Manchester Fun - Neal's Arrival & Polo!

You'll notice that the titles of this round of blogs corresponds to photo album titles on Facebook and Myspace - these are the stories to go with the pictures :) I have added in representative pictures for illustration.

So, six weeks of winter vacation. Slightly tainted by the fact that exams aren't until after the break, but that's how they do it over here. But the semester was both long and short at the same time and I welcomed the break.

I counted down the hours for Neal's arrival - he made it safely on Tuesday morning (December 18th) and I met him at the airport. Our first outing was on Thursday the 20th, to play polo - on horses, the real kind of polo.

We got up early to catch the train to Rugby, where my friend would pick us up in her car. The train ride was lovely - it was all foggy outside and going through the green English countryside was beautiful. We found some sit-down pizza for lunch, then made it out to the Rugby Polo Club for our lesson. The place really is in the middle of nowhere, very rural. It happened to be bitter cold that day, with lots of wind, so we were happy to ride in the wind-sheltered arena with a roof. The grooms tacked up our horses and we began.

For never having ridden a horse before, Neal did famously. Within a few minutes he had his mount going where he wanted and was working on hitting the ball. Hitting a polo ball is harder than it looks - you're trying to position yourself correctly while controlling your horse and your mallet to hit a ball that's on the ground while you're way up on a horse. It's even harder if you're not used to how a horse moves under you. We all rode around practicing hitting for most of our lesson. Soon Neal's horse seemed to be getting the better of him - horses have personalities and if they get the sense you don't know what you're doing, sometimes they try to take advantage of you. Neal's horse would get close to the ball, then stop before he was close enough to hit it. Then he remembered all the horse-riding in Indiana Jones movies, decided he wasn't going to break his horse if he kicked harder, and thus resolved the difficulty. At the end of the lesson we played a 2-on-2 game, my friend and I against Neal and the instructor, with the modification that the instructor couldn't score goals. We had a blast playing against each other and we all scored several points.

Our train back to Manchester wasn't for several hours, so we puttered around Rugby and found food and a pub with a big radiator to sit in. I was completely exhausted by the end of the day, so I spent a great deal of the waiting at the station using Neal as a pillow.

As you can tell, it was an amazingly fun day and we both enjoyed ourselves immensely :) Sadly, I didn't manage to remember to take pictures.