Hunter Pleasure - Main Ring Adventures

Arabian shows now seem to be 'divided' into 2 camps:
Main Ring (western, hunter, english, park, costume, halter, etc)
Sport Horse (sport horse in hand/under saddle, working hunter, jumper, dressage, etc)

Since the Fancy Pont and I have been training in the world of Sport, we had mainly focused on preparing for the sport horse classes.  However, THIS show offered BOTH classes!

So, we ventured into the main ring hunter pleasre classes and rode like an open hunter horse:
Hunter Pleasure ATR
Hunter Pleasure AATR

I'm lumping both classes rogether because both rides went about the same, and we were competing against mostly the same horses.

Fancy Pony was feeling stiff to the left.  She was having a difficult time maintaining her left lead canter, and she was struggling to carry herself.
These were our first 2 classes of the show on Friday...

You're not *really* going to make me get up, are you?

We made a reasonable presentation at the trot, but our canter was nothing special and was somewhat inconsistent.  Then, they asked for the hand-gallop....
Oh, hand-gallop, how fun you are!  And how satisfying when the transition is distinct!

My strategy for the hand-gallop was to find my cross-country attack mode, and Whisper was game to play along!

The first direction, they called the walk from the hand gallop, but I took my time to downward transition through the canter and a few steps of trot.
Reverse.
Trot.
Canter.
Hand-gallop.
Back to the canter.  Oh, yeah?
Heck, yeah!  Pony came back to the canter and rebalanced herself quite amiably.

Back to the trot, and line up!
We walked out of there with a 4th place in both classes!
That means we have enough point now to go to Regional Championships in Hunter Pleasure ATR!
What a GREAT feeling!!