I was riding in a golf cart in the dark, with no lights, on a road neither of us could see.

“We might die” he casually commented……..

And I thought, “Wow, I’ve come all the way to The Fork, destination event, 10 hour drive, to die in some kind of insane golfcart accident.”

But let’s back up.

When I put “The ForK” on my show calendar I didn’t think a whole lot about it. I’d always heard of The Fork. I knew it was a big show and all the top contenders would be there.

But as the day was getting closer people started to worry me.

I asked a friend, who just happens to compete at the 3* level, if she was going and she said, “Um, NO I don’t want to go anywhere near The Fork!”

Uh oh.

Then I was talking about going with someone else, who gasped a little and commented about how HUGE the courses were.

I began to wonder about my very nonchalant decision to make this my very FIRST show with my new pony the Zebrasaurus……

and it was going to be my next Prelim on TheWonderPony……. after we’d had a bit of a break.

As my concern was mounting……..I had one of THOSE lessons.

We were leaving for our Fork Adventure on Wednesday. We had a jump lesson the day before.

To my horror, our stadium demons reared their ugly heads.

It was bad enough the fearless leader said we needed to squeeze in another jump school at the show to make sure he was thinking about going over the fences.

I got to thinking about trying to do a “jump school” at a show, in a “show warm up”.

Personally, I think the warm up is a sport of its own and should be called something like “How to Die Today” or “Survive If You Can”. I have so many warm up demons the mere thought of combining my stadium demons with my warm up demons in hopes of jumping around at THE FORK was just more than poor little Bad Eventer’s nerves could handle.

I called the show secretary in a full on panic, and she graciously agreed to put me in the Training division instead of the Prelim.

I’m not completely sure what I would have done if I couldn’t have changed divisions, but it would probably have involved very little sleep………..or I might have even scratched.

Bad Eventer Chicken Sh*t was definitely in the house.

To be continued ——————