A short break in Cornwall
As we have got such a great team of girls helping us at the moment we decided to slip away to Cornwall for a couple of days - it was beautifully mild and we went for some terrific walks - we even did a spot of 'body surfing'...And YES Doug did find a wet-suit to fit him!
We got back yesterday afternoon to find that the girls had done a brilliant job and all the horses had worked really well with no disasters.
This morning first thing, we took Harry and Frog to Towcester as it was racing there the day before and you are sometimes allowed to gallop your horses on the track the following morning before they put the ground back. Towcester is a really challenging track with a long hill and it is a great test of the horse's fitness to gallop them around there. Charlie Poste rode Frog and a little jockey who works at Paul Webbers called Danny rode Harry. They both went really well although Harry was looking somewhat portly and we know he could be a lot fitter. Annoyingly we forgot to take the heart monitors with us in our hurry to get there on time so we can only go by what we saw and what Charlie thought, his comment was "Very pleasing" which is good coming from Charlie!
We will be looking for a race for Frog, hopefully in the next 10 days.
The next lot we took out was Laverty and Haunted House around the flat gallop. It is the first time I have cantered Laverty and although there is nothing to him and he still looks like a hat rack I was really pleased with him. He has a lovely swinging gait and a surprisingly long stride. He makes a nice outline in the canter, so it shouldn't be long before he starts to put some muscle on his topline. Haunted House was his normal impressive self.
We heard some very sad news this afternoon - George, who's 40th wedding anniversary we went to a couple of weeks ago died this morning. He clearly knew that it would be the last time that he would see his guests and was so warm and more interested in other people than himself. He was a real gentleman and so brave right to the very end. Going to watch the Saints playing rugby will never be the same again, as he always gave a very detailed and somewhat critical synopsis of the game in the bar afterwards, being a very good rugby player himself in his younger days. Out heartfelt thoughts go out to Merill his wife and George and Lucy, his children.
