The days are running into each other.  Sunday was great, the live stream of the jog at Rolex on Sunday morning was a welcome time waster.  It’s very hard to know that the jog is on and not watch it.  It is heart stopping when someone is sent to the holding box and when it was one of my favourites, Madison Park, it was tense.  I was SO happy when they called out ‘accepted’ and Parker hauled Kyle back to the barn ;).  I must say, I don’t know what it was they saw on ‘Outfoxed’ to spin him, but whatever it was, I couldn’t see it.  I guess you had to be there.

The show jumping phase had a real influence on the results.  Not on Michael Jung perhaps but for everyone else it meant either moving up the ladder or down the snakes and there were some exceptionally long snakes on the board.  I think that a lot of the horses were tired from the heavy going which North American horses so rarely run in.  Our horses run in harder ground than most europeans but we are not used to dealing with a lot of mud.  When I saw the weather on Saturday I was happy Woody was not running, however, going to Rolex and not competing is a bit of a flat weekend.

On Monday Woody, Selena and Anne Marie all came home.  They made it home by about 9.30pm, it’s a long drive but you get here in the end.  Woody looks fabulous, I have not seen him for four months.  The first thing he did was to get up and down half a dozen times for a good roll in his own bed!  There is nothing like coming home to your own bed.  King Brian (Derg Boru) has gone back to Tennessee with his mummy and I saw photos of him online looking very happy in a great big green pasture.

Woody having a good roll in his very own bed

Woody having a good roll in his very own bed

Now that Selena and Anne Marie are both home and riding today there seem to be horses going in every direction.  We have been tight with staffing while they were away and yesterday Tori Morgan did the whole barn on her own!  It’s a long arduous day on your own and I am happy the team is all back in one location again.  We could not manage anything if we didn’t have such a fantastic team behind us.

We are gearing up for the local outings.  Next weekend we have a group going to a jumping Derby at Oakhurst Farm near Ottawa.  The week after that there is a local jumper show in Kingston on the Saturday and possibly a Combined Training on the Sunday at Grandview.  Following that is another Derby outing and then it’s Grandview weekend.  I believe we have horses going to a dressage show the same weekend, and so it begins!  When you look at it that way, Bromont is just a few weeks and half a dozen horse shows ahead of us.  Tori Morgan will be riding her own ‘Bentley’ in the one star and Selena will take Woody for the three star and Zephyr for the one star.  We are already planning how the three horses are going to improve their scores by June.

This year Anne Marie Duarte is going to compete on my homebred gelding ‘Rather Boldly’.  They are going to start at the Training level at Grandview.  Very exciting.  Rummy will go to a few little events before his big outing at the Kentucky Horse Park in October and Benny will probably do one or two outings in the late summer or early Fall.  He is only four and still growing so we won’t be running and jumping him on hard summer footing until he is at least four and a half years old, so probably not until August at the earliest.  I hope he will have a chance to at least go to a little local show and soak up the atmosphere, however, after spending a week at The Fork he is probably a ‘pro’.  We also have to decide what Solo can fit in this year.  He has not had an outing yet, we need a six horse trailer!  There is never enough room in the box.