Morven Park

On Wednesday morning as we drove into Morven Park to get Charly his in barn inspection and prep him for his afternoon "jog" (official soundness inspection) I realized that I had once before been here. This was the location that I had tried out my young rider horse, Sweet William. William was owned by man named Colonel Wimert who happens to have a practice field at Morven named after him and that is where I first jumped William....

Anyhow that aside Morven is a great event with a fabulous real steeplechase course and tons of crazy things on the XC course. Soon I'll post pictures of a few of the XC combinations that I photographed.

Charly again improved himself from one dressage test to the next; he recieved all 8's on his trot work, the canter in my oppionion was SOOO much better than before, but the judge thought he was a bit low in the poll, but he was a bit lazy into his halts. The above was good enough to put him into second place in the dressage phase..I was super proud of him and he apparently was as well and by his next hand walk he seemed to have instictively known what was next...he was now acting like superman and ready to take on the world!

Unfortunately the weather changed and dropped from 80 to 50 and started raining, basically never stopping. Saturday became a game of riding smart versus chasing the clock; the steeplechase track was so wet that your path was chosen by finding the road less traveled instead of the fastest line; This was a whole new game for Charly and even with the icky footing conditions and the pooring rain making it terribly hard to see he finished B with time to spare.

I came off of B so proud of Charly but still feeling very unsure about the conditions I was about to send the two of us out in; I saw Danny and a smile on his face, that was enough to know we had done a good job, and feeling a bit confused about my path at that moment I trotted off to finish C. The whole way knowing that something was missed, knowing that somehow I missed C1 but not realizing where I had gone wrong. A long ten minutes later I passed back by my "team" and was told that I missed C1...the day, the weekend, was over. I could have tried to finish, but with the footing as bad as it was we didn't feel that Charly needed to have that go, there are other days, this was obviously not meant to be ours.

There was a lot of mud and mess to clean up before we could pack up and head back home. A long day of disapointment.

Currently I have a call into the Midsouth CCI * event organizer to try to get Charly signed up for that. He's fit, doing great and really should for his education have a full one star. The Midsouth one star is held at the Kentucky Horse Park in two weeks, October 18-22nd.