The jog at Luhmuhlen was on Wednesday and that was the first and last public appearance for Tim and Happy Boy in the lovely setting of rural Saxony. Happy had picked up a travel bug on the way over and despite Megan’s best efforts he just wasn’t going to be back on top form in time to tackle his first 5 star. Even the dressage wasn’t really an option as Tim had done very little work with him and Happy, as most ‘angry little men’ are, needs plenty of Tim Time to turn into the ‘happy little fella’ that is right up there after the first phase.
Supervet Christiana Ober made the withdrawal call an easy one one and it seems that Luhmuhlen 2023 really was a non event for Team Price. Happy gets to hang in the land of the sausage for the weekend whilst he waits for his ride home and no doubt Tim is googling flights home. Although the last time Tim left a 5 star early was Kentucky back in the day when after a series of airport disasters he ended up arriving home two days later than if he had waited for his scheduled flight on the Sunday night. I’m pretty sure he ended up in some mid Southern town that had a huge Billy Graham thing going on as the only form of entertainment! Tim wasn’t converted to the Baptist faith but he is quite well versed in the matter now.
Meanwhile, reluctantly at Nunney, was Jonelle with Full Monty de Lacense. (FM). The funny thing about Nunney is that it took over the date that Longleat used to have in the calendar and despite the excitement of doing dressage with the wolves howling in the background for some reason Longleat used to coincide with a summer storm and was often bottomless mud. Nunney, by comparison, has seemingly had the total opposite and has rarely been run in anything other than baked Sahara conditions. This year is no exception and Nunney seems to have missed out on any rain for the last month although as Jonelle said, the conditions were definitely the same across all three phases!
FM has come back from a mini break and was very happy to be back out and pointed his toes for a right-up-there 27 dressage. He rolled a pole in the historically quite tricky showjumping before Jonelle set out steadily cross country for a hack around. He is a proper thinking horse and he started out cross country almost a little nervously like he did as a baby and then had a mini nap before fence 6 which was vertical rails before you run down the big dip. Before his break the mini nap would turn into the major nap and it would be some time before Drive was engaged but today he picked up a 20 and then skipped around to pop it neatly before taking a breath and deciding life was all good again and proceeded to give Jonelle a super ride round the rest of the track. FM is back, he has scuppered yet another 3 day plan and now heads to Mallow at the end of July!