Horseback Riding | Tales from the Hutt

Monday, 01-July-2024

I adore learning new things from people. Meeting interesting personalities, absorbing little tidbits of knowledge and learning.

It’s part of what I enjoy about dating – I don’t enjoy how toxic the global dating scene has become… but I adore finding someone interesting to share knowledge and experience with.

A bit of knowledge that I’d absorbed in my time in Oregon was dressage riding – the style of competitive horse-riding where the horses and riders perform special canters and movements, who’s names and details I’m not even going to attempt to explain here. Instead, I’ll just simply state that one of the foremost dressage schools, and breeds of horses, are from Vienna – The Spanish Riding School.

Now, Spain and Austria are in fact two different countries… so why would Vienna have a riding school from Spain? Well… they weren’t always two countries. The Hapsburg Dynasty (yep, those guys again) spanned both, and established the Spanish Riding School in Vienna around 1565… making it a rather old institution. I’ll add a link to the Wiki at the bottom, for those who’re interested in learning more of the salient details.

For my experience, though, I wanted to see the school and the horses. I’d also hoped to see a performance… but due to bad luck with timing, I’d arrived just in the middle of their summer break. Another thing added to my list of “places to return to and future trip notes”, I guess.

I’m not one to give up, though, and even if the performances were on hold… well, I’m not going to miss a chance to take a tour! I woke up early(ish), made my way to the arena, and hopped on board the tour of the facilities.

It was super neat – though definitely not quite as cool as if I’d been able to see a performance afterward. We went fairly quickly, checking out the training arena, the performance hall, and even into the stables to see the horses themselves! We weren’t allowed to interact with them, of course, or take photos within the stables, but it still made for a very lovely opportunity that I’m quite happy to have experienced.

Link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Riding_School

A trail ride at Sturlureykirhorses horse farm!

Friday, 17-May-2024

After the staggeringly beautiful sunset at Miðjanes, what could I possibly follow up with as a final adventure to my roadtrip? I’d be returning Vanney to the depot on the 18th, just the next day, so I needed to do something glorious and adventure-filled to celebrate my last day of the roadtrip.

Well.

I am not one to back down from a challenge, and I started the day by… drumroll please… making some phone calls!

The first call I made came back negative – they already had all the guide spots filled, and couldn’t fit another in. The second call didn’t pick up… and to this day (nearly two weeks later) I still haven’t heard back from my email asking for information. The third, though, mentioned that they had one guide left who didn’t have anything at the time I could make it… so come on down!

A bit over two hours later, I was signing in to ride a horse for (to the best of my memory) the first time ever.

I was a little bit intimidated, I am not afraid to admit. I mean, okay. Humans have been riding horses for… a really long time. Something around 5,000 years, according to Google. And we haven’t died off as a species yet, so… it can’t be that dangerous, right?

Wrong. Have you seen the video of a horse eating a mouse? Or a horse kicking someone? These things are huge, and scary, and (forgive me, horsies) kinda dumb, from what I’ve heard from the various horse-people that’ve been in my life.

So I was intimidated and a little bit apprehensive.

Thankfully, my guide was awesome and my horse was a true gentleman. Stina was calm and collected, walking me through all the details. Mannie was calm and collected, “listening” to my commands and not immediately throwing me out of the saddle. I put listening in quotes, because he definitely mainly did what he felt like doing – I give my requests for specific “go forward, turn left, turn right” a solid 30% chance of being listened to. Thankfully, Stina rode ahead of us, and so Mannie mainly just followed her. So I didn’t actually have to do anything except relax and enjoy the ride!

We did a quick practice ride around the arena, the headed out toward the river nearby. A really interesting river, I learned – it’s the only river with a hot spring in the middle of the water, vs. to one side, and we could see the effect of that from a pretty solid ways away.

It’s something I’ve loved about Iceland – you can see the hot springs from quite a ways away, usually, from the steam billowing out across the moss. It’s neat, and definitely adds a whole level of mystical aura to the countryside.

We rode, we chatted, and I got the feel of working with Mannie to go where we were supposed to. We did some quick trots, lots of walking, and even a bit of a short gallop. The gallop was… interesting, mainly because Mannie very clearly had no intention of going as fast as Stina’s horse, nor for as long… he just sort of sprinted for a quick bit, long enough that we could say he tried, before slowing back down to a walk while they waited for us to catch up.

You know what? I’m fully okay with that. No rush from me – As long as I stayed in the saddle, remained un-eaten, and continued not knowing what it’s like to have a horse-shoe smack into any of my bits, I was one happy camper.

After we got back to the barn, brushed Mannie down a bit and gave him some treats, I got a short tour of the farm!

Turns out, Sturlureykirhorses uses Europe’s oldest geothermal heating system – The spring was originally tapped in 1907, with 4L/s of water pumping out of it at just boiling temperatures. It’s used to heat the barns, the houses… and most importantly, to bake bread!

Ohhhh don’t sleep on that last bit. I got shown the “bread baking hole”, and wasn’t particularly enthused… and then I tried the bread, and I was very quickly very enthused. It was amazing – almost like fudge in consistency, but with an amazing brown-bread flavor. They had the recipe posted up on the wall – while finding a hot spring in Dublin to bake it in may be a challenge, I relish the thought of trying to rise to that challenge once I’m settled in.

The bread was so good, you don’t even know.

It was a very good end to a very enjoyable tour, and a glorious start to my final day of #van_life!