Working at ....Park!!!

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Sitting on the train i begin to get nervous. We have texted nikki and let her know we are on our way and she has sent one of the girls to pick us up. When we arrive at Cambletown station we wait for 10 mins before Rachel rocks up. I can see she is a little apprehensive at first as we dont know what eachother looks like and Craig doesnt look his most presentable with his long hair and growing beard. Later Rachel tells us she thought she was going to be murdered by the bearded English man. lol It takes us around an hour to reach our new home. For privacey reasons we will call this SERENITY PARK. We dump our bags in our crib and are introduced to Nikki, followed by Gus and Scamp (the pooches). We are shown around the property and introduced to all the staff including Shane (The Boss). At first we didnt know how to take Shane as he is hard to read but once you get to know him you realise he is a nice guy. That day we chat to the girls and walk around looking at the horses. We make our first trip into Camden to get our munch and head back to the house. Me and Craig are living in a small flat next to the stables and the girls live in the house where we will share the kitchen. The girls are really friendly and make us feel at home. We make our tea and head to bed as we start work early the next morning.

6am rocks up in no time and we are ready to work. After a few weatbix we start to muck out the 23 stables they have here. It takes us over 4 hours to muck out and dump the poop in a paddock. Then we head in for our brunch or second breakfast whichever you prefer to call it. We help Kaz feed the 80 horses that were on the property and she thought we picked it up like pros. Given We were slow and incompetant with the horses we were still around for day 2. Soon we fell into our daily routine, clean out boxes, dump the poo, have breakfast then do some random job that needed doing and off for a spot of lunch. My afternoon was feeding the horses and Craigs was fixing or building something or helping out the girls with the horses. After our first week we were trusted to catch horses, rug and unrug them, shower them ect and we had frequented the local towns pub, The Camden Hotel.

All was not smooth for us at "Serenity Park" and within a few weeks we had sucessfully broken a John Deer lawnmower, a toyota landcruiser and smashed a fence wityh a giant tree. I also managed to put in the washing machine a fox tel remote control and a cushion, all in working order after drying out i must say. But still Shane must of like us because he kept us around. The girls we worked with were really nice and taught us from the ground up what we needed to know about horses. We worked with FEI Groom of
the Year Michelle, Rachel and Caryn who were also grooms.

So we spent a little longer at "Serenity Park" than we expected. We started at the beginning of March and worked til the 12th of July. Just 2 days after our 1 year aniiversary of leaving home. We cant say anything bad about our time here as we loved every minute. I must say we had days when i wanted to sleep past our 6am starts but i dragged myself up every morning in time for work. The mornings were light when we began but months later they were dark and cold, I wont describe everyday as that would be boring but i will tell you of a few good times we had there.

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