Photos from the holiday

The bridge across the gorge at Ronda
Trevelez looking towards the Sierra Nevada
The fort in Almeria
The village of El Ferrer, home of Rancho Ferrer
Terrano enjoying a graze after getting me to the top of the hill.

Trees are hard, horses are stupid

Well, I've had my nose to the grindstone recently and have done very little running training and only just about kept up with my Spanish homework.

I've just got back from holiday, Mark and I had a week in Spain at Rancho Ferrer riding horses. Overall I had a great time but with a few comedy moments and misgivings.
Great Stuff

• The horses! Lovely animals the lot of them. I was riding Terrano (known as the gentle giant) and he was completely as advertised. Mark was riding a grey mare called Babieca, who was a little flighty but still very kind and responsive. They had a wide variety of horses, from safe and calm to young and giddy. Anne-Marie and the other staff made great efforts to match you to an appropriate horse.
  
• The accommodation. We had our own little spanish house in the village, with our own kitchen and bathroom. Plenty of space to chill out and read books when we weren't riding and if the weather was good there was a hot tub and swimming pool. The only downside was the village was set up in the mountains, about 1 mile from the nearest bar, 3 miles from the nearest shop, so if you needed anything you'd have to drive to find it.
  
• The food. Everyone's fridges were stocked with goodies to make breakfast and lunches, and the evening meals in the bar were great. Plentiful cheap booze as well.
  
• The staff.Anne-Marie and Mike who owned the place were very friendly and professional. Don who ran the kitchen provided good food. Lindsay, Meg and Maria who guided the rides and looked after the horses provided advice about riding, local places to go and generally made the visit a pleasure. Everyone was helpful and made a great effort to make the stay enjoyable.

Less Good Stuff

• The riding. The terrain around the village was very spectacular, but most of the rides were on narrow mountain dirt roads. If you were a beginner rider you'd find these challenging at walking pace. If you were an advanced rider, there were opportunities to canter. However if you're in the middle (like myself) you felt that it was a little monotonous as you were at walking pace for most of the day. However, I can understand why this was the case as there were a lot of sheer drops, and the last thing Anne-Marie would want is for anyone to be injured.
• The weather. We must have been there on one of the most miserable weeks - when we landed at Malaga it was pouring with rain, and it rained for the next 3 days off and on. Some days we felt lucky to go out for a ride, as the start would be held back waiting for the tracks to dry out. Once the rain finished, we had 2 days of good weather, and then it turned windy, which can make horses quite jittery.
• Trees! Horses are very easily spooked, and when Balou spooked and started cantering down hill pushing past my horse, I ended up cantering through a grove of almond trees. This would have been ok, except that Terrano forgot I was on his back and dragged me through the branches of one of the trees in his panic. I was a bit shook up by that, and more than a little bruised. On the upside, I kept my seat through all of that - I might have been a natural at jousting ;-)
  

We also went to Almería, Ronda and Trevélez as day trips. Almería is not a glamorous town, though it does have a good fort. The drive to there was dominated by going past massive plastic greenhouses which are not very scenic. Trevélez and the surrounding villages in the Alpujarras were very pretty, though the drive was quite hairy and we did a short walk up the Trevélez gorge in the hope of reaching the snowline. Ronda is really worth the effort and the scenic ride up there from the coast near Marbella was breathtaking. I'll post photos when I download them from my camera.