Busy old weekend.....

This weekend was the long-awaited forum get together down here. Jane hosted it up in Bonneville as she has a gite for everyone to stay in. The usual suspects all came along, plus some of the girls from oooop north in Brittany. We took Gandalf and Sky along, Tess brought her little Pottock pony, Kyriane, and we had Jane's two, Maverick and Ocarina. But not all in the same place at the same time, as Ocarina hated the girls on sight and they weren't allowed anywhere near "her" man......

So Saturday morning kicked off with two separate hacks going out, the teenagers (Ali & Caitlin) going out for a somewhat rapid ride, followed by me in the car.....

...and the others at a more sedate pace. As the first hack went so quickly, I was able to nip back and catch the others in action too (OK, so a lot of that action was ponies diving for the grass)

The rainy start to the day gave way to a bit of sun after lunch, and after a few more people had arrived we spent the afternoon messing about trying treeless saddles (one of our members is a rep for Trekker saddles) and sitting around eating cake and drinking tea......

Everyone wanted to have a go on Gandalf......

even the SNO!

Saturday night involved a lot of curry and wine.....including this bottle purchased especially for me ;-)

Then on Sunday, after I'd had to be up at half six to send Ali off to her competition with the club, we spent the morning with our EE instructor giving the odd lesson or two.....

 ...but only getting a little bit wet.

Meanwhile, in St Antoine sur l'Isle, Ali had been putting all that soaring practise to good use on Nahiade and came 6th in both of her classes.

Not entirely sure why they felt the need to include a paddling pool under this jump, but she clearly wasn't bothered by it!

Ali was pleased with her performance, chiefly because Nahiade didn't feel the need to go charging off with her as has happened at previous competitions. And also because when Carole, the instructor, rode her (albeit in a higher class), she only managed 8th.....

 

Some rain fell out of the sky that afternoon though, the paddling pool must have been full! Back at the meet up, we hid indoors, then went out for a drive to collect Ali at the club after the comp and were glad we'd decided not to ride the horses home that day.....

 

So the guests offered to ride them back on Monday morning, when it was dull but dry. I followed in the car (again) to show them some of the tracks and got a couple of nice pics

 

 

All the horses were good, although Sky insisted on seeing if she could get her rider to take her eye off the ball long enough to get her head down to the grass. Business as usual, then......

 

We did kinda miss Chester though, as he went to a new home last week :-(

 

So now I'm back to normality with a heap of soggy washing from Sunday and a kitten who clearly felt dreadfully neglected over the weekend desperate to be in my face all the time ;-)

 

A very long ride, day 2

Saturday morning we woke up ridiculously early as you do when camping. Didn’t even get woken by the SNO, she was still snoring. First thing first, check the horses. They were mostly flat out after their exertions.......!

Lovely breakfast of barbecued bacon (well, the nearest you can get from Lidl) and Tess’s chook eggs. She knows which bird laid which egg so the SNO was able to choose which one to have.  Levered the OH out of bed to go and buy bread. He then announced he was off running for most of the day but as he had presumably imagined that I’d have known telepathically to pack his running gear, he’d need to take the car to go back home and fetch it. Suggestions that he just run home were met with a frosty glare......

As soon as the kids woke up they immediately wanted to saddle up the poor horses and go jumping. We delivered the obligatory lecture about resting them and putting their welfare first etc. To alleviate the sulking we went to check out the TREC course in the woods.

We sat around for the rest of the day occasionally creaking to our feet to go and make tea. Tess bought me this brilliant book for my birthday about 2 women who rode all the way from Canterbury to Santigo de Compostela on their Appaloosas. I immediately want to do something similar, the idea of leaving the OH and the kids behind for months is very appealing, but I suspect we’ll have to wait a few years. To qualify for membership of the Long Riders Guild you have to have done a minimum of 1000 miles in a single journey. Tess and I started idly planning it anyway....

At around tea time, a birthday cake arrived, home baked by Tess. It was too windy to light the candles (no, there weren’t 43 of them) so I pretended to blow them out. We ate it with more cups of tea.

Then the outside caterers (or Gary as he’s known) showed up with a barbecue and enough food to feed an army. This is just as well because he and Tess’s OH had disgorged an army of small boys and bicycles from their cars. We moved on to wine and beer (my OH having thoughtfully brought two crates of Belgian beer along). Gary served up kebabs with all the trimmings and the ravenous hordes made it disappear in short order. The OH finally staggered in looking somewhat the worse for wear after 15 miles. Think the mid life crisis obsession is getting a bit out of hand......

As the evening wore on, we caught up the somewhat surprised horses and saddled them ready for the night ride.

They didn’t look impressed, frankly. We set off into the dusk following our guide, Aude. We rode through the vines, having a canter as night fell, then went on into the woods in the dark. The kids made all sorts of spooky noises and we concentrated on not getting impaled on low branches. We stopped by a house and thankfully the inhabitants seemed to know Aude so presumably weren’t too surprised to see a bunch of horses arrive at 10.30 at night.

The horses didn’t seem to mind the night ride, Maverick was significantly better behaved in the dark than in the daylight, Gandalf wasn’t too happy to be at the back though and kept scurrying along to plant his nose in Seraphina’s tail.

Back to the campsite after a fun two hours, the only problem being that the moon stayed firmly hidden behind the clouds the whole way. The OHs seemed to have polished off most of the 2 crates of wine and were well into “talking bollocks” mode, but there was plenty of wine left for us.

So we drank more wine and eventually went to bed........

We went wine tasting.......

Sarah came up today to ride Seraphina, and we all went out for a nice hack.

Seraphina was as good as gold (apart from a little argument about having to go across a ditch!) and we had some nice canters.

Along the way we went past the Cave Coop so we stopped in so Sarah could try some of the local vino......

The horses were great, just stood there dozing off and didn't even leave any "presents" behind.......
Fun day, must do it more often!

Considering wine and cheeky babies.....

On Friday, my friendly local restauranteur is coming to cook lunch here for me and some friends so today I went to buy some wine to go with the meal. As I rarely have more complicated requirements than "is it red and wet?" when choosing wine I decided to use the highly scientific method of selecting bottles with nice horses on the labels.

We'll see if this is a good way to go about it on Friday.......






This afternoon was sunny, if cold, so I let Skyfaxa have a graze on the front lawn. Éowyn decided she needed something extra so opened the door to give her an apple and I nearly ended up with a horse in the kitchen!