We just returned from a fabulous weekend at beautiful Blasted Rock Farm, Stephanie and Larry Sher's place in up-state New York: a beautiful setting, a wonderful and interesting house, a new Larry-designed barn with features that many of us will want to copy and beautiful, well-trained horses.
Jill Merkel taught us: Stephanie Sher, Larry Sher, Patricia Dean, Howard Satterlee, Jackie Gambino, Laura Benson, Delorma Morton, and me, Anneliese Virro how to do basic Icelandic breed demonstrations. First, we had to work walking then running the patterns, then it was the horses turn to do the walking and running. Jill was a knowledgeable and patient teacher and we all learned a lot. I think that any of us - with some additional practice with the actual team - are now able to do reserve duty in a breed demonstration at least at an informal level. We all had a good time; the weather was very pleasant and Larry and Stephanie were perfect hosts. Stephanie served us great home-cooked meals I don't know how she managed to get it all done and to also participate in the training), and Larry had all the technical aspects worked out. He even had rigged up a loudspeaker system so we were all able to easily hear Jill's instructions. Then in the end, he set up his camera to record the last few times we rode the patterns, which we were then later on able to watch on the VCR in order to see for ourselves the progress we made with each new attempt.
Thank you Stephanie and Larry for putting us up and feeding us so well and for organizing this event and thank you ,Jill, for teaching us; all of us appreciate your generosity.
Jill
Anneliese
Laura
Howard
Do you ever feel like you're walking with a BIG rock in your shoe?
Laura
Laura
Stephanie
Larry
