It's that time of year again.....

Time for the Beaumont Christmas TREC! Got up at stupid o' clock to load the boys in the dark and the rain, Gandalf won't load unless we put all the lights on in the car and open the doors at the front of the trailer. Ches doesn't care because he knows there's hay in there!

Drove to Beaumont in the rain. Unloaded and tacked up in the rain, you get the idea. Lots of other nice dry clean horses emerged from various trailers all rugged and booted, ours were muddy and hairy, never mind. Went down to the map room, there were various letters to add to the map, not sure about the significance of them, never mind, got on and got going. In the rain.....

Ali's pony wasn't too chuffed about leaving his mates and going out with strange horses, lots of ears back and at one point tried to kick Gandalf Never mind, still loads better than the pony from hell we ended up with last year......

Arrived at checkpoint one in the rain, nice bit of hot soup to keep us going, the team behind arrived and Ali's pony, recognizing some of his mates, got a bit unneccessary and started rearing, had to read him the riot act, he soon settled down. We carried on, in the rain, mostly went the right way, got to checkpoint 2.

Glass of wine and some charcuterie this time, and we were handed a piece of paper explaining that the letters on the map are for the clips you have to punch your card with, but you must only clip the card if the clip is where the letters are, there may be some letters without clips or some clips in the wrong place, so don't clip the card with those..... 

It's not usually so complicated!

On we went, still raining, the tracks were getting nice and muddy by now, at one point we cantered up a hill, well the other three did and Ches set off after them but couldn't work out why he was running and not moving, he'd found a huge patch of mud and was just wheel spinning in place, the others looked back to see me laughing and laughing....he eventually got some grip and we charged up the hill.......

Last checkpoint and more wine and nibbles, Ches managed to knock a tray of them out of the guy's hand sadly for him it was all meat so even he didn't try to eat any off the ground. He did try to eat the plastic bin bag though......

Back to the stables, still raining, put the boys in a box with some hay, and hung around waiting for the rest of the teams to come in. The littlies on the Shetlands arrived back, the SNO had a brilliant time, Mike possibly less so trudging through the mud for 9kms.

Then it was food time, slap up lunch by a local traiteur with more wine of course and chocolates, we had to keep an eye on the SNO who kept trying to sneak off and steal the chocolates from the other tables.

Then the prizes, we were't last in the club section (!) but came fourth out of 7, and got an extra prize for the best fancy dress.We got a bag containing some enormous dried sausages, jars of paté and walnuts. And Mike got a bottle of bubbly for trudging round in the mud.