[RC] Linda in Abu Dhabi - Day 7, part 1 - Jay Randle
Hi Everybody
Yesterday we’d spent most of the day at the Sheikh Mohammed Cup and had a lot of fun but all that was blown away by the text message I’d received from my husband saying that all around home was ablaze with a wildfire. Very sobering and so very, very worrying. It makes the things I’m doing here seem very trite and unimportant in the scheme of things.
I hope that all of our Victorian members are safe and sound as well as their horses. I have spent a number of hours ringing home and trying to track down all my friends to see if they are ok. I have been able to contact most of them but I have a friend in the Kinglake area who I am very, very concerned about. Her house is way up on a hill and surrounded by lots of bush. I’m thinking that she will not be so lucky and may have lost everything, including all her precious horses. I hope not but with the devastation in that area it seems almost inevitable.
My father-in-law has gone across to SA with his bulldozer to build control lines on some outbreaks there so I hope that SA endurance folk are also safe and sound. I’ve seen all the fires in NSW on the maps and the floods in Qld. It feels very surreal being so far from home and have all these disasters going on. I’ve been trying to keep up to date with what’s happening back home via CNN and the various websites detailing fire activity as well as regular updates from home.
Please everyone, stay safe and be prepared. My thoughts are with you all.
We got through our chores early yesterday so that we could head up to the ride base to catch the final stages of the ride. We hit the Truck Road and headed up to the Dubai endurance village. Meg had to restrain herself as Kristie was following in the Yaris, which is not at all speedy. It also has the weirdest gear change I’ve ever seen/heard in an automatic. When you put your foot down there is about a 5 second delay before anything happens and then all of a sudden this high pitched rev kicks in and holds for another 5 seconds and then a gear change without a drop in revs occurs. Finally everything seems to catch up and you slowly start to gain speed. A bit hairy if you’re in a tight spot and a real nightmare on the Truck Road where you have to get a few revs up to catch the gaps between trucks.
Kristie did a stirling job passing trucks and getting 3 abreast with the trucks in the little Yaris and Meg did a really good job of restraining herself to about 110km/hr. We eventually got to the ride as some of the front runners were getting in off the 3rd leg so we hurried into the vet ring to watch some of the action. The front running horses were looking good and vetted really quickly. There were compulsory re-presents after the 3rd and 4th legs so we could see how the horses had held up after the hold time. Most looked pretty good still with only a couple that we saw being spun.
We headed out just behind the crowd onto the fourth leg to see some of the action and try to avoid getting run over! Traffic was very hectic out there with all the flash Mercedes 4WD and Lexus 4WD and the odd Hummer and lots of Landcruisers and some Range Rovers. There was one section where we had to sit outside the fenced off forest area and I reckon there would be 60 cars there.
I still struggle a little bit to come to grips with the riding style here. Much more laid back in the saddle and with feet sitting on the shoulder a la Wally Webb style (for those Victorians who have been around for a few years they’ll know what I’m talking about). The horses were rocking along really well and all looked pretty good.
The tracks out at Dubai endurance village are quite different to that at Al Wathba where we are as there are a lot more of the heavier sand patches so the horses need to work a bit harder but it certainly doesn’t seem to slow them down. After following the riders for a while we made the dash back into the ride base. It’s a bit of fun dodging those big F350 utes and the Toyota utes with about 10 people in the back and another half dozen hanging off the sides.
