The first month

So much has happened so far it will be impossible to recap everything as it happened. We arrived in NYC at the start of June. When we arrived we were already exhausted from many nights of little sleep and the stress of making this huge life change with only 3 days to do so. My eyes were tired and swollen from all of the tears shed during our departure. I was in total shock that everything was actually happening. It felt as if we were walking through a very strange dream for a while.
We joined at the very hardest part of the show, set up and tear down. There are workers there working literally 24/7 to put up the tent and set everything up. On my side we had to build the stables which is more work than I would have ever imagined. It included laying a thick rubber jigsaw locking floor (about 1000 tiles each weighing about 40lbs of floppy rubber), placing and locking in hundreds of walls to create the individual stalls for the horses, running water lines and setting up the paddock and tack rooms. There were many other smaller tasks as well. The hours were long and the work was hard. It is not usually work that the girls in the stable do. However I had no choice when I joined it was the only option. After a week of this the horses arrived at the stable. When they got there things got back to "normal". My body wasn't used to this "normal" yet. It certainly became used to it quick, it had no choice.
Billy works in the kitchen. He had to feed the hundreds of workers. This meant preparing large catered style meals about 8 times a day. Meanwhile he still had to set up the kitchen. All of this in a kitchen with no organization, a head chef that didn't want to be there and no recipes or meal plans. He was so overwhelmed. We have been here a month now. Billy and I have asked ourselves many times if we made the right decision to and if it were wise to have thrown caution to the wind and run away like this. I can confidently say now that we made the right choice.