Winter hacking can end up with a bit of baking .........
January in the UK is never an easy month....It’s either freezing cold, pouring with rain, howling a gale or all three at once if you’re lucky!! In order to survive you need Uvex helmet ear warmers, very good thermals and waterproofs. The horses always tend to be far to fresh and feeling very well after a lovely long break, so at Team Griffiths we have a yard rule to make it all better, if you take a tumble you have to bake a cake!!
One of the bonuses is that it’s dark at 5pm and not much can go on after then so we are finished on the yard early. It’s nice to use the time to go home to see my family, or meet up with friends for dinner during the winter months social things that quite often don’t happen mid season. I am already looking into where I could go for a few days of sun mid season
A whole new barn built for our brand new Empire lorry!!
We’re very lucky in that we have got a great team lined up for this year and that includes horses and staff, I’m pretty excited to be heading into my fourth season working for Sam and Lucy. At the moment we are nice and quiet, also helped by the fact that we don’t have a lorry to be able to go off show jumping or to dressage lessons. We are expecting the Lorry to be ready in the next few weeks so when it arrives I’m sure I’ll be eating my words and we’ll be flat out going here there and everywhere before the season starts. We plan to get going at Aldon this year which is very local for us about 30 minutes down the road, so if anyone see’s me driving the new wagon I’ll have my hands firmly gripped to the wheel anxiously watching for any hazards!! If you can’t tell I’m already petrified about having to drive it!!
My new life saver - a Centaur heated rug drier
We’ve had our great sponsors Amerigo down for saddle checks on all the horses and they will then also come back at the beginning of March to make sure everything all still fits well. As the horses fluctuate in weight with how fit they are the saddles can then also change so we tend to make sure we are on top of this. We will also have the physio check over all the horses as well as the dentist so I guess January is a bit of a ‘maintenance’ month.
Hopefully we would have been out on some adventures in February so until then ....
Happy Times taking an afternoon nap in his new sponsor Bucas rug
