems like everything is largely boilerplate and it gets very easy to skip over stuff which looks like what comes out of every rider packet ever received.

Once the engineer left, with assurances he was happy to write a compliant report so we could close the world's most absurd real estate deal, I got us loaded up and on the road. It was 2pm by the time we were on our way.

The Cayuse ride being around Santa Margarita meant we had to slog our way through LA traffic to get there. There's a reason I tend to treat rides north and west of LA as non-existent. When it takes 9 hours to travel 300 miles, they may as well be on another planet. It's not that I mind driving for a long time. I don't. I mind driving for a long time and not making much progress. Plus stop and go traffic is hard on the horse. I don't like it.

We arrived in camp at about 10pm. It was hard to tell what I was looking at in the dark, and despite suspecting I was parking in an "off-limits" area, I took what I could get and we all went to bed for the night.

In the morning I wandered around until I found some semblance of ride management. I allowed as I thought I was parked improperly, and was directed where to move. A quick loading up of the horse and moving about 50 feet, we were in the clear. 

Feeling confident I had properly alerted the ride manager to my expected tardiness, I went about my morning preparing for the ride. 

It turned out, had I actually read the directions, vetting in the morning of was not permitted. The vets had to leave camp to be ahead of the leaders before the ride started, making early morning vetting impractical. I was disappointed, but, well, my own damned fault for not reading carefully. I did suggest in the future such a requirement be moved into the numbered ride rules and bold faced and a day of the week rather than a date used to bring attention to it.

I was prepared to just spend the day in camp volunteering. I'd brought a friend for her first experience at an endurance ride, so it would make for a good opportunity to start showing her the ropes. Then, the vet for the LD ride arrived. The ride manager came up and told me if I could get vetted in, we could at least do the LD ride.

So I saddled Demon back up again and we presented to the vet. After the examination and trot out, the vet said it looked to him like Demon was a little off in the right hind. I had my friend trot him out and it was subtle but there. The vet would have allowed me to start, but I elected to bag it. I'm not a fan of starting out on a horse with a bad step going on, even if it could just be something he'd warm up out of.

We spent the day in camp, had a good time watching the vetting and hanging out with friends and visiting, and headed for home in the morning. It wasn't the start to the 2022 ride season I had hoped for, but at least we were going home in one piece.

A couple of weeks later, when I finally got around to reshoeing Demon, I found a dried abscess in the outside heel of that right hind foot. Just as glad I didn't start him that day.

Tl;dr: Read the ducking directions.