2014 Middle Tennessee Carriage Club HDT

Vanessa driving Foothills Hopefilly in her first go at Preliminary Single Pony.

With my most excellent Navigator, Charlie Morgan, we finished in 2nd place!

Dressage was respectable, scoring around average, putting me in 3rd place after dressage; we have no lengenthing in the trot (only on marathon!), so lost some points there. Gain some points in presentation with the new Goodwill Jacket Carole brought for me and the borrowed headband for my hat:-) I can always count on Carole for driving fashion! (I hope to find a photo so I can see what my final outfit looked like)

I was very happy with cones. I finished within time (but ony by 1 second!) and had 1 ball down. I was please that I was bold enough to sacrifice a ball for the time. Otherwise, I would probably have incurred much more than 3 penalties for the ball down. The course was twisty and uneven, so a real challenge, but very fun, as usual. I love driving cones, especially with Hopefilly.

We started marathon still in 3rd place after cones and we only had 4 obstacles to negotiate. Since this was Preliminary (the first move up for pony, whip and gator!), we had to remember gates A, B, C AND D! This is quite a challenge for a crew that could only remember gate "A" on all the hazards at our previous HDT (lol) but we did it, and with style.

We blazed through the water hazard (#2) below and the x-co jumps hazard (#3).

We had a 2 minute hold on course immediately before the final hazard, which knocked us off our pace and shook my concentration.

Nonetheless, we managed to get all our gates (though I never found the white "D"); thanks for Charlie's encouragement to get the heck out of there (obstacle 4), we still had a decent time in that one.

I was so happy with our marathon run and all our times in the hazards. We blazed through the water hazard (#2) and the x-co jumps hazard (#3). We finished with no time penalties for overall marathon, and our hazard times moved us up to finish in 2nd place.

What a great day! We had so much fun. Thanks be to God:-)

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