Combined Driving At Its Best

Marathon Day At Live Oak

This past Saturday we attended the Live Oak International Combined Driving Event. This event has become an annual outing for us. We hope for sunshine, pack our chairs, cooler and dog and drive the 10 miles to the event. Though this event has three phases, Dressage on Friday, Marathon on Saturday and Cones/obstacle course on Sunday, we have found the Marathon to be the most exciting.

Good Humor



 With a little bit of Good Humor and lots of excitement the day goes by fast.

Obstacle 1 The Sanctuary Water

The Marathon is the toughest test of stamina, courage, and agility.The classes are grouped by 1. level of difficulty and level of the horses training, 2.either horse or pony and 3.number of horses/ponies that are in harness (Single, Tandem and Four in hand). You can imagine the excitement in watching the four in hand going through the obstacles. There are 7 obstacles spread out over a large field. The driver walks the course to decide the best route through the obstacles or mazes, keeping the lettered gates in sequence as he goes. The more time spent in a hazard the more penalties. 

The Driver and Navigator do get wet !

This basic pony cart was tagged at $2,000.00

This deluxe Horse Cart was tagged at $9,200.00



As you can see, Combined Driving can be a very expensive sport. I think I'll stick to watching with DBH and Mia.



DBH and Mia

All in All, a great day in the country

Sew Happy,

Karla

THE WOOD CLAMP

It all started with this!

Scavenging through an antique mall in Ohio I found this unusual wood clamp. With DBH being a wood worker of sorts, I knew he would appreciate the beauty of this old clamp. I bought it! He loved it! It became the center piece on a wall in our house. Looking a bit  lonely hanging on that big wall all by itself, we decided it needed the perfect picture to hold within it's clamps. We began to scour the flea markets to find the perfect size picture. We looked and looked and..........

 found this

and this

and this

and this

By now, our wall was full but still no perfect picture for that old wood clamp. Finally!! This past fall we attended an art festival with Mia (our dog) in tow. There we found a wonderful sketch artist who for 10 minutes and $10.00  sketched Mia. Our Prima Donna, Mia sat quietly for her sketching, with a smile on her face. I think she knew that we had finally found .......... 

 

The perfect picture!

Sew Happy!

Karla

P.S. If you haven't met Mia, check out my past post on "Small dogs are real dogs too!"







Manatee Springs State Park

Manatee Springs

With company in town this week from Michigan, we took time out to visit Manatee Springs State Park in Chiefland Fl. The weather was a warm 78 degrees and the spring was absolutely breathtaking.

Manatee Springs is classified as a first magnitude spring

A cool water temperature of 72 degrees

Swimming in the springs is allowed.

Hope they read the sign!

On the board walk to the Suwannee River

Manatee alert!!

Though we didn't see any "real" manatees today, we had a great day in the sunshine.

Sew Happy,

Karla

P.S. I have had past experiences while boating around the springs that the manatees swarmed around the boat letting us touch them.  I call them the gentle giants of the springs.