Life in the fast lane

Yet again I have been completely lax on this blog. I have been in high gear building the barn, managing contractors and the like. Things are coming along, we moved all the horses over May 15^th. Tomorrow the floors will be poured and the Amish are expected back on Friday to finish up the wood work.

Regal made his move to Training, with a great dressage test in the pouring rain on grass, his score was 27.7 and we scored mostly 8s with a couple of 9s. He was clean XC but unimpressed with stadium pulling 3 rails at all the easier fences, jumped the hard fences well, I can only hope that as he continues to move up and get move impressed with his job this habit will resolve itself. In the meantime I will continue to work on strength and developing the best possible uphill canter to make stadium as easy as possible.

Training horses is coming along well, right now my challenge is finding time to sleep and then ride everyone, but it is going well and all the horses and riders are making good progress. Lily is starting baby jumps. I am really focusing on her canter and head shyness right now. I think she will be slow to mature but, watch out for her when she does! i have enjoyed having some time to school Spiderman again and of course the baby OTTB parade has been fun!

Peri is going for her Pony Club rating this weekend and we will look to move her to Beginner Novice in July.  As the end of the school year rolls around I suspect my teenagers will get into the full swing of show season. Amanda is graduating *sniff* she grew up so fast and will be heading with scholarships to Monmouth in the fall. She will be missed but we are all happy that she will be close enough to come home frequently. 

About 3 runs from being done moving horses and everyone's stuff from the old barn to the new, my truck started making awful noises and I was barely able to drive. Thankfully I was not going fast and was able to pull over with Regal and Lily in tow and get some assistance from friends to get the horses home safe. Turns out my bearings were unhappy, so while in the shop with Kyle and Jim the truck got all new breaks. I hope she is happy as my purse was not...Now if I could only give her a bath we'd be good as new.

The barn has been busy we are welcoming many new boarders and students to the new location and I recently sold Top Position, but he will stay with us as a boarder. This of course means I was free to find another horse to bring in to train and compete. My lovely calm bay gelding was replaced with a red headed mare. She and I got along rather well on our meeting and I am looking forward to turning La Rouge into a top eventer. For those of you that don’t know me, my first horse was a little spitfire red mare called Scolly Square. So this is really just coming full circle just bigger and my training tool box has many more tools.

Barn and horse update

Dear Reader,

Life is busy. Construction has started on the new barn, very excited to see the area getting cleared, its funny how you look at piece of land and think “oh that won’t be too bad to clear” then you see it all on the ground in giant piles, it’s a lot. The guys at Aaron Excavating, http://www.aaronenviro.com have been great and  Roy has been nothing short of awesome in all steps of the process. I cannot say enough good things about them. Without further ado, photos of the destruction: 

I also signed off on the final barn plans this week, so as soon as the site is ready the barn builders will be coming in to get started, they assure me we should be done by the end of April, I can only hope winter finally goes away so they can get in and going. 

This past Sunday Ceara, Peri and I headed down to a dressage show at the NJ Horse Park, both girls rode well. We know that accuracy and a steadier connection to the bridle needs to be improved, but their efforts were rewarded with 1sts and 2nds and we had a really nice first outing. If only every show could be so low key and easy!

My own riding on Regal has been not as frequent, I have been enjoying getting Lilly going, we are having a bit of a set back as her teeth are in horrible shape and very sharp. It is causing her a lot of discomfort and some naughty behavior, so I am excited for her to get that taken care of on April 1^st. She is really a lovely mare and I am so excited to be able to train her and watch Elizabeth enjoy her (when she is being a good girl!). Regal and I had a mini jump school in the snow the other weekend, it was a lot of fun to knock the rust off and I was so impressed with his adjustability to the fences. I am trying to sneak in a jump lesson on Easter Sunday so hopefully I will have more to report back on. Meanwhile I need to tackle his wild mane, which is currently detracting from his devilish good looks...bad mommy,

Other than being frazzled from living between 2 locations, managing the barn project, getting the horses ridden and organizing 2 breedings for the Spring life is really happy, feeling so energized and grateful for such a wonderful group of clients and sponsors that are helping me reach my goals.

More soon,

Chelsea

Keys are in hand, welcome to The UpperFarm, home of Penwick Eventing

So, farm shopping has been going on for nearly a year, with many ups and downs, one deal fell through a week before closing, but that is because we were meant to find this place...two of my long time clients, Elizabeth and Leyla have partnered with me to purchase this lovely property that we will turn into an eventing and dressage training facility for 26 lucky horses to call home.  I will be living in the house, which is going to allow me to focus more on my riding and training client horses. There is a lot of stuff in the works and now that I can actually talk about it, I will share as the weeks go on, but I am feeling very lucky and excited about the future, the first time in a long time.

Future cross country, will look to have through intermediate level

Top of driveway, rings will be behind fence on left, XC field front and to the left

Some of the plans...

Where I will live...