Summer holidays (part 1)

During the last part of Mary’s recovery period from her back surgery her horsey itch started again. With Smook far away (see post of 10th of June) she investigated the possibility to get Mirinda, our horse in Egypt, over to The Netherlands. Unfortunately, in addition to the current unrest, there is at present a ban on exporting horses from Egypt, so the search quickly switched direction to France. Last year she met Jacques and his horse Real (pronounced Re-aal), a stallion that she really liked. So she hooked up with him again and drove over to Normandy to view this horse. It was agreed that we could have the horse on loan for a trial period, before we would make a final decision to buy. However, we had to get the horse ourselves… So now the search was re-directed to marktplaats.nl (a Dutch version of Ebay) to find a horse trailer, and Mary was successful within a few days.

Thus on our first day of the summer holidays we all drove over to Normandy, stayed overnight at Jacques’ farm and early in the morning loaded Real in the trailer. Then we drove all the way across France to our house in Bassey, a solid 12 hour drive as we had to keep our speed under control. On arrival we quickly had to make a small paddock with electric fence and let him out. The next days a much bigger space was set up in our garden and Real slowly calmed down. Then the trials started: he proved to be a handful, and although he picked up quickly on the exercises his fiery character kept playing up (not helped by a number of mares in the village!), and we had some entertaining rodeo scenes. After several days the opinion of Cecile, the local stable owner, was sought and she was very clear: this horse is not suitable for a stable in The Netherlands. After few more days Mary and the girls accepted the inevitable and the decision was made to decline.
Due to all this horse action our usual activities were at a lower level, but we had a few nice days with Hanneke (Smook’s owner) and her extended family, and Piet managed to get a number of bike rides under his belt.

Paula and Mary are training Real

Dorien riding in our paddock in the garden

Real is a very sweet horse, but not really suitable for us in The Netherlands