It's an eventful life of Esmarelda at the WEG test event

An Eventful Life has had great fun with Esmerelda in the past week or so. When we heard that she would be heading to Normandy at the same time as us we figured it would be great to catch up with her and travel together a little bit.

One of our bloggers, NormAus (little brother of Norman, the official mascot for the 2014 FEI Alltech World Equestrian Games) took her under his wing at the airport and they had a bit of fun in the Duty Free area where he and Esmarelda discovered that they had the same taste in gin and champagne!

She was a perfectly well behaved traveling companion except that NormAus found her interest in perfume and make-up a bit boring (like all men do at airports) while he was much more interested in the chocolate.

Our travels continued from London to France via the Eurostar and time at the eventing test event for next year’s WEG where she hung out with all the big guys in eventing and checked the suitability of the venue for slightly smaller, and more squishy, horses as well as spending time at Le Grand Complet 3*.

Esmerelda was interested in what An Eventful Life is all about so we filled her in a little bit about us. An Eventful Life started life as a book about five Australian Olympic medallists in eventing, published in 2010. The website www.an-eventful-life.com.au, created to promote the book, grew in popularity as we added the five riders’ blogs and we followed them at events. In 2012 we re-launched the website to cover eventing in Australia and around the world with quality editorial, photographic, video and audio content. Our photographer Libby Law (also an ESMA finalist) covers the European season, including all FEI 4* events, and is well known for her stunning photography. In Australia we also video the cross country at various events, enabling every rider to view their entire cross country ride, thanks to our proprietary video software.

The past two years has been a great time and we love what we do but we can’t do it for free! In June 2013 we introduced a subscription basis providing our 4* members with all of our exclusive content for the price of a monthly magazine – eventing updates every day at their fingertips but we still also provide lots of free content for casual viewers.

Social media was one of the catalysts for the early success of An Eventful Life as the word certainly spread via Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. It was wonderful to be nominated as a finalist in last year’s Equestrian Social Media Awards and even better to be the runner-up in the Australia and New Zealand region. It is amazing how the equestrian community have adopted these forms of communication and we find Twitter is particularly popular with the eventing fraternity (amazing what you can do with 140 characters…).

There are lots of plans in store for An Eventful Life but Rome wasn’t built in a day! We see the video component of our site becoming more of a feature, more presence overseas and coverage of eventing in emerging countries such as Asia and lots, lots more in the future for our followers. It’s going to be a busy time!

Click here to view all the photos from Esmarelda's trip