A win and pasta squares filled with meat and spinach

For Gert-Jan and Vampire, those were incredible days down there at the Donaueschingen tournament.

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On Friday, our eleven-year-old Marome son did a clear round, and on Saturday he won the championship with a great round in the jump-off. He was almost two seconds faster than the second horse, Cayenne under Felix Haßmann! The championship was a Dutch success all over, anyway. Among the top five, there were three Dutchmen: Gert-Jan as the winner, Wout-Jan van der Schans was fourth and Bart Bles fifth.

On the Sunday, Vampire was still in excellent shape and with the fastest four-fault round in the jump-off ranked fourth in the grand prix. Amazing! If the last rail hadn´t been knocked down, Gert-Jan would even had defended his victory last year, when he won the grand prix with Ulke. But we don´t want to be churlish, of course, but happy.

I hadn´t taken any horse and was thus able to give Gert-Jan my full support. That was huge fun. And we had brought our special lucky charm in form of my mother, whose birthday it was that weekend, which we all celebrated very happily.

One simply has to be happy, too, about how the Donaueschingen tournament has again turned out. The Saturday even saw a peak number of spectators, although the weather hadn´t even been that good. Kasper Funke really did a great job with this tournament. This year, the new restaurant with specialities from Baden-Württemberg was especially great. They served delicious pasta squares filled with meat and spinach and salad with strips of bologna-type sausage, gherkins and mayonnaise dressing and so forth...