WE HAVE A HOME :) the best part is so does Mr Quigles!!!! Our new home away from home is a quaint little apartment in a three plex that is adjacent to a playground, on a street named "Jethro" and seems to have many "Jethro's" that hang out on their front porches, AND it has a lovely back yard that hopefully one day will have a fence for our handsome pup.
This has been a truely stellar week, in addition to the home find, we also found a great "beach" that is truely just down the road, a fun little crab house hang-out, discovered that we have talents outside of riding (WAKEBOARDING :) ), and the ponies had an incredibly diverse week with a cross country school on Tuesday a dressage show on Saturday and a light gallop on Sunday (of course a bit of training in-between!)
Rosella and Asia have both quickly aquainted themselves with the roads, I myself continue to just be shoffered around by one of them... and admittedly am a bit nervous about when that ends! This place is confusing, no square blocks like where I grew up at!!!
So at the end of my first complete week of re-riding on Charly I can honestly say he's a changed man (and most definitely for the better). First of all you can rest your hand on his head, way cool; secondly if you correctly put a spur in his side (I say correctly b/c I still have a bad habit of not doing correctly, but I'm working on it...) he not only moves away, but he jumps away while asking how high, thirdly the horse is now more forward thinking that I on the cross country course...so I'm ALSO working on fixing that, fourthly the man can freakin RUN... yes you guessed it I am ALSO working on keeping up with that!!!! :) I am happy to report that it is not only me that has things to work on, he isn't perfect (yet) (I suppose if I had given Danny another two weeks of fixing him he might have been), Charles (aka Chuck or Chuck-A-Doodle as I foundly call him) needs to work on a rounder frame in his gallop, best described as more like a TB less like a fancy show jumper...hehehe So basically he has one huge lesson left and I have many... :) The real test is how quick of a learner am I really...Charly had four months, I only have a few more weeks....then we are off to Millbrook, NY for our first outing back out. I know lots of you have been anxiously awaiting a schedule; I'm going to list what I know of so far, however the schedule for Charly and I will be more complete after our first run at Millbrook.
August 6th- "OLNEY HT" - Malibu and Molly/Lance and Molly/Gem Lion and Asia
August 11-13th- "MILLBROOK HT"- Discover the Power and Danny AND Charly and Molly
August 19-20th- "WAREDECA HT"-Makers Mark, Malibu, Charly with Molly ; Gem and NZ Swag with Asia; Lance and Rosella .... plus Danny's entire crew
September shows will be decided here shortly but I think it will be as follows...
September 9-10th- "SENECA VALLEY HT"-
September 20-24th- "AEC's"-
Well I'm off to give it a shot at being domestic...We've got to make this house on Jethro a home
Monday, July 24, 2006
Wednesday, July 12, 2006
East coast travel...COMPLETE!
A week ago, the fourth of July, us three girls(Asia, Rosella and myself), four horses (Swag, Lance, Malibu and Mark) and a dog(Mr. Quigles of course!) set off on a long adventure. The night before dragged on a bit long as we tried to organize four months worth of anything you could need for any type of weather; and to top it all off we were doing last minute rig re-configuration. Luckily Rosella seems to be a super handy type of a girl and stayed calm through 2 hours of wiring work, in the end we had lights, brakes and turn signals...
The first leg of the trip was supposed to be 15 hours, ending us in Wyoming at a fair grounds for a night of rest. Lesson number one of horse road travel, always add lots of time to map quest estimations (apparently they don't understand that we have to stop and water horses and feed the trucks). So this trip actually took 20 hours which meant that we weren't asleep til 4am the next day... needless to say we were exhausted.
The second leg was originally going to be 17 hours and take us all the way to our destination of the Wayne Maui Jim horse trials in Illinois. Being quick learners we new that 17 hours was a far off hope and we (Asia) found a really quaint nice place in Atlantic, Iowa. The land of corn fields. SO a shorter trip that day, but it was either driving or sleeping, we learned lesson number 2... if you aren't needing to watch the road take a nap. Oh yes, lesson number 3... always take a Verizon phone if you want any service after you leave California until you get back into more civilized states... my Sprint phone finally started working in Illinois.
One more day of driving and we made it to the show grounds. The best news of all is that we stepped out of the truck and un loaded happy, alert, and healthy ponies. We quickly got to work setting up a little camping community with my long lost buddy Heather Morris who was at the show with her Texas barn mates. I of course couldn't let myself catch up on sleep or even try to just chill; the next morning started off super early with 4 horses on my list to braid all needing to be finished by 7am. Well worth it when I watched our handsome horse Charly parade around the warm-up looking like a million bucks.
The show grounds was immaculate, GREEN grass and perfect weather made it the perfect way to lay over. Charly flew around cross country coming in 25 seconds under the time... I think the boy can run! The next day he jumped beatifully and finished his first CIC *. Not only does he seem to really enjoy the sport he also seems to be much more mature than the Charly that left California.
The final leg of the trip started at 3am Monday morning and we arrived into the ponies new home away from home at 6 pm that night. The horses have a great big barn to live in and lots of green grass in the big fields for turn-outs.
As for us girls, we still have a hotel. I hope to be bringing news of a cute apartment or cottage in the next post! If not I might have to be looking into a flight home for Mr. Wiggles... anyone ever flew a dog before?
Off to bed... I'm still trying to catch up!
The first leg of the trip was supposed to be 15 hours, ending us in Wyoming at a fair grounds for a night of rest. Lesson number one of horse road travel, always add lots of time to map quest estimations (apparently they don't understand that we have to stop and water horses and feed the trucks). So this trip actually took 20 hours which meant that we weren't asleep til 4am the next day... needless to say we were exhausted.
The second leg was originally going to be 17 hours and take us all the way to our destination of the Wayne Maui Jim horse trials in Illinois. Being quick learners we new that 17 hours was a far off hope and we (Asia) found a really quaint nice place in Atlantic, Iowa. The land of corn fields. SO a shorter trip that day, but it was either driving or sleeping, we learned lesson number 2... if you aren't needing to watch the road take a nap. Oh yes, lesson number 3... always take a Verizon phone if you want any service after you leave California until you get back into more civilized states... my Sprint phone finally started working in Illinois.
One more day of driving and we made it to the show grounds. The best news of all is that we stepped out of the truck and un loaded happy, alert, and healthy ponies. We quickly got to work setting up a little camping community with my long lost buddy Heather Morris who was at the show with her Texas barn mates. I of course couldn't let myself catch up on sleep or even try to just chill; the next morning started off super early with 4 horses on my list to braid all needing to be finished by 7am. Well worth it when I watched our handsome horse Charly parade around the warm-up looking like a million bucks.
The show grounds was immaculate, GREEN grass and perfect weather made it the perfect way to lay over. Charly flew around cross country coming in 25 seconds under the time... I think the boy can run! The next day he jumped beatifully and finished his first CIC *. Not only does he seem to really enjoy the sport he also seems to be much more mature than the Charly that left California.
The final leg of the trip started at 3am Monday morning and we arrived into the ponies new home away from home at 6 pm that night. The horses have a great big barn to live in and lots of green grass in the big fields for turn-outs.
As for us girls, we still have a hotel. I hope to be bringing news of a cute apartment or cottage in the next post! If not I might have to be looking into a flight home for Mr. Wiggles... anyone ever flew a dog before?
Off to bed... I'm still trying to catch up!
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