2007

Diary February 

The month started well with a short skiing trip to Bad Gastein Austria with some friends of ours, Emma & Conner.
Mark was cautious as his foot was still pretty sore. Tanya was determined not to break anything, Emma had a dodgy knee, so the only one raring to go was Conner.
Despite the shortage of snow we had fun skiing, with long relaxing lunches and dinners, a perfect break before the season.

With all the horses back in full work and the start of the season looming we arrived home and had to get the horses out jumping and XC.
The weather was against us, water logged fields meant no XC schooling so it was down to the jumping.

We are lucky enough to have 3 indoor jumping venues within 40 minutes of the yard, one week saw 3 trips to Markfield and Arena UK.
To say the older horses were a little rusty would be polite! but luckily they improved as the week went on.
Lauren, Mark, & Booli all had young horses having there first outing, as often is the case they showed the older horses up and behaved perfectly.

Jumping @ Arena UK

We flew to the states on the 24th for 5 days teaching. The gang we teach in Wyoming and Utah fed up with the snow by his time of year make the 3 day journey to California for our clinic which they follow by competing at Twin Rivers HT.

As usual it is great to see everyone, I would like to say it was nice to see the sun, but that did not really happen, it was pretty wet and cold. but still warmer than Wyoming & Utah)

We did two days at El Capitain ranch, only 20 minutes outside Santa Barbara overlooking the sea I can think of a lot worse places to be!
The next 3 days we were at Cottonwood Ranch a further 40 minutes north, an equally beautiful setting, swapping the sea with rolling hills as the back drop.
The clinic went well, with only one person off, - Marybeth, who had a fall in a very smelly water, I am afraid we did laugh!

We left feeling confidant that every one was well prepared for the competition at the weekend. (we have since heard that all went well at the event and most people were placed)

The flight home was pretty uncomfortable, with the plane full, we were very squashed and found it difficult to sleep not really what we needed with a very busy 7 days ahead of us.