Friday 12 August 2016

Mare Inspection, Wedding and Vacation

The last 3 week have been extremely busy on the farm!

Trakehner Inspection Day
Erland was taken to the Trakehner inspection held at the beautiful farm of Catherine and Dan Templeton's of Listowel area.
Erla was a superstar!   She was so calm and perfect in her presentation.   She wasn't the top scoring mare in the bunch but she scored high enough to make the top mare book so that was perfect for me!   Her overall attitude traveling, spending the night, braiding and presentation on the triangle showed me what a wonderful partner she is turning into.   With the limited amount of work I have put into her at this point, I couldn't be more pleased with how well she presented.  





The Wedding
The next very exciting news...We hosted a wedding at the farm for Ruth and Mike.  
What a beautiful day filled with magic!   The farm was transformed into an elegant and majestic venue.  



Erla's love to be near people drew a crowd at the gate with the wedding guests!


Family Reunion
The annual Dunbar family reunion was also part of the events happening around the farm.
There were less guests than normal with some of the relatives unable to attend for work and travel commitments.   It was another hot, sunny day with no rain.   The food (as normal) was delicious.  Reconnecting with everyone that we only see once a year is always fun and full of wonderful stories from the year gone by.



Vacation
Our annual cottage vacation has been how DH and I spent this past week. 
I made the best of my time away...We had time for visiting with friends.   I was able to run most of the days I was away.    I spent a considerable amount of time catching up on my summer reading.   We kayaked.   We swam.   We tried stand up paddle boarding...which was much easier than I had expected.  However, on rough water I can imagine the level of difficulty increases significantly







And to finish this post…The summer of 2016 has been one of the hottest and driest we have seen in many, many years in SW Ontario.   We have had about 3 days of rain in the last 6 weeks or so; and some of the rain hasn't even been enough to settle the dust and cool the surface of the earth enough to make it comfortable to be outside.   On the one odd day that it did rain…we got a good soaking…

…and the horses were all happy to be outside in the middle of the day.  You can tell how dry and hot it has been…the pastures are all fried and brown.

Even Marley wanted to stay out in the drizzle since it was such a rare occurrence.