Man rides horse

Being on a camping holiday with friends is an interesting experience in planning. Depending on the taste of your friends and/or known associates, you may be subjected to either fun stuff or never ending hell. Nevetheless, mine have decent taste, and so we ended up riding horseys on Saturday afternoon - the non metal variety. Obviously this had to be passed first by the assembled collective, and as I always was curious what riding a horse is like, I answered the question "but would the blokes not have a problem with it?" with a resounding "nah".
Because I knew that riding horseys is an incredibly manly thing, and has been throughout the centuries, as showcased by the following examples:













Well, apart from the 17th century. Then it was clearly something done by ponces with angels hovering above their heads.

Now, having established that horses are not always pink and fluffy, I can recount a variety of interesting things having to do with them.
The horse I was given was fairly big. In fact, I rode the tallest horse of my group, an impressive black mare who liked eating branches and being at the head of the column, which, I suppose, put me in general command. Huzzah! All the horses were properly trained to find the way back, using the same tracks over and over again, so little steering was involved (apart from steering the horse's head away from the branches, that cheeky devil!), allowing me to survey the area at my leisure.

Which bring me to another massive advantage horses have: they're very tall, and when you're on top of them, you're tall as well. This made it terribly easy for me to spot any animals, and I saw, consequently, two pheasants, a partridge, four squirrels, an army of rabbits, and a castle. Only the castle I'm sure I would've seen otherwise; the simple truth is that being on a horse gives you a great overview of your surroundings, and I found this to be helpful not just in the field but also, surprisingly, in the forest. Very cool.

Now, a little more on riding. Supposedly there's a technique for, you know, bobbing up and down from your saddle while the horse is in a canter or faster. The woman from the stable tried to explain how to do this and seemed dissatisfied with my inelegant custom of bouncing up and down the horse's back like a kangaroo on steroids; nevertheless, I could not find a better way to deal with this. No doubt this takes some time getting used to.

Also, when a horse craps while riding along you really don't notice a thing. Seriously. I heard from people behind me that my horse had left a few "I was here" marks around the place, but I never noticed; and I was reliably informed that another horse had the peculiar habit of farting very very loudly.