I have said good-bye to Kentucky and am making my way home to sunny California. I'm looking forward to being dry for an entire day! During the first leg of my journey, I thought about the past week and the memories I will be taking home with me. I thought about the Lexington area and the Horse Park, about not only how beautiful it is, but how there is so much to see there and I didn't see a fraction-I will have to go back when I can spend several days and see everything. I thought about...

Today at Arabian Sport Horse Nationals (SHN), my fellow Arabian horse lovers and I were treated to a preview of the new Arabian Horse Galleries at the Kentucky Horse Park's International Museum of the Horse. The Purebred Arabian Trust funded a 9,000 square foot building to be added on to the existing museum, although they are still requesting donations to finish the exhibit. Those of us at SHN were invited to a special presentation (with a sales pitch artfully thrown in) to see what the...

When I'm at home, I generally have a pretty good sense of direction. Even when I don't know where I'm going, I can apply logic based on where the mountains are, what direction the freeway is, etc., and keep from getting lost. My husband gets lost often, but I probably shouldn't tell you that because he's reading this. Anyhoo...something about flying to Kentucky has thrown me completely off kilter. I can't tell which way is north or south, in what direction our hotel...

The third annual 2010 EQUUS Foundation/United States Equestrian Federation Youth Convention will take place on Saturday, January 16, 2010, at the Louisville Marriott Downtown, in Louisville, KY. The convention unites youth from around the country and helps to nurture and develop a growing interest in equestrian sport. As in prior years, this will be held in conjunction with the USEF Annual Meeting, allowing our youth the valuable experiences of watching and learning from some of the great...

Besides delighting my readers with scintillating stories (we writers like to use words like "scintillating" because we think it makes us sound writerly), my main purpose for being at Sport Horse Nationals here in beautiful, damp Kentucky is to help out (in other words, provide slave labor for) my good friend and mentor, Patience Prine-Carr. This means that I get a lot of mane pulling and braiding practice every day. While it's good for me to get the practice, it's frustrating because...

Tickets to the 2010 Alltech FEI World Equestrian Games go on sale September 25 at noon EST, exactly one year before the Games arrive in Lexington, KY. Ticket sales will be facilitated by Ticketmaster, and sold through www.ticketmaster.com . Tickets will also be available for purchase at all Ticketmaster outlets. Anyone with special needs, including ADA seating, may call the Ticketmaster hotline at (800) 745-3000. Tickets for reserved seating will be available to each session of competition of...

The U.S. National Arabian and Half-Arabian Championship Horse Show (U.S. Nationals) begins October 23 and continues through October 31, 2009 at Expo Square in Tulsa, OK. U.S. Nationals is the flagship competition for the Arabian horse industry and is produced by the Arabian Horse Association (AHA) of Aurora, CO. Exhibitors and spectators will have plenty of shopping at their fingertips at the U.S. Nationals Shopping Expo in the Exchange Center and Ford Truck Arena. The expo features dozens of...

The premiere event of the American Endurance Ride Conference (AERC), the annual National Championship ride, proved to be a weekend of celebration in Northern California on September 11 and 13. At the site of the annual Patriot’s Day ride in Greenville, CA, competitors arrived from all over the western U.S. and Canada to compete for AERC’s top prizes. The 100-mile championship ride, held Friday, was won handily by Lindsay Graham, a fourth-year veterinary student at the University of California...

Oliver Townend of Great Britain is poised to achieve what only one other event rider in the world has ever done, claim the $350,000 Rolex Grand Slam of Eventing. In September of 2003, Pippa Funnell of Great Britain became the first rider in history to win the Rolex Grand Slam of Eventing when she rode Primmore's Pride to victory at the Burghley Horse Trials in England following back-to-back wins in the Rolex Kentucky Three-Day Event in April aboard Primmore's Pride and the Mitsubishi Motors...

In observation of World Rabies Day, September 28, 2009, the American Association of Equine Practitioners (AAEP) urges veterinarians and horse owners to vaccinate horses annually for rabies. When a horse is infected with rabies, the outcome is invariably fatal. But taking the simple step of ensuring an annual vaccination for your horse will nearly eliminate your horse’s risk of contracting this deadly disease. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 42 cases of rabies were...