Hello Everyone!
What an awesome weekend! Plantation really made this a fun event! Plantation Field is really turning into a top class event. I hear Plantation Field did an awesome job keeping the sponsors and owners tent well stocked, even my mother enjoyed a few bloody mary’s before watching me jump! (cracks me up, she gets more nervous watching than I do riding!) And PRO had riders working with the announcer, Ed Holloway, to give this event a real big time feel. One great thing about this venue is that you can see almost all the cross country fences from the top of the hill. On Saturday, The cross country courses looked beautiful, but there were alot of technical eliminations. The hard thing about having different courses for the national and CIC divisions meant there were a few riders that walked the wrong fences! It was a good reminder to make sure I never make that mistake!
Saturday started with prelim cross country, and I had some good practice on my horse, Magic Man. Unfortunately we didn’t get any more rain Friday night, so the ground was still quite hard. Most everyone came in with 10 or more time penalties on the 3* course. For me, I know my horse has a nitrous button, I’m just saving it for the CCI*** at Fair Hill in a few weeks. We had a super cross country round, Eric really listened to me the whole time. I took all the direct routes, and my ride went exactly as planned...except that long spot I saw at the ditch and wall(there’s always something to do better!) Later that evening, after lots of icing and equissageing (vibrating back pad to loosen up muscles) My mom and I stopped by the cocktail party on the way back to the hotel. A HUGE thanks to the Walker family for having such a nice party, and all they do to make the event possible. Unfortunately I couldn’t stay very long, I still haven’t found a way to make my homework do itself…so it was off to the hotel to do some work and get some sleep!
Today was fantastic. Mark Donovan designed a great stadium course on grass footing. Eric passed the jog, and in warm up felt like he was ready for cross country round 2! We had a clear round, which is a career best for us! The scores were all so close our clean round luckily moved us up to 2nd place! I was so excited; we won enough prize money to cover all the entry fees and expenses for the weekend! I’ll be busy with dressage bootcamp the next few weeks. I hope everyone comes out to Fair Hill, it’s the next stop on the PRO Tour Series, and Eric and I are going to give it all we’ve got!
~Ashley
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