I met Colleen Rutledge for the first time at Jersey Fresh and I found all the rumors to be true. She was quiet, charming, and incredibly intelligent and I instantly became a huge fan and I look forward to rooting her on at Burghley in just a few weeks. Colleen is departing for England today with her 13 year old chestnut OTTB Shiraz. Colleen and “Luke” will spend the next couple of weeks at Ann Taylor’s Washbrook Farm until they ship to Burghley. Collen will be writing about her journey here on EN and on her Burghley blog, which I strongly suggest you check out. Thanks for writing this Colleen and thank you for reading.
—-
Shiraz at the JFK vetport
From Colleen:
So, here we sit at JFK airport waiting for our 10 pm flight. HRH Luke, the horse who refuses to eat off the ground at home, walks right into his stall here and proceeds to hoover up the hay like a 12 hand pony in a starvation lot. Then, he just goes to sleep. For a horse that has never done this before, he’s quite relaxed about everything. Did I mention the part about having to be here before 1 pm, and having to leave our farm before 5:30 am in order to not hit all the traffic?
Well one of us overslept, just slightly, by an hour. The phone ringing this morning was accompanied a flurry (blizzard) of curses, banging (my toes and head on the wall, simultaneously) and yells to my two girls of ‘GET UP RIGHT NOW, mommy OVERSLEPT, GET DRESSED, RUN TO THE CAR.’ Thank goodness I managed to finish packing my stuff last night. I rushed the kids into the car, threw my body bag suitcase (you, know the one, big enough to hold a body and then some, but still not enough room for all of the event rider’s clothes) in and broke the land speed record getting to the barn. My mom, saint that she is, had the horses loaded and ready to go. We transfer my stuff to the trailer, load the rest of HRH’s equipment in and off we go!
Down the road and passing the first exit on I70, Wait, where’s my phone? Did you grab it when you grabbed my bag? No, you must have gotten it when you grabbed your purse. Call it, please… Silence. Turn around, back to the barn, grab it off the floor of the van where it fell, and off we go, take two. The traffic gods smiled upon us, since we left almost two hours later than planned, I just knew we were going to crawl from the Baltimore beltway all the way to New York. Why not, it took me 5 hours to make a two hour trip over the weekend, and I didn’t have a deadline.
The ONLY traffic we hit was just after we crossed into manhattan. That was a surreal moment, through the little tunnels, driving through the boroughs, getting cut off by people who think the open space in front of you is just for them and 6 of their most distant driving rivals who all need to be there in the same second. Finally, at the airport, we unload HRH, and wait. And wait, and wait and wwwwaaaaiiiittttttt…. Our next bit of excitement…. Check in at the airport!
