ride4acure

The arrival in Gawler tonight was underwhelming.  Took me three hours of running around to find yards for our horses…. after going on a few’dead ends’ finding out there are no yards at either the showgrounds or the racetrack!  and Gawler is the biggest rabbit warren of streets, nothing runs straight, all ducking back on themselves…..and narrow, not made for horse trucks at all.  And all this  before lucking out at Gawler Pony Club. Had a call from a farrier who is catching up with us on Friday to shoe the horses….breathe out…..I had made about ten phone calls, all no luck trying to track a farrier for here and then received this wonderful phone call! Big thanks from me as he also said he had a good paddock for our three horses from tomorrow morning, where they’ll have a good graze and few days off work before we make tracks to Clare on Sunday.  Also a big thank you to our sponsors Diana from Clarke Horseshoes in Wingham for locating a heap of phone numbers for me to find a farrier!

Last night we camped at Waikarie Pony club grounds, arriving again in the dark, couldn’t find the shower block.  The stink from a wine ‘factory’ distillery place smelt like a piggery. Also one of the horses had peed in the truck, so we were torn between opening up all the windows on the truck for the pee smell or having the stench of the distillery ….we settled for horse pee!  We were all that tired and a tad ‘grumpy’ by 8pm last night we were over everything!  The best part of last night was while Esther and I got the horses bedded down and fed, Joe cooked us hamburgers! Delicious!! At the front of our truck we have a very small ‘living area’ where we cook, store clothes, tucker etc and bunk (Joe and I) Ez has a special bunk in the front of the horse area up high above the floor.  The ‘living area’ is about 2m x 2.5m and has all the above in it.  When we break for morning tea and it’s cold and windy it’s pretty cramped inside.

Joe and Esther having a yarn at morning tea today 8.6.11

Esther is covering incredible distances and the horses are doing a great job.  We’ve been on the Sturt Highway now for nearly two weeks since we left Hay and a lot of the truckies are recognising Esther and our truck.

Joe with ride4acure horse team today on Sturt Highway rest stop.

It’s great having the UHF radio and listening to the truckies talk about the ride!  Some of them have been doing their homework on us!  Also it’s fantastic when I can radio the trucks to caution when crossing bridges with Esther behind and also dodgy bits of roads etc.  The horses get all excited when they see any vehicle with flashing orange lights and start whinnying (spelling?) they’ve made a very strong attachment to the lights now!

Joe getting a lesson off Esther on putting on a tail bandage.

Have some great photo’s we’ll put up when we download them off Esther’s good camera in the next day or so. I mainly use my iphone and I can email them straight to myself! Slackie I am.!! Tomorrow we have to pick up a couple of pallets of Manuka horsilage and mixed cereal chaff we’re feeding and organise the truck to fit it in/on the roof! Hats off to David Wallis from Quirindi (the CEO of Manuka) for organising to get feed to us and also the wonderful truckie who carted it cost free all the way to Adelaide for us (the truckie himself has lost a son and wanted to help us out).  One more of the awesomely generous people we’ve met along the way.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 8th, 2011 at 11:33 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.