DIVA.CHRONICLES : Grand Prix Special

Today was better in a lot of ways, thank goodness.

As I mentioned this morning - I got more sleep! That helped a lot. Tomorrow we have no events so we are going to go to a nearby town, Bayeux, so I can sleep in!!

We picked up Laura at the train station and took the city bus to the stadium instead of the shuttle (which is what I planned to do when we booked the apartment and surprisingly enough it worked out). The bus is around the corner from our apartment. We arrived early, no stress, it was lovely. We watched dressage all day, which was pretty good, although I still wanted to fall asleep at some points. Watching fancy prancing all day gets a hair old for me. The USA did very well, with 2/3 riders in top ten - 8th (Laura Graves & Verdades) and 10th place (Steffen Peters & Legolas 92). Considering the competition here, that is really spectacular.

We are learning more and more about how ill-planned this event was by the French (but really - they are French so what did we expect). I made a joke this morning how they spent more time on their social media and videos to show in the stadium during breaks than the important stuff, like, bathrooms for example. The bathrooms are THE controversial issue here. So the main events - jumping and dressage take place in the Stade (stadium) d'Ornano. The stadium seats 21,500 people. They expect to fill the stadium for some events (it was half full today). And there are TWENTY, count 'em 20, stalls total in the entire arena for women, and another 20 for men. We figured, ROUGHLY today there were 5,000 women vying at 4 breaks during the day, to use 20 stalls. To add insult to injury, the "bathrooms" are literally holes in the ground. You have to squat. Like you are in the woods. With a line of 20 people waiting on you to do your business. They don't even have extra porta potties outside. It is absolutely ridiculous.

Additionally, everything is far apart, so as I mentioned yesterday, if you want to stretch your legs, you have nowhere to go. Eventing is 30 minutes away, endurance is another 30 minutes away in another direction, the driving/para-dressage/reining/WEG Village is a 50 minute walk from the main arena. It is just stupid how poorly this was planned. We talked to an Australian owner of a para-dressage horse today on the bus, and she said she'd been to four WEGs, and even Rome, who had 18 months to plan because they were a backup when another venue fell through, did a better job than this. France had four and a half years to plan this. I am having fun, but certainly not nearly as much fun as I expected or had in Kentucky.

I am very lucky to be here to see these incredible riders and horses, but it is a challenge.

The day ended well because we got home relatively early at 5:30 or so, hung out a bit, went to a delish dinner at Archi Dona just a few minutes away from our place, and it was amazeballs.