Esmee and her parents arrived first thing this morning at the hotel. It was great to see some familiar faces and I am very excited to be sharing this experience with such a great teammate! Our families have spent some time together in the past at the North American Young Rider Championships and we make a pretty good "family show team"!
We arrived at Horsely Park a couple of hours early just to get our bearings and wander the show facilities. It is not nearly as huge as I anticipated, but the venue is gorgeous. Unlike our big venues at home, there is no concrete and everything is so lush and green! Grass, trees, and red soil. Very horse friendly atmosphere. The indoor arena itself is a little scary but nothing too fancy so it shouldn't cause much alarm with the horses.
Esmee's horse arrived at 1:00 PM and she jumped on him straight away. He is a cute little palamino guy (he was considered too small for me). Esmee seemed to do quite well on him and by tomorrow I think she will have the trot considerably bigger and quicker. She was doing tempi changes on him without a problem and they seemed to match each other well. It is a big change for her though from her 17hh guy at home, so she has a big adjustment. I think she did a great job though!
My horse is a 16.3hh grey guy with a heart of gold. He is a Holsteiner and 16 years old. Unfortunately, he had a 7 hour journey on the trailer today so he was definitely a bit stiff to start out with and I only spent the ride stretching and walking him around. So to be honest I wish I had more of a ride today and am crossing my fingers that he feels a bit more nimble tomorrow, but he seems to have an amazing temperament.
The owners of both the horses have been exceptional and are so kind to let us borrow their horses. There is also an additional horse for Esmee and I to try tomorrow afternoon. There needs to be a back up horse for us in case something happens or one does not pass the jog, therefore we will both try the additional horse tomorrow and go from there.
As I mentioned, tomorrow is another riding day, Wednesday is the jog and we get to ride our horses in the competition ring. Thursday we compete in the Prix St. George, Friday is the Intermediaire I test, and then Saturday is perhaps the most exciting day with the Derby! For the derby we all get to draw a horse and only get 30 minutes to get acquainted and warm-up the horse before we go into the competition ring to ride the Prix St. George test! It will be the ultimate test of all the riders!
Oh, and we discovered today that riders do still ride left-to-left here - thank goodness! Seems strange though considering they don't drive that way. Also, their golf carts and fork lifts have the steering wheel on the left side..... yet they still drive their cars on the right side. Odd if I may say so myself!
Goodnight from Sydney!
Lindsay
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