Whew it has been a bit of a week. Florida has been treating us to a bit of a summer preview with temps around 90 every day, and I’m going to assume from the fact that I feel like a walking piece of beef jerky that I have not done a very good job of hydrating.

BUT, last week Niamh of Hoof Woof Images was in town! So many visitors lately. She met the herd, petted some babies, and was kind enough to snap some quick pics of Presto. I have no idea how Niamh gets such stunning pictures, but it’s gotta be either magic or witchcraft. Maybe both.

Highly recommend contacting Niamh if you’re looking to book a photog for nice photos. She was also quick, which is a good thing because Presto was seeing actual demons at the end of the barn aisle.

On Thursday Hillary and I left for TerraNova. I was reporting on the 4* for Eventing Nation, and Hillary got to come in an official capacity as well, to help with interviews and social media. On our way out of town we stopped at WEC because our new Romitelli boots had finally arrived.

To be honest I ordered mine under extreme duress (it was a really really bad day) and they didn’t turn out how I had pictured. Originally I wanted them to coordinate with my light blue coat, so I’d ordered black boots with like a pebbly gunmetal top part and light blue stripe. In actual application I didn’t like the top bit I’d picked (too shiny) and the blue was very different from the sample color, so instead of being like the sky blue of my coat it was like a bright, almost bordering on turquoise color. I just didn’t like how it turned out and they def wouldn’t coordinate with my coat. Womp womp.

Luckily Romitelli is very accommodating and helped me look through all the boots in my size that were in the store, the latest shipment, and the storage trailer to see if there was something I liked better. I saw many things, y’all. Many interesting and bright things. But I did really like these dark gray boots with metallic silver accents.

They don’t really go with the light blue coat but they would def go with my black and silver glitter theme, or just look good with all the black I tend to wear at home. So they let me trade mine out for those. Crisis averted. We’ll see how they look with the XC outfit maybe?

After that we were officially en route to TerraNova. It’s only 2.5 hours away but my Ocala-privilege ass has gotten very used to everything being under an hour drive and honestly I have no idea how I used to spend so much time in the car when I lived in Texas. It’s maddening.

But we made it around lunch time, set up our stuff in the media area, and immediately headed out to walk the 4* course, get photos and video, and decide on our plan of attack for XC day.

We only got lost once (totally blaming Will Coleman for that, he saw us walking the wrong way and chose to let nature take it’s course… which I probably would have done as well) but it still took us a couple hours to get everything we needed and for me to wrap my head around all of it well enough to write up the course preview. We headed back to the media area very hot, moist, and dehydrated. Spoiler alert: the entire event would see us in much the same shape.

Anyway, I won’t bore you with the details of what all we did, because the short version is: watch the 4*, write about it, stalk riders for interviews, spend 900 hours trying to pick the right song for a reel, double and triple check info on FEI, shoot video, record literally everything, sweat, eat our weight in italian ice, go to press conferences, and get sunburned no matter how many reapplications of sunscreen occurred.

If you want to see the coverage we did, the course walk is here, recap 1 is here, recap two is here, and Instagram reel 1 (aka an ode to Chin Tonic) is here and reel 2 is here.

On Saturday we apparently forgot all the mistakes we made during the course walk on Thursday and headed out on course to photo/video/watch/walk 4 hours of XC without any liquid sustenance whatsoever. Hillary posted videos on Insta stories like a machine, I took notes, and mostly we just felt like death the whole time as we made our way around the course and tried desperately to find any bit of shade (were we at one point crouching on the ground behind a Novice rolltop? maybe…). Event reporting, is is glamorous.

I didn’t even ride but I still felt like I got run over by a Mack truck pretty much all day yesterday. Today is marginally better.

There’s no rest for the weary though because this week is looking pretty full as well. Better to be too busy than not busy enough! Hope everyone else had a good weekend too.