It seems to me that the vast sprawling forests that surround Fontainebleau just to the south of Paris are destination to  a wide variety of adrenalin junkies all seeking their particular thrill fix, as you too will soon discover.

First up we had to get there, you may remember that I had foreseen such a long trailer trip being a particular problem for Turnip travelling alone. It seems like I know my root veg. Turnip said,"Two hours fine, a minute longer, no way, hold on guys, I'm busting out of here!"
Now you may think this sounds like an exaggeration, that's because you don't know Turnip, if Turnip says he's doing something he means it. As a young horse refusing to stand alone in the trailer I was quite sure he could be cured, we left him to his own devices to turn somersaults, backflips, get hooked over the bar and bellow his indignation on several occasions, but the fifth incident made me change my mind. It was a choice between keeping a trailer and a horse or quite possibly having the two mashed together to a mangled pulp of bloodied twisted metal.
We had taken him showjumping and returned to the trailer to find our neighbour white and trembling, telling us he'd had to let the horse out as he was coming out himself. I nodded calmly, with a wide smile, explaining serenely this sort of behaviour was quite usual with him. However proceeding round the corner I started to feel a bit of an idiot, not only had he managed to smash partitions and breast bars he'd also managed to punch the entire top half of the trailer out, apparently leg, head, neck and monster had been coming through. I think this was when I decided that I'd keep the trailer and the horse and let Turnip lay down the law once again.
Last summer I took him round to the great horseman's house, Mr. Tatlow's to use the jumps. Mr. T. snorted and poo pooed me with deriscion," all horses would learn to stand alone", but Turnip isn't all horses. Turnip has a thing or two to teach a man about a horse.

I waffle, the point is when Turnip says, he's getting out of the back he isn't just kidding. So highly illegally I'm quite sure, the dogsbody got into the back to whisper sweet nothings to the spoilt brat and hopefully comfort him for a further part of our voyage.It didn't seem to stop the problem but it did quell the crescendo for an hour.
Then it was my turn in the back, now I'm pretty brave a riding the lunatic but I wasn't dead keen on standing in there with him, after my hour I was baying at the window to be let out and had myself considered all sort of escape posssibilities. Despite the companionship the level of violence being thrown about in the back had me decided that the best course of action was to sedate Turnip and head back home, it was getting too dangerous for my liking.The dogsbody wasn't keen on that plan though, he argued it was further back than on and while Turnip couldn't be doped he was happy to stay with him the rest of the way.Probably deeming it preferable to sitting next to the me all the way home, giving him grief that the ginger tosser  had screwed up my plan once again!
So we resumed the journey after a quick call to say we were experiencing technical problems and anticipated a late arrival.Little did we know!!
Alone as navigator and driver I was relying heavily on that untrustworthy device, the sat nav. As we got onto the outer Paris ring road it started jumping about , cutting in and out, telling me to turn back and all that jazz (apparently it has a glitch-dead handy!). I had a basic knowledge of our direction and felt sure we should head off to Verailles, so did the sat nav, down the road with a low bridge that doesn't take vehicles over 1.5m high.
I'd always wondered what happens when you pull off under those dangly warning things, now I know.Your nutty horse crashing around in the back goes beserk thinking it's being consumed by a monster while you panic, pull up on the hard shoulder and wait for the end of the world to come. But it doesn't ,a kindly farrier pulls up and delivers directions on where to go, only you're too stressed to get what he's saying becuase the dogsbody sensing we have reached a standstill is exiting the trailer on the edge of a motorway and the frenzied ginger nutcase is trying to come with him. So I sit there in a sobbiong heap, I can't see the map , let alone find which road I want or where I am................until the highway cops pull up. I get round two of directions, but I should have smelt a rat, this dipstick has just given me directions in to central Paris for the periphique. Since travelling in the trailer seems likely to be illegal we kangaroo off down the slip road with turnip working out in the back alone.
Phew, it's going well, we arrive at the periphique, very soon it's not going well.
It's rush hour we're stuck in traffic at least an hour from our destination on a free flowing road but being told our exit junction off the damn ring road is still over an hour off, even if it's only five hundred metres away. So metre by metre we crawl the sights of Paris while the  ball of anger  in the back gets more and more irate. Finally the trailer  leaps in the air and I explode. The dogsbody choses the silent idiot over me and crazily exits the car and gets in the back whilst in the middle of the motorway in the middle lane. Okay,  so we were at a strandstill, but there were still a lot of crazy french men whizzing around on motorbikes and those said bikes were nearly the demise of Turnip and the dogsbody. The final straw for him was being holed up in the motorway tunnels with a steady stream of full throttle bikes hammering past him. By this stage I don't really know who was more worked up, me, Turnip or the dogsbody. Well it wouldn't have been the dogsbody because I DO NOT KNOW ONE SINGLE OTHER PERSON in the whole world who would have been brave  enough or stupid enough to stand in that trailer with that horse.
 Apparently for some lengthy duration he was physically holding Turnip down by hanging off the headcollar while he tried to toss himself over backwards. The trucker behind had his mouth agape, he'd never seen such a carry on in all his miles off trucking,to be honest I doubt he will again. Anyhow the unusual calming strategy of the dogsbody's paid off and in due course, after six and a half hours on the road, we arrived. It didn't seem quite right unloading my passenger from the trailer at the entrance to the national school of gendarmes but noone seemed to bat an eyelid.

I'd left home with grand plans of riding Turnip round to settle him in, by the time we arrived I had grand plans of stealing a shot gun and blowing his brains out. But i didn't, we put him in his house, slammed the door, had to wait til ten pm to find out when my dressage was and then settled down to the first of four luxurious nights in the 4x4. It would have been okay except it was about 6 inches too short for me and we had three dogs and three pups doing stinking poos in a plastic box while mewling that they were cold. Tough tits, so were we, they should have been grateful we didn't relegate them to the trailer llike most normal people would have done.

By comparison our second day of dressage seemd rather dull. I rode Turnip for two hours in the morning , not much in the schools just round and about to try and settle him. I have to say he was remarkably chilled in his plastic stable especially since his was very unlucky in having an empty stable either side of him and a stone wall infront, nothing to occupy his peanut brain. His sole distarction was squabbling with the grumpy horse over his back wall, lucky I suppose his acquaintance had a bit of charcater with which to entertain him.

He did some lovely work in the collecting ring

 
and then decided to explode when I took him in the ten minute warm arena. I don't know if this infact made him better or worse for the actual test, whether he mistakenly thought we had begun the test or whether it just heated him up before he went in I'm not sure. Either way I wasn't going to complain about his test or mark, it was horrid and uptight with several mistakes and canter anticipations, but believe me if you'd seen some of his other tests then you'd think it was decent enough too. He was 84th out of 103 after this;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXYI8hWKyyM&feature=youtu.be

Friday morning he was showjumping, boy I was so grateful that we'd squeezed that 1m15 class in at Beny before we had the snow, otherwise I might just have completely freaked out. It was big and bold but beeuatifully built with a lot of solid colour  really picking you up over the fences. As always he was tense and stupid in the collecting ring so we did most of our warm up outside. He was also tense , mouthy and occasionally disunited during his round. I expect this now, it's an expression of his nerves,excitement and anticipation so I do nothing about it whatsoever except ignore.


 
He is perfectly capable of jumping this height off the wrong lead with his head on one side coming in at a ninety degree angle. So I figure if that's how he likes it, let him get along with it, the more fuss you make of his antics the worse they get. So far the strategy is paying off and I was chuffed to bits he jumped a clear, only 30 horses did and many of them had time penalties so that pulled him  up to 58th position;


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LG19SpNKzC4&feature=youtu.be


So having got that out of the way we thought we'd have some fun and go and visit some of the wierd and wonderful rock formations in the forest.I wasn't particularly surprised by the proliferation of tarts adorning the roadsides enroute to our tourist hot spot.
 I was already familiar with the working girls of the Fontainebleau from my stint as a trucker some years ago as a driver for a horse haulage company.On my very first driving  trip abroad we were looking to overnight at some layerage in Milly la Foret (just down the road).It wasn't a stop we used much as we tried to push on further south for the first night, but we'd been dropping horses in Paris and the time had got away from us. It was about three in the morning when we pulled into a layby on the edge of the forest to consult the map when out of the bushes a man emerged wearing a pair of tights over his head. The guy I was driving with was experienced both in years and miles but he dropped the map and hit the gas, we really didn't need to know what he was after.
Our little foray into the woods confirms my suspicions that there could be quite a lot of freaks and weirdos in the area, perhaps it's not the quaintest tourist attraction in France?
 We were heading for the rocks in the woods to admire their form and more importantly check out their climbing possibilities. Fontainebleau is reknowned amongst climbers as the best bouldering spot in Europe.( Bouldering is like climbing except ropes are not used as you are  more often than not close to the ground and moving horizontally or diagonally across the rocks.)


Apparently this is not the most common hobby of the area as we were welcomed to the first carpark by a very shady man who made me feel rather dubious about leaving the vehicle, but he was soon to get in his car and drive off so I was rather alarmed to see he had returned by the end of our little amble round the very scenic rocks and was once more staring at us rather purposefully.
Although the rocks were asthetic and the idea of climbing appealing we both felt exhausted so decided to head on to the next 'gorge' for a quick nap which was bound to be more peaceful than back in the grounds of the competition.We drove down to the hidden car park a couple of miles off the main drag to find a half dozen cars and a group of hikers, so we chose a quiet corner and rearranged seats, pups and gear to have forty winks. Just as I was about to lie down the same shady man pulled into car park and proceeded to amble about, really giving me the jitters but the dogsbody told me to calm down and leave the man to clear off. I tried to feel reassured as I watched him saunter back to his car but obviously I wasn't as a few minutres later I looked out the window to see the guy walk back over towards our 4x4 sit down about twenty yards away and light a fag, all the while staring intently in  at us.I can only think the man was into dogging and he had assumed we were too, I can't imagine he was going to get much og a spectacle watching us slumber, but I'd had enough. I had no wish whatsoever to find out what shady man wanted or what wierd and wonderful fantasties were floating round his head.
As soon as he saw us make a move to go he jumped up and skuttled back to his car, driving away but no without a final pull over to stare back at us. I have to say I was completely freaked out and quite expected as we drove out that he'd be waiting to jump us or tail us down the road.Thankfully neither scenario was in the offing and after a quick trip to the supermarket we headed back to base to have a rather noisy nap surrounded by people with a rather healthier( in my opion) hobby.

Saturday was a rest day for us, otherwise known as thumb twiddling, trying not to worry about all the horses left at home. It would have been a fun day climbing at the rocks but our excursion the day before had really served to put me off. Instead after taking Turnip for a gallop round the sandy track round the xc course we into town to have a look at the sprawling Chateau.


Well blimey you can understand while the people thought they needed a revolution with the absurd gesture this pad makes .The doggies were really taken with it, especially since they found the remnants of a drowned fox beside the water that was particularly, fabulously stinky to roll in. Bless them.(Very strange but the the water was incredibly clear, spookily so, I guess fed from the fountain of the spring of the beautiful water that our friend in the supermarket told us of!)

Sunday was an early xc time leaving us the rest of the day to get back, there is little to report other than that Turnip gave me a super ride all the more special since he hadn't even seen a xc fence since his last outing in August at Firle. I had hoped to make a xc excursion somewhere but the snow truly put paid to that. On the whole the course wasn't big not much more than a tough BE100 but it was typically french in that anything tricky was up to height so the skinnies and the corner in the woods were up there. If I had been concerned about any xc  fences it would have been water, not that Turnip has a problem but I wasn't sure he'd be confident to leap a big fence into water. I shouldn't have worried, this course the perfect school, with three water combinations in a course of sixteen fences! They began at fence five, the rolltop in the dew pond;

round the corner

 
followed by fence six a drop into water, jump out and several strides to a pretty tall and very skinny brush;


The third water was right near the end of the course and consisited of a small brush near the water's edge then a big hack round an island  in a moat for about thirty metres up onto the island for a brush fence then back down into the water for a skinny. Woo! and by then I think we could say Turnip was okay with water!!
There was quite a tricky coffin with a steep climb to the second jump after the ditch and the corner in the woods was followed by a turn to a little owl hole shed contraption. Luckily I walked two routes to the corner as it was quite sloping ground downhill and away from it. I walked my ideal line and then the probable line I might end up on when Turnip had leapt ten foot sideways becase of a  small rock they'd painted white and dressed with flowers. Turnip opted for the sideways leap that carried us down the bank and on to my anticipated alternative approach. It wasn't really a bad fence but it did suck you under it a bit and I had the misfortune whilst waiting at the start to watch a horse do just that. It failed to get it's shoulder up in time and cartwheeled over it. Very reassuring, but Turnip has some merit, otherwise he wouldn't still be here but in a can of pedigree chum.For all his shortcomings he's pretty smart at looking after himself and it's not often he hits jumps despite my best endeavours to sometimes ride him into and through fences, he's no fool ,he just likes to act like one.

All in all I couldn't fault his round, we finished in 51st place out 103 starters scraping into the top half but still fulfilling my aim. We picked up six time penalties xc but he did well to get only these as we trotted the tricky waters to make sure we didn't make mistakes or miss tricky skinnies.

But perhaps the best part of all was the trip home, it had been hanging over us a heavy cloud. We'd decided to come back across country so pulling in was easier and less dangerous than on the hard shoulder and the sedalin was primed.However Turnip was the angel, he didn't even scrape or bang once, perhaps his nights of solitary confinement had helped him accept being alone more graciously.It certainly wasn't fatigue since the first thing he did on arriving bcak home despite a xc round and five and half hours in the trailer was start chasing poor Twiggy the pig round the garden.

I am exceptionally grateful  Turnip put up such a good show, it was a huge amount of work to set the animals up here to leave and rearrange once we returned. It was hugely worrying to leave them especially with no grass in the fields only hay left out and Pearl so close to foaling. There just seemed too many possibilites for disaster but thankfully everyone bar Kevin stayed put and with the very kind help of Ian and Marie topping up and checking twice a day everyone was able to fend for themselves for a few days.Just this once everything went aswell I could have possibly hoped,I guess every once in a while we all deserve a break!