Mohamed Visits and Horses.

Mohamed, our boss at Wallingford had been visiting us for the past week to see how we're getting on. As you can see from the photo we're working very hard and even Mohamed had to join in our work.

We had a really good week while he was visiting. We each took it in turns to show him around Sydney and where we lived. I took him to the Orbit bar for 360 degree views of the Sydney skyline while having some cocktails. We then went to the very swanky Wildfire restaurant near Circular Quay. The service there is very good but the food not quite fantastic for the prices that we paid. Oops, wrong photo, this should be the one that I want to show:

I had a great chance to go horse riding over last weekend. We should have gone the weekend before but it was all rained off. I still managed to cycle down to the Centenary Park stables in the rain though which was really good fun.

Here you can see me bonding with my horse, Dave. Most of the time he was more interested in eating rather than moving anywhere. Can you see the fear in my smile?

Once you get on the horse the higher up views are quite good. I can well see why police use them in crowd control. Talking about the police...

This is Allen doing his impression of one of the Village People. His horse was rather more frisky than mine. It kept wanting to move as soon as it got the chance. While my horse needed quite a lot of effort to get moving.

I was all set to do my impression of Indiana Jones on my horse but Dave wasn't having any of it. He would barely move when I was in the paddock and would only trot once another hose was in front of him that he could follow.

As it turned out I did managed to do some trotting and then even managed a gallop at one point. I now know why women generally prefer horses! When you're trotting along you have to try to time your own bouncing up and down with the horse movements. Most of the time you find yourself bouncing down when the horse is moving up. Quite awkward as you can imagine!

Once you start to gallop though it's a different story altogether and the horse movement is much smoother and as a result much more comfortable. The only problem is to be able to control the horse as everything is moving much quicker.

Here you can see all the riding team. Unfortunately taken by the instructor with my camera phone as no one had bought a decent camera along for the ride. From left to right is Jennifer, Joe, Allen, Roger, Me and Deirdre.

Roger probably did the best among us as he had ridden quite often before and knew how to get along with his horse. He was quite happily trotting and galloping around. He even helped hose down and put his horse to bed.

I quite enjoyed the horse riding. If someone had asked me to go before I went last weekend I would have been indifferent about it. But now I would jump at the chance to go again. It's not something that I would push to do again but given the chance I wouldn't turn it down.