Where do you ride?

Just out of curiosity's sake...

On average half the time is spent on schooling in an arena (indoor or outdoor depending on light and weather) and half the time on trail rides where the purpose is to reinforce what has been worked on in the arena, improve fitness, and let the horse relax.

Since i'm a full time trainer,i'm alway's in the round pen or arena when i'm not at a show.i sometime's take a young horse out in the pasture to check on or bring in my buffalo or cattle.

I like to go, I usually ride at Petersburg Battlefield park, (ever seen the beginning of the movie "Cold Mountain") Its about a 12 mile circle except for when they close of 4 frikking miles over a single Eagle nest, It has its advantages but I am getting oh so bored with the same circle, I would go insane if I had to ride in an arena.
I do understand arena riders are doing different things, and there are many sports and activities that take place in arenas, it's all good. Just not really my cup of tea.
Seems like the cool things I'd like to do are girls events.

I used to ride in an indoor and outdoor arena and on trails, but with my new lease at this tiny house I just have a small field in front of the road to ride. Its not that bad though :)

Always outside, sometimes in an arena and sometimes on trails.
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It depends on the weather, time, people to go with, how I am feeling (amount of pain that day).

If everythign is great, it is down the road about a mile (some friggen busy and scary ones at that!!) and out onto a couple thousand acres of logging trails with the filly dallied to my saddle!

If just some things are going right, it is down the road in the other direction. The stable is on a dead end one-lane road that takes about an hour to ride to the end and back. Kinda boring, but better than nothing.

Most of the time, especiall in winter, it is poke around the indoor arena because it is better than not riding at all. Sometimes, because we have two riders and only one ridable horse, my daughter will take him out down the road and I will do the cool off from thier hour gallop in the indoor arena. While she is out galloping my horse - I groom and love on her filly.

My kid? Spoiled? Ya think?

I don't have a whole lot of choice. If we had an indoor or access to an indoor, I'd definitely ride in it. It gets to be a pain riding outside with -20 windchills and all weather.

Other than that...trails, or hacking around.

I don't have an arena so I ride on our property. There's a nice, mostly falt area near the barn where I do most of my schooling. I trailer to lessons which has indoor & outdoor. We have some trails around I use for conditioning.

We ride Spring and Fall in the Cherokee National Forest of SE Tennessee and the Chattahoochee National Forest of N. Georgia, and a fair amount in the Cohutta Wilderness area which is only about 40 miles east of me. With so much forest to ride we seldom get bored.

We're blessed to have a lot of good riding within a few hours, and have ridden at various places on the Cumberland Plateau and on occasion ride in the Big South Fork Area.

We plan to ride in the Great Smokey Mountains during the elk rut in September.

This winter, when the days are short, we ride the Chickamauga National Battle field when weather permits.

It's almost spring, and we'll be riding somewhere most every weekend until the heat comes in June. We seldom ride in July or August.