Horse life in the Fraser Valley

After riding horses every day for a month in Iceland, I was really starting to miss the smell or horses and the feeling of not having to use my own two legs so I had to get my fix of riding while’s back home. My family doesn’t own horses anymore, but a young nurse boards her 3 horses on my mom’s farm in Chilliwack. She has 2 enormous Percheron-cross yearlings and an untrained, hot-blooded rescue horse named Ellie she bought for $20. She (the Thoroughbred, not the nurse) is only 4 years old, but broke enough to ride, so I managed to get on her for a little spin and she’s definitely worth more than $20. We took her trail riding through corn fields and she managed to keep me on her back even though the yearling Suzy was walking alongside was way calmer than Ellie.

we could barely see over the cornstalks

Me and my older sister went to visit our younger sister Ruth in Langley, since she lives at the Trinity Western campus where she goes to school. We made the trip an entire day event by spending the morning watching horses warm up at Thunderbird Show Park for the summer finale competition going on that weekend. I still can’t get over how huge the horses were, all these big American and German warmblood show horses, western, jumpers and dressage style, and even the ones that were only 15hh looked like giants compared to Icelandic horses. But of course there were horses 17 and 18hh, and I could not stop gawking at them or the tiny people riding them, who, in retrospect, probably werent so tiny, they just looked so on top of the giant horses.

look at that rump! that’s a whole lot of horse muscle

I also visited an old time friend in Abbotsford, who I went to elementary school with in Surrey and now runs an equestrian center. Lisa graciously let me ride all her giant horses in their fancy indoor riding ring, padded with ground up nike runners. When we weren’t riding, we were in her apartment, which is actually in the barn beside the hay loft, and usually killing flies with one of their many flyswatters placed strategically around the house for killing ease. She has two dogs, a bunch of cats, two donkeys, a couple of her own horses, and then all the other horses that she takes care of. They’re a new equstrian center, but they teach and train horses there under the name Hobbit Hollows, but the barn is called Farpoint Farms – if you know anyone looking to board or take riding lessons.