After the dressage finished, the show staff set up a few practice fences in the ring for Stadium. That was very interesting to watch. I have watched jumpers many times, but I have never seem Stadium done quite like that. It was a very low level, beginner novice I think, but everyone did pretty much the same thing. They move really fast. Some of the older, more experienced riders with young horses went slower and put in the correct number of strides for the lines and made deep corners and straight approaches. But most of the riders went really fast, didn't really care about strides and took the quickest path to the fence, which didn't always pay out. There were a good number of poles down, most of them being at 1 fence.
After watching stadium jumping for an hour or so, I walked back to the barn to get my stuff, it was cold and windy, so I thought that I would had back to the hotel and do some homework. But on my way back I ran into the lady and she asked if I would like to walk the cross country course with her, preliminary level.....um...HELL YES!!!! That was sooo cool. I walked the whole thing, I'm not exactly sure how long the course is, but it took us over 2 hours to walk the entire thing. She told me all about how she would approach each fence and where would be good places to gallop to save time and where she would need to be more careful. Most of the course was pretty straight forward and cool. There was a water complex that they go through twice, a sunken road, some really big, wide fences and one section of the course was I'm pretty sure if going to course problems. They start by cantering or trotting up a really steep hill, then at the top of the hill, then the hill starts to slope down, also steep, and there is a log that they jump, going down hill, again at a really steep angle. I will try to find a picture of it. It looks really crazy! I didn't get to see any of the cross country jumping, but it was still an ama