World Equestrian Games

As a semi-surprise, we took horse girl to the World Equestrian Games in Lexington, KY at the beginning of October. Hubby could only take so many days off of work, so we were only able to stay for one day. Horse girl wanted to see the Cross-Country event since she is planning to do Cross-Country.

It was absolutely amazing and nothing like I had imagined. We arrived around 9am, along with about 10,000 other people. We heard later that there were around 30,000 spectators that day. We walked through the shopping area and took notice of the shops we wanted to visit later. Horse girl of course wanted to go into the Breyer store.

This is a picture of the back-side of one of the arenas. You could walk all the way around the lake to get to different jumps. We started on the left and ended up hitting all of the jumps over the course of the day. There were around 28 jumps and a ton of riders. The event lasted from 10am until around 3 or 4pm. Each rider took roughly 11 minutes to get through the entire course.
This is a practice area and we got to see this horse rearing up.
Mom and horse girl, waiting for the first rider to come through this jump.

The spectators were able to get right next to the course, giving us great photo opportunities.

Take a look at the amount of people watching just this jump. This was typical for all of the jumps. We were free to wander the course over the course of the day and watch the jumps in whatever order we felt like.
This horse decided he didn't want to take the jump at the last minute and almost threw his rider. The rider held on, circled around...
took the jump beautifully. The crowd cheered!
Us, at the end of a very long day. Horse girl managed to spend close to $100 at the Breyer store of her own money. She had been saving up for months and was able to purchase Secretariat, a mare and foal, and a Cavaletti (a type of training jump).

The World Equestrian Games were started in 1990 and are held every four years. This was the first time they were held outside of Europe.