Before the year is done( and the clock's ticking now) I wanted to catch up with a few of our fearsome and fairsome adventures from this particularly pretty Autumn.
Boy, that seems a long time ago now after weeks of greyness, mist, cloud and rain. How can you have Christmas in a soggy mizzle? It's depressing enough anyhow, at least with a sunny day of crispy snow it feels right!

So anyhow this Autumn we got up to a few tricks outside of the usual pony stuff like breaking Visa;



with spotty dogs, to make a pretty riding pony;



And getting back on Cloud;



We decided to have a real break from all that horse type stuff and go to  the Foire Saint Luc at Gavray;

Take the trip with us;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epatcIQXMC4&feature=youtu.be

( or if you can't be bothered with that, take a quick look through the pics below)

Okay , okay so there are horses!



and horses;


fancy horses;



gypsy horses;



mini horses;



(Mini donkeys even, 1500 euros a piece. Not many salami in these little fellas for that price!)

Often there are in excess of a  thousand  horses so we are told, but hey, there's lots of other stuff too!
It's a traditional French fair a la Normandie after all. There's row upon row of stands of agricultural type stuff, machinery, sheds, pepinieres (don't know what these are called in english actually, but they sell baby trees and shrubs etc).

Then there are avenues of food stalls;



and rotisseries



This man spit roast us the best lamb 'gigot' I have ever had in my life.
Perhaps it was in the wrapping of his grandson though

;

 The fair also has the rows of  plastic rubbish and tat you might expect, but strangely to an english person they also sell puppies. An area will be dedicated to puppies in a cages in a way we wouldn't find acceptable, we might sell poultry and rabbits at the markets in such a way, but not puppies, not anymore.

All in all I love the autumn fairs, they have a foreign side to them, it's true. There will be wagons of horse that get loaded up late in the day to go to slaughter houses and some perhaps may get long and terrible journeys. But I shall never forget the look of utter astonishment when I spoke to a  frenchman about a little trotter he had from me. I said to him that I never wanted the little horse to end up on a lorry bound for slaughter in Spain.
 He looked at me in utter astonishment,"Where did I get such an idea? A- he wanted the horse for keeps and B- why would the horse go to Spain? A horse would go to the local slaughter house , not Spain."
So I think it's perhaps best to accept that  in being a foreigner some things are bound to seem, well, strange.

Our other big Autumn adventure aside from taking Turnip and Red to a few competitions like the 'Grand National de dressage at St Lo' ;



Red 6th;


 and Turnip 5th;


And indoor jumping at the cattle market of St . Hilaire, where they shipped in tons and tons of sand so we could jump at night under lights;
Red 7th;


Red had decided he wouldn't stand in the trailer alone that night so while Charlie was out looking round he did a back somersault and got himself stuck upside down. It was really quite traumatic trying to get him out whilst he'd wedged himself upside down against the tailbar in the dark. With a valour I wouldn't have found in daylight I smashed the bar up and out at the same moment as he struggled to get up. It freed the bar and he tumbled down the ramp backwards onto his head, flipping  up like a gymnast, not a great lump of  idiot horse  who'd done well not to have killed himself.
It served us well though, depsite few  his knocks, bangs and skinnings he was none the worse for wear and went into jump clear, come seventh and win us enough money to buy a well earned mulled wine!



Despite all these exciting advetures I still thought we should probably spice up our life a little more by climbing down the road at the beautiful waterfalls of Mortain;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRx0BeiDiCA&list=UUGIIOedOX-L_TKVr9iw693w&index=2

And then after that because we seemed to have partaken of enough action and adrenalin fueled activity we partook of some gentler ones. Some pretty strolls through the glorious normandy countryside;



on foot;


and on Charlieback;



Lastly but by no means leastly we decided to treat ourselves to the new oriental eatery just recently opened in Vire;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4V_22sXVCLc

but was that not the scariest feat of them all?