Yellow Cards, Baby Mommas and Tree Bowling.

I'm coming home!! Well for a month at least, 13 Dec to 12 Jan. Very exciting, and very soon!

So what have I been up to lately? Well since we got back from England its been very busy on the competition front with the Europeans, Boekelo and Pau.

We went to the Europeans in Fontainebleau directly from England and had another lorry meet us there to pick the other horses and a mountain of feed and rugs and tack etc etc etc... just as we arrived the organisers decided to water the clayey / sandy parking area, making a great muddy mess and

making unloading / loading the everything great fun! The team did great (although Mossy was a complete bitch!) they ended up with the silver medal. Very good indeed.

On the Friday there was a cocktail party that Susy decided she was going to drag me along to, ok then, so we get all dressed up and rock on up to the tent and everyones dressed in jods and jeans and just plain old scruffy. Thanks Suz! Luckily it was free wine so we got over our embarrassment fairly quickly. That did however mean we were playing bowling with those round ornamental trees and deciding Bryn and Stefano needed plastic grass chest hair... After

that it was the whole Italian team back to our lorry for pasta, so including all the hangers on etc etc there was 22 eating in our lorry! Ok our lorry is huge but c'mon!

So Mossy was really horrible on the cross, she ended up getting the big E in the last water (3 from home), for some reason however Susy kept going and finished so she got yellow carded... more on that later...

We were back home for less than a week before leaving for Boekelo with Caro, she was a star! Its amazing what a change of bit can do! Even got a qualifying score, no more exceptions for us! Of course Boekelo was a ton of fun (how can an event sponsored by beer not be!). I made best friends with Peter the man at the coffee stand as he asked me to move the lorry 5 meters backwards after we had parked so he could have his machine at the entrance to the stables. No drama I said, he was shocked and I couldn't walk past him for the rest of the week without him trying to feed me something! Very convenient as I couldn't actually get to the lorry without going past him! Giuseppe Della Chiesa (the TD) seemed to spend a lot of time in our lorry eating all our food (including Mrs Ps home made spaghetti bolognese) on one particular evening he was somewhat tipsy and basically emptied out the fridge... lucky I had Peter to fall back on!

Then again we were home for less than a week before leaving for Pau with Mossy and Ava. My two little dressage stars, Mo 3rd and Ava 6th! Super Ava of course jumped clear with 2 SJ rails and finished 9th. Mossy however despite jumping amazingly starish decided ¾ of the way round that she was done and got eliminated again. Susy pulled her round and jumped the last one that she stopped at before walking home... yep, another yellow card! and a 2month ban LOL. Good thing it was the last comp of the season and the ponys are on holidays now anyway. But it did cause a bit of drama, including a rant by Mark Phillips in his Horse and Hound column.

Today our first baby Momma arrived. Next year Susy wants embryo transfer foals from all her horses. Very exciting!!

The 2009 season so far

They say a picture says a thousand words and as I've been missing about ten thousand this year I decided I needed a fair few pics to bring you up to date...

Vairano was quite a competition, Susy won all the classes (CIC**, CIC*** and CCI***) which was quite special. Everyone I've talked to cant remember anyone else having done something like that. The pony's were all amazing and on their best behavior and I also won the grooms prize - Yay! :-)

Ava went up to Badminton (that's us grazing in front of the house), she was super just a bit of a shame about the XC time faults. I was also helping Robbie (Italian that came 4th) he did so awesome! Was a party on the way home I tell ya! I met up with Mum and Ky while I was there so good to see some familiar faces, did some shopping too – yay new boots!!

The next big event was the 4*in Luhmuhlen. It was Mossys first 4* and she was amazing! Just one run out XC which really was Susys fault (she fell off in the same water last year) but popped straight in the next time. It was quite a tough course, she was the only one to finish for about the first 20 starters or something stupid. So lots of carrots for Mo Mo ;-).

Coming up is the dressage Europeans next week followed by a one day then leaving for Burghley that night then straight back to Italy for a comp in Rome before the eventing Europeans in France. Barely enough time to catch my breath!!

I'm dreaming of a white Boxing Day.

Not quite as good as a white Christmas but damn close! That is unless your flat out on the couch unable to move due to a particularly bad bout of the flu (Thanks Chloe!) whilst everybody else is outside building snowmen and having snow fights.
Never the less Christmas in Carcassone was awesome. Lots of family, lots of presents, and LOTS AND LOTS of baking thanks to Kates early Christmas present (a kenwood mixer).
Before the terrible flu outbreak we managed to get in lots of roller blading (new Xmas present :-D) which put me in good stead for the ice skating rink we found in Carcassone town. They had quite a lot of festivities going on, with a market around the ice rink, a ferris wheel and a parade consisting of 5 men dressed up in fluffy costumes (which took quite a likening to Ariki, Tamati and I) and a small band.

Greece is a whore everybody's been in her

I was back for one night before leaving for the wonderfully sunny Greek cruise :-) The first night was in a very fancy pants hotel... that is apart from my bed, evidently they were trying to squish as many people in as possible so I had a stretcher that was designed for dwarfs. As we all know I'm not exactly tall but my feet were hanging off the end quite impressively.

The boat was amazing. The beds however weren't a great improvement on the previous night. We had 4 of us in a cabin that barely held 4 beds never mind the luggage of 4 girls too! It didnt really matter though as we spent most of the time in one of the numerous bars on board or on the sun deck sitting around the pool drinking (the unlimited supply of) cocktails or joining in silly activities such as towel animal folding (unfortunately the game of 'stop the bus' – anyone know what this is? - didn't seem to happen, much to Dees disappointment) and just generally mixing in with the 150 year olds that made up everyone on the boat the wasn't part of the contiki group.

The on board parties were fun (couldn't possible be anything to do with the free alcohol). There was the contiki cocktail party, a toga party in which there was a lot of macarena style dancing (the Americans seemed to know an awful lot of similar ones), the captains cocktail which didn't consist of much except dressing up and (after a long wait in line) getting your photo taken with the captain which Hannah then proceeded to loose we did however take the opportunity to do titanic impersonations at the front of the boat. And if all else failed there was always the karaoke to keep us going – my personal fav being Jeremys version of Michael Jacksons Thriller.

Of course we did get off the boat and onto the islands the tour went to Mykonos, Kusadasi, Patmos, Rhodes, Crete, Santorini and back to Athens.

There were some talented stair walking donkeys (an interesting ways of making them go) which Hannah kept reminding us for the rest of the holiday.

Turkey was quite entertaining. We opted out of the tour and spent the day wandering around the bazaar fending of very thought out and well rehearsed chat up lines: “hey Charlie's Angels have arrived” “Four angels... one devil muh wah ha ha” “Oh its the desperate housewives” and my personal fav “ Ladies this is the boarder patrol, you must come through my shop to have your passports checked”

Boekelo

Boekelo was so much fun!!! Crazy crazy party's like every night. I guess that's what happens when the main sponsor is beer! First night was the best, it was a bit of a spontaneous random one in the tent in the yard, they were poring the drinks 9/10 gin 1/10 lemon so everybody was wasted at like 8! Then Susy decided it was a good idea to start dancing on the tables so dragged me up... well it all went downhill from there – half an hour later all the tables had been pulled together and everyone was up I must have fallen off like 20 times at one point I fell (I still maintain I was pushed) had Susy and Andrew Nicholson fall on top of me. At 12 they stopped the music so Susy decided we would take everyone back to our lorry... this the massive flash lorry that's kept spotless... yea messy. I woke up the next morning very sore, very hungover and with a fat lip. It must have taken me like 2 hours to plat poor Mossy.

The next night was the meet the stars, we weren't planning on going but we were passing by after dinner so decided to pop in. I felt very out of place everyone was wearing dresses and suits – I was wearing jeans caked in mud and my yard jacket never to mind a few beers later and everything was fine. Twas also a very entertaining night with Zara Phillips and Dirk Schrade spinning around the dance floor at a great rate of knots and Clayton Fredricks stealing the mic and having his very own karaoke party. The most entertaining part however was at about 4 that morning I hear the lorry door slam so hard I think its gonna fall off its hinges. I found a very very drunk Australian curled up over our toilet...

So back to the horse bit Mossy was a star did a really awesome dressage was coming 36th (there was like 110 in the class). I managed to see her jump 3 fences on the XC – the first and the last perfect, then number 5 which was like a cross bar oxer kinda but quite big and very wide. She smacked the first rail SO hard she was basically vertical with her bum above her head then she landed on her knees with Susy hanging off the side and somehow managed to reorganise her self and keep going leaving Me John and Bryn staring in amazement trying to get our heart rates to return to normal. The rest she was very good (she was a lot more careful after that) just had a very stupid stop jumping off a bank. And Show Jumping was OK.

Mossy came back to Italy with a friend of Susys and from Boekelo we went straight to Düsseldorf to pick up Dodo and take her to a comp in Austria. Dressage people are very mad, everything is blinged up to the eyeballs! Bandages with sequins, halters with sequins, and my most hated tail coats with sequinned words written on them!!! Dodo was super got 7th in both the Grand Prix and the Grand Prix special despite her lack of sequins.

New Toy

We have a new pony. Name is Blue Moss. She's a New Zealand TB was started by Mark Todd in New Zealand and then went to some Irish girl whose had her since she was like 5 or something. Mossy is very very sweet (somewhat ugly however – her forehead is ridiculously huge and she has no forelock to cover it) but needs quite a bit of work, from what I've heard the Irish girl didn't do her many favours but so far shes come along loads.

Quarantine

First up was the CHIO at Aachen. Was Dressage, Show Jumping and Eventing so I got to catch up with lots of people I met in Spain. Ava went rather terribly almost crashed with the carriages as they came bolting out of the main arena where they had their prizegiving right before her Show Jumping round which Ava being the stresser as she is gave her a mild heart attack and consequently she had something like 5 rails down. XC wasn't much better – 2 run-outs at a chevron in the second water, Susy has noticed that shes picked up a recent habit of having a little snooze in the middle of her XC, did the same thing at Badminton. Fingers crossed its sorted before the Olympics!

From there we went straight up to Holland for the team training with Hanns Horn. Really lovely place and lots of cute babys around. Only problem was that there was no track for fitness work so we had to hack for about 20mins to this random sand road (yes an actual road with cars and things).

Whilst in Holland I had a couple of days off and venture up to visit Mel! I had detailed instructions of which busses and trains to take and much to my surprise I managed to not get lost! That must be a first for me! I did have one slight drama with my train ticket however, I had it in my pocket and when the ticket guy came around do you think I could find the damn thing! Was a bit of a stress as I searched through all my pockets and emptied my bag onto the seat – nowhere to be found! After about 10min (during which time I'm getting very odd stares and trying to explain in Dutch that I actually did buy a ticket) the guy beside me found it under the seat and had to climb on his hands and knees and ferret right under the seat to dig it out. Highly embarrassing! Was awesome to catch up with Mel. Had a great gossipy time just like the old days and had a way too successful shopping trip in the beautiful Deventer.

From there it was back down to Aachen for the quarantine. Quarantine was lots and lots of fun. It was basically just one big party as there were heaps of people all with only one horse (except us as Susy took all of hers up!) and not much going on as there was no competition or anything. So everyone was bored out of their minds and being complete fools.

The Italian team delayed the naming of the team to the very last minute (2 days before they flew!) So it was all a bit stressy in the Italian camp. Luckily I don't speak Italian (ha not often I get to say that!) so was able to stay out of the most of it and declared my self and honorary Canadian!

So we had Ava at the quarantine and the other 4 at a yard that was 15min up the road and had the scooter to get between the two. On the second to last day I was going back in the afternoon to feed the others when a cop starts following me... OK sudden memory jog to remember all the road rules and am on my best behavior when he pulls me over... eek I was breaking so many laws for starters the number plate on it was from another bike, it hadn't been registered since 1997, I had my riding helmet on not a motorbike one, didn't have my license or passport with me, and the guy reckoned I was doing 80km in a 50km. Yikes! It ended up he followed me back to the yard where so I could show him my license (highly embarrassing arriving with cops behind me!) and after he added everything up he decided that it would be too expensive and let me go after I promised to not ride it again! Whew!

This is a photo of everyone with their spacesuits on just before they left for the airport.

Me Amelia, you Tarzan

Well I finally made it to Toulouse to see my cousin and what a mission that was only took 14hours of traveling, luckily I had a sleeping train (which was interesting... I swear the guy opposite me was about to drop dead! His lungs must have been so full of fluid he was making more noise that the train, and then he would stop breathing for like a minute before coughing and spluttering and choking everyone awake... bergh!! Even the memory makes me feel like spewing)

So their new house was cool... empty but cool. Spent a bit of time furniture shopping and then furniture building and by the time I left it wasn't so empty :-)

We went to this crazy ropes course thingy. Ariki and Tamati were like little monkeys swinging all over the place while the rest of us were tentatively negotiating our way around. Half way round I got brave and decided that if everyone else can flying fox upside down then I damn well could too. Well that ended up with me getting my hair caught in the slidey thing, missing the rope to pull myself onto the platform and sliding back to the middle of nowhere... apparently my assumption was wrong.

Elroy and I stupidly decided to go the extra for experts route (see photo) , oh the PAIN! It looks easy but I tell ya there is no comfortable way of doing that!