The Pony Club Conference Cheltenham Racecourse 09

It’s been quite a stressful this week with so much to organise before I go to Thailand on Saturday with Martha. Last night I suddenly had a thought that I hadn’t checked the expiry date on Martha’s passport and found that she only had 3 months left and Thailand requires a minimum of 6 months. Then I decided to go to bed as I had to be up early in the morning to drive to the Pony Club Conference at Cheltenham but I couldn’t sleep worrying about the passport so I was on the 24hr passport advice line at 1am. Needless to say although I got up at 7.30am Amelia and I didnt leave till 9am which would’ve been ok to get there for 11am. We joined the M5 at Junc 8 intending to leave  at Junc 9 only to find there was an accident just after junc 9 and all three lanes were at a standstill. Unfortunately we arrived late at the conference and missed the start. New additions to Pony Club tests were being dicussed which I will have to look into further, there are some new achievement badges and I was very interested in the changes to the Riding and Road Safety test which will no longer require riders to actually go on the road. This hopefully will make it much easier for us to offer the training and the test as we could not do it previously because our main roads are too dangerous. There were some very interesting speeches from Major Richard Waygood Riding Master of the Household Cavalry, Mary King Olympic Eventer and Heather Fell Olympic Pentathlon. One of the things I found very interesting about Mary King was that her parents weren’t horsey and she never had a horse of her own as a child attending Pony Club on borrowed ponies. Mary left school to follow her dream and worked as a groom for Sheila Wilcox 3 day eventer. Eventually Mary’s parents helped her to invest in a very small yard and Mary did numerous other jobs such as butchers helper, gardener, chalet girl and housekeeper to make ends meet. Which just goes to show with determination and hard work you can strive to achieve your aims. We left as soon as the conference ended and when I arrived home Martha had got a passport application, new photos and I have an appointment at 11am at the passport office in Newport tomorrow.

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Posted on Thursday, March 5th, 2009 at 1:58 am You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.