Well we’re finally here at the Mitsubishi Motors Badminton Horse Trials! After a dressage session on Louie (Zero Flight) yesterday morning at home, we all trundled our way down to Gloucestershire. The old stables at Badminton are gorgeous, but the roads around them are small, so we luckily got here before the rush and dropped Louie and most of his kit at the stables before heading back down to the lorry park.
Here at Badminton the lorries park right in the village and it’s a bit of a tight squeeze. That was another definite upside of arriving early — we didn’t have to fit through a tight gap to find a parking space!
After getting our wristbands and rider packs, we grabbed a bit of lunch in the lorry before heading up to the tradestands to see some of my sponsors, Horse First supplements and Tredstep Ireland. In the process, I was given a couple new pairs of breeches by the Tredstep guys to try this week. Now that’s the kind of trip to the tradestands I could get used to!
I then hopped on Louie for a quiet hack, which turned into a little bit of dressage work when he decided it was much more fun to put his back up and buck rather than chill out and walk round. He is 16 years old now and when he comes to these events he definitely knows the game, so the cheeky side of him comes out.
So we are trotting up at 4.30pm today and then we are allowed to do arena familiarisation (walking round the arena so the horses can relax in there before the atmosphere of Friday and Saturday) in the main arena after. Louie will school through his dressage test a couple times, just so he knows he’s not getting out of that bit and going straight to cross-country!
I have a couple of commitments with sponsors tomorrow as well, so enough to keep me and Louie busy. If the weather stays as good as it has been today we are in for a great weekend of competition and some fabulous pictures too.
Lauren
Lauren will be blogging daily from Badminton this week, so log back on to follow her progress.
Don’t miss the second part of H&H’s Badminton preview — a 16-page pull-out with form guide and a scorecard to fill in for every rider — on sale today, Thursday, 2 May.
