So there is a lot to catch up on! For starters – the U.S. Eventing team has been dominating - they won the dressage and then jumped FIVE double clear rounds on Saturday’s cross country course in front of 33,000 spectators at Santa Sofia Golf Course. It was awesome to watch them – Buck set the mark on Absolute Liberty and the rest of them met it. You could count all hairy moments on one hand – we have a lot of which to be proud. The venue was beautiful and it was like a cross country fiesta.

The morning started off a bit manic, I made 30 sandwiches to get us through the day. Then we couldn’t get the gate unlocked to start loading the equipment (the horses had to ship about 20 mins to the cross country) then once we got it open, we discovered that our driver only had 1/8th of a tank of diesel. He didn’t seem concerned and so Jim Wolf and I piled in with him – three across on the bench seat and crossed our fingers. The fuel light went on when we pulled into the venue and we determined that we could at least push it from there. The horse travelled easily and that is most important. We set up our remote venue – Dougie Hannum (our stable manager) needs to be cloned. He does the work of 10 men and he does it with a smile on his face. This is a great group of grooms but a few of them are inexperienced, but they were happy to have help and I think they learned a lot. We had a great set up – Dougie’s Ice Horse machines were in full effect in the cooling zone and all the countries took advantage of them.

There is some lack of education in Mexico about walking on the cross course if you’re a spectator – we witnessed lots of wandering near the jumps early in the day, but everyone caught on eventually. There is a very laid back atmosphere here.

We witnessed some things that were a throwback to the 80s – horses covered in wet towels to cool them off, things that we hadn’t seen in years. There are thousands of ways to take care of horses and we saw a large percentage of them yesterday.
We went to the press conference in the chapel, which was a light-hearted affair for all the riders.

We then tore down our temporary village at Santa Sofia and packed everything back up – I climbed out of a trailer window at one point after we finished loading the horses but we managed to fit everything in and all the horses! Our driver had gotten some diesel delivered so we were in better shape heading back and he told me all about Zazopan (the town which Santa Sofia and Club Hippca is in). He lived in Texas for a few years so between his Spanglish and mine we had a good chat. We spent a few hours in the barn getting the horses sorted out, I did more sewing (saddle pads, etc) than I have done in the last five years and helped put everything away. The horses were all happy, a tired contentment embraced both the horses and humans.

We got home around 9.30 and checked in with the jumpers, they arrived on Friday to the Guadalajara Country Club and they are happy and organized. I haven’t seen Clark Shipley since 2008 when he looked after Authentic for Beezie Madden – so it was very nice to see him. All of our attention will turn to the jumpers beginning tomorrow.

This morning, after a good night’s sleep and a lot of love from the grooms (and carrots) the horses looked fantastic. Bringing 8 and 9 year old horses makes life quite a bit easier. They jogged up brilliantly and now are having a school. They have 20 points over Canada and they are pumped. This is an awesome team with a great dynamic.

More later.