Road Tripping

You wait and wait for something to happen and then everything does at once.

With about two days notice, I got the go ahead from my steering group to pair up water voles again in order to breed more and expand our release site. At the same time, I had to collect all of the voles that were at the right age for release into the wild. Only trouble was that most of our voles are being bred by Derek Gow and Kathy Holder in Devon... and 100+ voles were never going to fit in my little Jeepy thing.

Looking at my diary, the only days that I could get down to Devon and back was this weekend, which scuppered my chances of going to Badminton Horse Trials with Kath... or did it?

Kath and I studied the maps and planned our time-table. It wasn't a big detour at all to go to Badminton, only a matter of a 20 minutes in fact, and having an extra person on my trip would be a great help... so we decided to go for it.

On the way down, it just so happened that there was a horse that Kath wanted to look at just off the M6, so we decided to pop in there too.

Interestingly enough, Amy, the horse in question, was bred by my Grandma's cousin Vin Toulson, the well known horseman. Sadly Vin, who won the Horse of the Year Show five times, recently died aged 78 and I came to learn that his young stock were being sold off as his partner couldn't deal with them on her own.

We arrived to meet Amy late in early evening. She was in a paddock with a little friend and came down to greet us immediately.

As it happened, I took to Amy far more than Kath did, if only I had the money for keeping a horse! Kath is having a think. So I suppose we'll just have to wait and see. However, considering that Mi Mi will be arriving soon, along with Fizz's new foal, due in June, and the fact that Quem Foi (Kath's Luso Stallion) is still around, probably means that another filly on the yard might be stretching things a wee bit!