30.06.2025 – A journey begins.
This Journey has been a dream for many years. Not mine, not Peers but both of ours combined: Peer wanted to learn driving a carriage, and live in harmony with nature. I wanted to travel the vast wilderness of north America with horses. And for our daughter we both wanted her to see the beauty, and feel the magic that there is still left in this world.
The feeling of leaving the well known roads of our neighbourhood (for 2 years) for the great unknown is beyond words… the carriage fully packed, neighbours coming out of their houses, giving us treats for the way and wishing us farewell… Thank you Gergö for the delicious bread 😉
The first two days were the toughest of all! The roads we needed to take, in order to reach the well maintained gravel road system of the backcountry, were in terrible condition. The carriage desperately overloaded, the shock absorbers pushed way over their limits. Several water/mudholes on the road, Allie one of the carriage horses scared to death of water… so several times, we had to unhook the team, and push and pull it around and over a field of brush and lava rock with our own hands… what can I say, the horses don’t have an easy job on this terrain!
Scared that the carriage might just fall apart, from all those bumps and rocks and holes… we made it mile by mile further and further away from Alturas.
An other challenge of the first days: Wild stallions! Our girls, apparently still kind of in heat, and freaking out, almost impossible to handle at first. The wild stallions: absolutely not scared of us, the carriage or our crazy screams and movements, that we tried to scare them with … our only way to get ridd of them: make them tired… I guess they have never seen such hard working girls… so we just kept going, trotted where the terrain let us, at least that brought our focus away from fearing for the carriage. One bachelor stallion chased us half a day, for many miles until he gave up.
After two days we made it to the first oasis. A beautiful water delta, where we were able to let the horses run free (just with their hobbles). We had a delicious tritip pot-roast from the last supermarket bought meat. We ended up staying for three days, to give the horses a break, and time, to adapt to this new lifestyle. We needed that too! We were still a little sick and worn out from the last weeks.
Living in nature like that, is the best medicine for everything, we believe! It takes a while, but the whole system slows down and gets the chance to recover… the mind gets calmer little by little and the body starts to heal in a way it is never able to, living in the wheel of never ending work and unhealthy consume.
