3 Days of Horse Bliss

Stellplatz: officially a Stellplatz but it WAS only a Restaurant Parking Lot

Wow is all I can say. What an absolute experience the Global Dressage Forum was. In a nutshell the GDF is a conference where the the cream of the crop of riders, judges, horse owners and organisations come together to discuss Dressage.

The first 2 hours I sat there completely star struck - I had the german Olympic Team Trainer on my right and a French Judge on the left. He turned out to be quite nice - we ended up sitting at the same table during lunch :-)

Lunch at the GDF

One big item on the agenda was the future participation of Dressage (and other equestrian disciplines) in upcoming Olympics. Basically the IOC has told the International Equestrian Federation to make the sport more publically attractive or be dropped from the Olympics from 2020 onwards. Ouch!

Another favourite of mine was the serious of "Greatest Dressage Horses of All Times". Beautiful videos were shown and the owners, riders, grooms etc were invited to talk about these horses. Ruth Klimke (wife of the late Dr Reiner Klimke) stood out for me - she was so happy to be talking about the horse that took her husband to Gold Medalist and you could just see the joy they had. Her bursting out into a fit of giggles when talking about trying to get the horse into the parking parkade in Madison Square Garden, New York at 3am in the morning was priceless....

Lovely riding and training demonstrations were held, the food was superb and I could go on and on but I won't bore you.

During the two days, I bumped into Claire and Rena (both from Cape Town as well) and they kindly invited me to join them the day after the GDF to view Helen Langehanenberg's stable close to Muenster in Germany. I was NOT going to turn down the opportunity to visit a London Olympics Gold Medalist and so we departed Holland at 5:30am in the morning to be at her Stable at 9.

Helen and her staff were fantastic and watching her (well her students anyway, Helen is due with her first child in 2 weeks) train the horses was just mind-blowing. 

After Lunch we headed back into the Netherlands to visit some Tack Shops and practice retail therapy. Thank goodness? my credit card is maxed already - I'd have come back with mountains of stuff ;-)

Just as a side note - while I had known Claire briefly from meeting up at Shows, I did not know Rena beforehand but boy did we have a blast of a time. I was physically sore the next day from so much laughing!