Last week at Richland Park

I missed last year’s CCI*** (that’s the second-highest level of world class 3-day eventing) but the impressive entrance to Richland Park’s seemingly endless grounds looks about the same as this pic on my last vendor visit in 2015. Just substitute soybeans for the corn lining the entrance drive. You can barely see the two huge complexes of stall tents over the tops of the corn. A much clearer view this time around, although the sky reprised its gray color this year too.

The good news is that I got my tent, along with those wonderful mesh panels I won a couple of months ago, all up and assembled and chock full of paintings on display in only (cough) 4 hours. That may seem like a lot, but it’s a world record for me as a one-person setup crew to get it done in that amount of time. Fortunately we had a setup day on Wednesday, with the show taking place Thursday through Sunday. That really takes the edge off of the stress of setting up in a hurry.

So here’s the lovely booth!

 

And here’s how it looks as you walk by–the ability to get that right side covered in Aquabords really helped visitors get an idea of everything available without having to paw through a box on the table. They stuck around browsing a lot more than they used to!

My little painting table is in the corner behind the reddish basket of note cards.

Right next to the food booth–best place to be! Everybody ends up there eventually.

 

I had plenty of time to do some watercolor painting over the 4-day show. Here’s my product quota to add to that Aquabord™ wall on the next show–

Anybody from my barn know that dog??

My horse Charm stars as a body model in all these paintings.

Charm went from chestnut to white to “double” bay…

 

And now for the fun part! This particular jump on the cross-country is called a table, and it’s actually a triangle if you’re looking at it from the top down. The closer the rider jumps to the white flag, the narrower it is. These are all top riders and they seem to have chosen different approaches based on how they navigated from the jump in the background, through the water, and over the table.

How close can we shave that white flag?

Right through the middle

Got over the table, easy-peasy…

And a gray for my WordPress friend Elinor…

 

There were approximately 500 horses entered in this event, and here’s where they lived for 4 days.

There was another long row of tents behind this one.

 

The landscape of trucks and trailers went on way, way farther than the stall tents…

When all was said and done, on Sunday it only took me and hour and 45 minutes to pack everything up, take down the tent, fold and stow it, and head for home. This was another new record. I have had the dubious honor in the past of always being the last vendor to leave the site. Even the mobile tack shops with their tons of shelves of stuff always managed to pack up and leave ahead of me. Nope. This time there were three I left behind!