For those of you who don’t know this yet I met Anna on my China trip and we hit it off, to the point that we decided that she should fly out from Paris to meet me in Sydney. We arrived at the same time at the airport and got picked up by Simon & Trinks. The day after arriving we got ourselves a hire car. We then headed up to Newcastle to go and visit Martin & Louise who were on the China tour with us. We stayed over with them at their house and had a great evening catching up. We then all went to Nelson Bay the following day. We booked ourselves on a boat trip to go dolphin spotting. We actually did manage to spot 8 bottlenose dolphins in the bay. I noticed a full day adventure being advertised in one of the booking offices, which both of us were keen to do, but when we tried to call them there was no answer. We decided to try in the early morning again. After saying goodbye to Martin & Louise, Anna & I went looking for accommodation. Anna wanted to find a place that had horses so that we could feed them in the morning. On the road out of the Bay I drove passed a farm gate that had a sign for an adventure tour. I thought it was the same one we saw earlier and so decided to go knock on the door and see if they were going to do the tour the next day. We opened the gate and walked inside only to be greeted by a staffie. He was very friendly so we walked up to the house and tried to get someone’s attention. There was a second staffie, but no one appeared to be home. As we were about to leave I saw someone feeding horses out back. I went up to the guy and introduced myself. His name was Jock. It turns out he did not do the adventure tours, although he trained Arabian horses for Endurance racing. I guess I should mention that Anna loves Arabian horses & had only recently been to the World Champs in Paris so she was very happy to see them. Jock then took us around his place and explained that he was building a horsepackers. He then invited us for a beer. So there we were sitting having a beer with a stranger with his 2 staffies. He then asked me if I knew anything about IT as he could not connect to the web. I offered my services and managed to figure out his modem was b*****ed. Meanwhile Anna was watching a DVD. He then offered for us to stay over and we eventually agreed to do so. We felt like he was a good guy, but still felt a little nervous. But he told us to use his mate Keith’s room. So we crashed for the night. The next morning when I went outside I bumped into Keith who had got back. So I introduced myself and said “I hope you don’t mind but we slept in your bed last night”. Keith said, that’s ok and then where’s Jock? Well Jock explained the situation and then we all sat and had tea and we made breakfast for ourselves. We all sat around like old friends which was weird but great. Jock said if we wanted to ride we should come back at 5pm and he would saddle up some horses. We said ok and headed off for the day. We went cycling around Nelson Bay and went to one of the beaches for a swim. The water was pretty cold though. I told Anna we should get some steaks to BBQ and some wine for the evening as it would be a great way to end the ride off with. Well we got back at 5pm ad saddled the horses. Anna got a horse called Ella, which was the New South Wales Endurance champion 2 years ago, so we were on Arabian race horses. We did an easy ride through the forest before coming up onto the dunes. The sun was just setting and the sand was all pink & it was an amazing sight. It gave me goose bumps being there. We then rode down to the beach where Jock then let us gallop the Arabians. I must confess I have never felt such power from a horse before and the Arabians shot off with me hanging on, but I soon got the hang of it and felt as one with my Arabian. What a feeling of exhilaration, like driving a Ferrari. We eventually got back to the farm and I made a BBQ for us and grilled some steaks. Later that night we were all sitting in the lounge watching a DVD, the four of us and the 3 dogs. Keith then insisted that we use his room for the night. The next morning we found it difficult to leave, as we felt like old friends with them but we did not want to overstay our welcome.

For those of you who might make it there here is the website link http://www.pegasusairborne.com/