"It'll be fun" ...or maybe not

I was optimistic and pep-talking Mara, "Let's go for a walk, it'll be fun!" as I put her surcingle on and driving lines. I honestly believed it at the time.

She was traveling along nicely until the wind hit a huge stack of silage bales and the loose plastic flapped around. She teleported off the sidewalk so fast I missed it completely - she was faster than the human eye. That's the kind of spook I cannot ride. She tried to drop down into a mown hay field to escape, but I steered her back up and toward the bales, where the road meets the trail. She stood in the middle of the street, unwilling to go onto the trail, and cars go 100 on that road so we needed to get off. Finally she consented, and I showed her the bales that, to my disappointment, I'd shown her before when she freaked out about them.

Our nice outing was over at that point. She started gawking at both sides of the thin paved trail going down to the Haflinger farm where she stayed the weekend for that TTEAM clinic. I worked her in serpentines down the hill, never letting her straighten out, but near the bottom there were paddocks on both sides and she froze up completely.

She refused to move for a solid 5 minutes due to ??? The same Haflingers as always were peering over the fences at her, the same Fjord horse and Insha, the 30 year old Arabian  I've been fond of for years. All those hairy horses waiting for her so happily, they were really beautiful. One Haflinger's forelock covered his entire face, touching his nostrils.

The entire 5 minutes she refused to budge, I tapped her with the lines. At one point she threatened to kick, but I made sure I was out of range, and kept tapping. I never increased the intensity, I just kept vocally encouraging her and tapping tapping. I honestly didn't know my horse could block out such stimulation, but she was not being convinced to move. I realized that if I'd been on her back, my legs might have given out, I'm not sure I can tap my heels for 5 minutes. Thankfully I was on the ground.

Finally she carefully took one step, then another, hesitating in between. Then we were finally down there between all the horses, safely out of their reach. I parked her and said, "This is supposed to be the fun part. This is the part where we socialize and enjoy ourselves with all this horsey company." She stood there in a daze, and I talked to Insha and the others. One Haflinger was blowing/sniffing over the fence, enjoying her scent. I watched a chicken trying to drink drops of water out of a downspout, it was so cute. He was so determined and pecking at that thing trying for one more drop.

I was stroking Mara's rump and rubbing around her tail to try to relax her, and she would look back at me like, "Enough, can we please go!"

Then we went, and it was a series of terrifying objects the rest of the way home. At one point I had to abandon driving and grab her face and pull her off the road to safety because the mailman was trying to drive past us and she was afraid of a woodpile and trying to escape toward a nearly invisible strand of barb wire.

A rock was probably the worst thing she saw all day, moreso than the white mailbox she always tries to escape. It took us forever to just get through that village, but as soon as we were back in the woods, she calmed down. Since we were on the way home, I made her do the ultra slow walk, but I had to be careful because of the frozen ground.

A patch of unmelted snow covering the path freaked her out a bit, but she went over it. In case you're keeping track it snowed again yesterday  - is this our 5th?  It's not deep though, and the roads are clear.

She was quite good on our street, no spooking at all on that last stretch. I can get her to stretch her neck down with the driving lines so we practiced that.

Finally home I praised her, mostly lying about how good she is. *sigh*