Early starts

Emma Hindmarsh

   Walking Cassie home from cross country at Fairhill

This week I spent time with the usual chores of mucking out stalls and then on to riding our assigned horses. Over four days I rode eight different horses and once again they ranged from preliminary to three star level. Last Monday I rode two horses by the name of Gambado and William Penn. Gambado is a one star horse and Penn is a three star horse. I mainly did dressage all week so it was a quiet week for me. 

Lizzie and Phillip left at 2:30am on Wednesday morning to drive to Georgia for Phillip to compete at Chattahoochee event. He took two horses to the event, William Penn and Team Rebecca Ben. After the dressage he was first and second and overall he ended up finishing third and eleventh. 

On Thursday morning I went with Jennie to watch her train race horses. I got up at 4:30am to be ready for Jennie to pick me up at 5am. She rode four horses that morning around the track and started some of them out of the barriers. It was an amazing set up. The barns were quite big (see picture below) and the place was designed with a walking track around the outside of the stables (but still inside the barn) so they could walk the horses in the winter to keep them fit. This place had certainly had a lot of money spent on, which could be seen in the stables with the brass finishing’s and meticulous wooden partitions between the stables.

On Friday night I went out for dinner with Charlie, a guy from Ryan Woods’s barn. He took me a restaurant called The Whip which was quite enjoyable. 

Back to eventing on Saturday when I went to the Fair Hill event with Jennie and Jackie, where Jennie was competing on four horses. I helped to groom all of the horses and made sure they were ready to compete. It was a very successful day for Jennie as she placed in the top five with all of her horses. 

By Sunday I was ready for my day off and spent a relaxing day around the apartment getting things ready for the next week.

That’s all for now

Emma