Overwelmed at the Equine Affaire

Last Saturday my mother and I made our yearly visit to the Equine Affaire. It is a birthday celebration of sorts for both of us, since it falls between our birthdays. We planned to do some shopping and to check out a few of the clinics.

We arrived around 10am. Cars were backed up from the off-ramp for the whole 2 miles to the Big-E. By the time we were inside it was around 11am. So much for our morning. We browsed one building before realizing it was nearly 2pm. More buildings to go, and no lunch yet!

My mother is usual nervous to try something new. But I introduced my mother to Gyro sandwiches last year. So she wanted one again.

After lunch we got back to shopping. That is, we started horse shopping.

The two baby Warmbloods (photo left) were gathering a lot of admirers. "Awwww..."

But we managed to convince ourselves that a baby horse was probably not a good birthday present for my (of a certain age) mother.






After horse shopping we shopped for a trailer to haul them with. This is the trailer we were most interested in, although I borrowed this photo from the dealer's website. It is a Hawk 2-horse straight-load with ramp. If you have any experience with these trailers, let us know!

After all that shopping we bought... nothing! We'd been too hurried to see it all. But we weren't the only ones. Although the buildings were so crowded that we thought we'd faint from heat, very few people had shopping bags. Could it be the economy?

That evening my good friend from Connecticut met up with us to see the Fantasia show. Poor planning on the part of organizers led to us being stuck outside in a thunderstorm (with a tornado watch!!) for half an hour. Don't they know that high-maintenance dressage ladies are flammable when wet? We enjoyed the show however. But none of my photos came out well. So if you'd like to see videos, check out these ones taken by another spectator:
Fantasia videos

I particularly enjoyed the aerialist, frankly because he was shirtless. I made a point of hooting and whistling enough to scare my mother back into the depths of her seat. More shirtless men and horses please!

We got home around 2:30am, exhausted. Next year we resolved to get a hotel room.