What an awesome week! Ed and I went to southern Spain for an end of season holiday (me from TREC and him from farming!). We flew to Alicante then drove a hire car down the coast as far as Seville and back via the Sierra Nevada. We saw some stunning areas of Spain and also some of the less attractive. I’ve never seen so many greenhouses; some areas along the coast looked more like a sea of plastic! Our hotels ranged in standard from a small and quite tired looking place in Almeria to a fantastic four star hotel in the centre of Seville with valet parking!
The main focus of the trip was a visit to the Fundacion Real Escuela Andaluza Del Arte Ecuestre (Royal Andalusian School of Equestrian Art Foundation) in Jerez, where they put on a show twice a week to display their dancing horses. There were a lot of dressage movements in the show and you can’t help but be impressed. My highlights were the horse that bounced on its back legs the length of the arena, the incredible jumps that the horses performed and the final scene where they had 14 horses in the arena at once! The week was over all too soon and we returned from the wonderful 30°C sunshine to the cold damp autumnal British days.
When I went home to collect Wiz I made use of the facilities and gave him a full clip. Wiz used to be petrified of clippers and we had to have the vet out to inject him. A couple of years ago I decided I wasn’t happy for this costly method to continue so I invested in some battery powered clippers. They came with a DVD on the natural horsemanship approach to clipping and Wiz and I haven’t looked back since. I now clip him without tying him up so he can chill out with his head over the door watching the world go by whilst I beaver away. I just need to find a way to stop him bobbing his head when I get near his ears, I’m sure to take one off some day soon!
AGM season has started and this week the BHS Warwickshire County Committee (of which I’m a member) had their annual meeting. Mum came and gave a talk on her trip to Mongolia earlier this year on one of the BHS’s access rides, which went down very well.