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Published: August 3rd 2015
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Ok best day ever.
I went to the Rest Home for Old Horses and stayed there half the day. It's a brilliant place - it was first started as basically a retirement home for the work/tram horses in Douglas and now they have all sorts of beautiful old darlings... along with some donkeys to keep things interesting.
(Their names are off memory from looking at pics there... so... take it for what it's worth lol. It's more so that I can remember who was who in the pictures.)
The lady who was in the gift shop was super friendly and basically gave me an overview of the place as I bought some food for the horses. She also told me about the oldest horse, Pocket (he's a little skinny - give him all the food he wants!) and to be wary of the donkeys because they don't have manners lol.
First I went to see Pocket. What a dear. He was off in a different enclosure with one of his buddies - some sort of foot problem at the moment, so he was seeing the vet today and he's inseparable with this other horse. You could tell
they were buds because they weren't attacking each other to get more food haha.
Going towards the main enclosures - I love me a good work horse... they're just so regal and powerful looking, but are really gentle giants. Charles(?) was the first one - he was standing there on guard for the first person to walk by with food lol. I didn't disappoint him. (I love the feeling of feeding horses by the way... even if your hand gets very wet and slobbery by the end of two buckets worth...) There was another horse that then came over, but Charles gave 'em a good head butt, so I went on to the next field lol.
Another big boy was waiting at this one too - Billy(?). He was a beaut. He made me laugh because he had like a moustache on his muzzle - it tickled. Further along the enclosure you could see all the horses starting to line up - they knew the good place to be. Some were pushy and some were polite in their requests for food lol. (Some even tried nibbling my camera thinking it was part of the food bucket. Uh, no.)
There was this sweet golden horse that would tap at the fence like, 'excuse me, pardon me, food pls'. He was often pushed aside by one of the work horses (Topsy?) though, so it was a bit of a game to try and get him more food. Same with the Shetland Pony they have! Poor little guy haha. There was a beautiful dark chestnut horse (Senator?) who was another one of my favs - very gentle, very calm.
I felt so bad because there was another field with horses (not work ones) and we weren't supposed to feed them. N'aw.
The donkeys made me laugh. Poor old man Patchet, he seems surrounded by a much rowdier crowd. When I got there they were all in their stable but it didn't take long for the the three Ds to run over (Denis, Dominic and Dillys). Patchet was much more dignified in his approach. One of the Ds was a bully and kept biting at the others to get away so he could have the food, and one of them had his head down on the fence ears back the entire time like pleeeeeease feeeeed me pleeeeeease. Meanwhile Patchet was
like yes please food ok ok thank you goodbye.
They also had some chickens, a rooster who decided noon was a good time to cockadoodle-doo and a baby chick. Cutie!
From there I decided to loop around the other side of the island, back up to Peel and to Ramsey, but on the west side. I didn't end up doing the hike out near Ramsey because of the weather/time. Much happier to have spent the day with horses.
Back in Douglas, the wind had really picked up - so much so that there was a splash zone along a chunk of the promenade. I got my camera out to try and get some pictures and you can guess what happened. Yes, I got some good photos and yes, I very much got splashed in the process.
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Irene
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The 3 Ds Donkeys
Awwww, they remind me of Donkey in Shrek. The 3 D's...Desjardonkeys!