How a girls still loves her horse!

It was 1998 and being in a different country (Canada), speaking a different language was not easy, but manageable. A bit harder to manage is riding 15 horses a day, cleaning stalls and look after the mommies and babies. But given there are 24 hours in a day, it is doable…


Nice thing about working with babies and mommies there are usually daddies too! And daddies make a difference! Since i was a little girl I had a soft spot for Walt Disney movies, you know the ones that always end right, the good guy gets the pretty girl and no animals die, ever, or the go to doggy heaven.

So being in a foreign county with all these beautiful horses was just fantastic! There was one in particular, a Morgan stallion named Fox Trim Classic. He was just like the Black Stallion, but sweeter! Basically he was just big pup, but nobody had the guts to compare a horse to a dog, so i just thought he was fantastic. I had the pleasure to ride him in a big show two weeks after i got to meet him and every day after that. I just loved the “big”  (only 15.2 which is really not that big) boy. 


I grew quite fond of his owner as well and I told her if I was EVER going to move to The States and if she EVER wanted to sell him for whatever reason I would take him! Off course being 19 years old and very optimistic and naive about live, I thought it was a reasonable suggestion...

And live goes on.


When we moved to the States in 2006 it never occurred to me that Classic, would still around. He had to be in his twenties and after a full life of breeding every mare presented to him, I didn’t think it was a possibility, of him being alive and kicking… 


I was wrong (in a very good way, wrong)!


In April of 2008 we got the earth shocking news that I had cancer. After that news I was very lost and lonely (even with all my loving family and friends surrounding me) and it was a hectic and stress full time. 


Two weeks after I received the shocking news I got another phone call. From the woman who had Classic!?! If I would be interested in having him, he was all retired and she needed a good home for him, she was getting a divorce and needed to find him a good new home.

After 12 years I said YES right away! It was just a gift from heaven, to let me know that I didn’t have to battle cancer all by myself …


So he came, a little more gray, being beautiful, understanding, sweet and powerful and during chemo, every time if I felt I just couldn’t do it no more I just had to look outside the window and see my black stallion and I know I could…

This all happened three years ago and i STILL look out the window every ten minutes to see if he is there. If we are at the farm and i know bad weather is coming, i will run home and make sure a he and his buddy Jones are ok. And yes, i will make Bastiaan go outside, right before we go to bed, and check up on him. Just in case... And i know Bastiaan doesn't mind...

I am also pretty sure that just like us, he's ready for round two and kick some cancer butt again. He sure is my Black Stallion!

This was one of my first posts from 2009 a little bit changed (no new pictures i just didn't have the time...), i hope you liked it (again)!


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We got home from Chicago and it is decision making time. What doctor, which hospital and what treatment... All of these different decisions make my head spin... Though choices are never easy ;-)

Oh Canada... Bambi Drama!

Gentlemen.

Lovely little Bambi.

The wilderness called Canada.

A big truck and stupid boys.

Those are pretty much the ingredients you need for an absolutely TERRIFIYING story!

As you probably (hopefully) have read in my previous “Oh Canada” posts, my time was pretty amazing there. I worked hard, loved the family were I stayed with, made some great friends and adored the horses. But you can’t have all good things, sometimes there are some “not so swell” experiences that you have to deal with too…

We had a day off. It was the second time I spent at Touchstone Farm and we were going to go to Edmonton, visit some cultural places AND go shopping! Yes I was wearing my incredible high heels and we were feeling pretty girly and happy.

My sweet friend had a car, nothing fancy but it drove well, played good music and got us to where we needed to go. My friend was driving and I was enjoying the beautiful view of mountains, trees, valleys and… A DEER! A fawn I think is what they are called when they are not fully grown yet..? It had the same spots a Bambi had and just looked soooo elegant and cute standing beside the road.

She was on the right side of the road, still in the grass and we could tell she was thinking about crossing, I don’t know much about deer, we don’t have many in Holland and I was just surprised that it was there in the first place, right besides the road, but my friend was telling me that deer are a pretty common sight in that area. Because of us talking about the deer and thinking about what this fawn might do, my friend slows down. Behind us is another car and it slows down too.

But on the other side of the highway, a truck (with one of those HUGE bull bars) is speeding towards us. I look at my friend and we are wondering if he is going to slow down….

He isn’t…

The deer decides to cross the highway and we breathe a breath of relief when we see the little fluff ball safe on the other side of the road in the grass.

But then it stops and turns around…

It comes back towards us. But that truck hasn’t slowed down. And at this point the deer is at exactly the same “level” as us AND the truck. The truck hits the deer while it is trying to come back to our side of the highway. In slowmotion the truck with the HUGE bull bar hits the little animal…

I close my eyes

In matters of seconds, but what looks like minutes we get hit by an incredible BANG!!! And I see the deer sliding of the windshield over the hood on top of the highway. The truck hit Bambi. Because of the force and the speed of the truck and because we were almost NOT moving at all, the impact made the animal just catapult towards us and literally got DROPPED on top of our car…

We stopped, I started bawling and my friend started crying and she was the one that saw everything because she had her eyes open all the time! We got out but were actually too amazed by what happed to really LOOK at the deer. The car behind us stopped also and two older gentlemen rushed over to us and asked us if we were all right. NO, we were not, but seeing those friendly faces helped a lot. The two older gentlemen concluded that the deer was dead.

While we were trying to get ourselfs under control, the truck had stopped too… and two young men stepped out and walked casually towards us, yapping about their "hit"...

and LAUGHING…!!!

I was bawling all right but when I saw those guys smiling, I got SOOOOO MAD! And I wasn’t the only one! My friend was equally mad! But those stupid boys with their smirks on their faces even had the audacity to ask us where we were from, what we were doing and if we wanted to go out with them later that day!!! By that time the older gentlemen had dragged the dead deer towards the side of the road and got a little upset with the younger boys too. They friendly asked the boys to leave. Which after some hesitation they did… But not after commenting on the dead deer and possibilities to get our phone numbers…

When our tears had dried up, the sweet gentlemen had checked our car and we were capable of driving again we took off towards Edmonton. The guys had convinced us that we still needed to go, to take our minds of off things and that the dead deer and stupid boys should not ruin our day.

A half an hour later we found out that there was more wrong with the car then we thought and after hosing it down at some people’s house with water, there was a LOT of blood and fluff still stuck to the car, we decided to go home, we weren’t in the shopping mood anymore and we defiantly didn’t need some “new” boy attention…

I do remember going back to the Edmonton Mall a couple of weeks later, our hosts really thought we would have fun there once we GOT there. It was indeed a pretty place to visit. And yes, when I think back about this beautiful fluff ball and those STUPID boys, I still get a little (read; a lot) bit mad…. What a couple of LOOSERS!

I hope you never hit a deer, and if you already did, I hope the deer died quick and that you walked away fine! AND that you didn’t have any Canadian boys hitting on you because they thought it would be cool to pick up a girl after they killed Bambi.

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Oh Canada! A rocky road...

Ever hit a big rock?
On the highway?
Driving at least 50 miles per hour?

I would not recommend it…

I had a fantastic time in Canada. The horses, the people and the quietness of the country side were good medicine for the soul. We didn’t have much time off but after two months me and the other student Kate were allowed to take the bosses car and drive down to Calgary to go see a big International Jumping event. There even were some Dutch professionals coming to compete... whoohoo....

Chris (our boss) had arranged that we could stay at a friend’s place. We just had to drive down there on Friday go to the show on Saturday and Sunday and then drive back home so we could be back at work at Touchstone Farm on Monday.

Things went well…. Well, until we got in Calgary.

We were driving along the highway after having met our lovely host for the weekend and told her that Kate and I were going to see where exactly the show was going to be held so we wouldn’t be late the next morning. We also figured while we were in Calgary we should make the best of it and maybe even go to dinner and see a movie.

Because it was later in the afternoon the roads weren’t that crowded and we were driving smoothly on a well kept highway, having a good conversation and listning to some good music trying to figure out where we needed to go the next morning.

And then we see this big brown thing in the middle of the highway… We discuss the issue at hand and come to the conclusion, that it must be a carton box, maybe fallen off of a truck or something. Then we discussed if it would be possible to drive over it and what would happen if we did… we were feeling pretty gutsy and daring, driving 60 miles an hour…

BIG BLOND MOMENTS GOING ON RIGHT THERE AND THEN!

When we are about 50 feet from the “carton box” Kate yells at me “THAT IS NOT A CARTON BOX!!!” At exactly the same moment that she yells, I noticed the same thing! It is not a carton box it is a SOLID ROCK!!!

The moment we realize it is not a carton box of about 2 by 2 feet big, defiantly not something to drive over at 60 miles an hour, I yank the steering wheel over to avoid the thing, yelling back to to Kate that she "needs to hold on!!!"

We missed the rock… well, actually we didn’t, but the car was still going…. “Who on earth leaves a SOLID ROCK in the middle of a highway anyway!!!???”

Kate was pretty pale and I’m sure I was even paler, together we let out a breath of relief and I slowed down. We did a quick check, check, doulbe check: the car was still driving, we didn’t hear any crazy sounds and we almost didn’t hit anything, and we were still alive. But we felt incredibly stupid...

While recuperating we noticed a four dollar movie theater. Because we were pretty shaken up we figured, go eat something, go to the movies and go back to bed. We had enough excitement for one day...

I park the car and as I exit the car I hear this hissing noise… Kate heard the same hissing sound and we checked where it came from. And yes being girls with no “car mechanics background” it should have been real hard for us to figure out what was wrong. But it wasn’t…

It was pretty easy actually and that didn’t help the situation. There was a hole in the tire. And not only was there a hole in the tire, there was something wrong with the rim. A rim is supposed to be nice and round, and this one wasn’t. It was bent. And bent isn’t even the right word it was more like it had  a 2 inch gap in the middle…

We looked around and noticed that on the other side of the road there was a garage (I know, we had a least 4 little angels sitting on our shoulders). We hopped in the car drove (really, really slowly) to the other side of the road and hurried inside, trying to find somebody who could help us.

It was five minutes to five on a Friday afternoon….

We did find a nice gentleman who tried to help us but because it was so late during the day and he did have a tire but NO rim, he could’t really do more. He gave us addresses of local scrap yards and told us we needed to find a new rim, and then he would put it on for us the next morning.

Feeling even dumber we went back to our lovely host. We told her that we had a “little bit” of an accident and that we needed to go find a new rim for Chris’s car the next day. That Saturday we spent THE WHOLE DAY looking for a rim and by 2 o clock in the afternoon we had found one. Brought it to the nice car mechanic and he said he needed the rest of the day to fix our car back up. At 6 o clock and a lot of Canadian dollars lighter we had our car back. And no, we didn’t see one horse at all that day…

That Sunday we didn’t really feel like going to the show, after all, all the good riders had already competed on Saturday so we decided to drive the four hours back to Touchstone Farm. We thanked our host and she promised us not to tell Chris.

We got home early that Sunday and told Chris we enjoyed the show. He never found out (or so we thought). At least not until I went back to Touchstone 5 years later and told him about that time that we got him a "free" new rim…

So for all of you miss smarty pants that have the feeling that they need to be brave and gutsy every now and then, NEVER get gutsy with a ROCK on a HIGHWAY… it’s just not worth it… trust me... i know...


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Oh Canada! Feeling like a girl…

Being in Canada was very different from everything I was used too! (And yes If you haven’t read “Oh Canada, part one, I would recommend you do that now…)

The first day I arrived I got a bit of a culture shock but Mavis, Chris and Wendy were so sweet that I didn’t feel completely as an alien, and yes the hundred horses and the beautiful landscape helped too! With me arriving there were 3 students on the farm and one girl’s was there a week, and she did not look happy, i thought.

Oh my, my heels...







Within another week she decided to go home. This was pretty eye opening to me, because I still had a hard time with the loneliness of the country and the lack of other people besides the family and us, but I was determined I wouldn’t fly half across the world and then wimp out because I felt home sick!

And of course there was Fox Trim Classic, the MOST BEAUTIFUL stallion in the world (how a girl get’s a horse), even prettier than the horse in the movie the “Black Stallion”, and Kate (the other student) and the family. Our days were pretty full and long. On breeding days we would start with “finding” the horses out in the pastures. Try to locate the head mare and lead them back. We had to do this on foot, and it was always a long, long walk to find them and a long but little shorter RUN back to keep up with all these mares and fillies. Yes, at that age I had really good stamina…

The Mares going back to their pasture






One of us would start helping Chris with the breeding and the other girl together with barn manager Barb, would start cleaning out the stalls, after we were done with chores and breeding we would ride the horses that needed training. This could be anywhere from 5 to 10 horses a day. And as a cherry on the cake I got to ride Fox Trim Classic. After two weeks I started to feel pretty happy being here; Great people, great animals, I got lot’s and lot’s of mail (hehe, the good old days) from home and in the evenings I had time to relax and think about my life (which is very good for the inner self).

Kate and I got along really well and on Saturdays we would get Chris’s truck and we would drive 20 miles to the closest town and eat at the local hamburger joint. NO, they did not have a Mac Donald’s so you can imagine how “big” that town was… Being from the Netherlands I still had the need to dress up every now and then, and with dress up I mean, put on my short skirt and my high heels…

Yes, THE truck....









Kate would tell me I was nuts, but I felt it was important to feel like a girl every now and then to keep centered. This was my center piece, 13 cm or 5.1 inches, heels! And yes it would take some time to get in that huge truck (being used to all the "little" cars in Holland), but if Kate would give me a push it would work out great! It didn’t help I just got my drivers license a couple of weeks before and the truck would be popping out of its gear, like, every 10 minutes… So besides getting in, driving it was equally as hard…

Getting out was the easy part… you just slide out… but you had to make sure your skirt doesn’t ride all the way up over your buttocks…

So we would drive to town, slide out of the truck with as much grace as possible, eat a burger and watch cute Canadian boys in their trucks drive up and down Main Street….

We tried to enter a bar once but I can’t remember clearly how that went so I assume we didn’t get far (being only 19 and all…).

Those boys diving up and down Main street were! And I honestly think, they had never seen a crazy Dutch girl with crazy high heels in their town, and all I can say I NEVER seen teenagers driving UP AND DOWN the street ALL EVENING for fun!?! I asked Kate what was up with that and she explained that that was what the teens would do because it beat sitting at home and they were not allowed to go out to a pub, club or bar, like we did in Holland. I have to say it was pretty funny to see the same faces checking you and the rest of the town out, turn around at the end of the street and drive by again. And this would happen every 10 minutes for hours!?! Kate and I could not stop laughing and we had a really good time.

I know... I know...

We didn’t stay for hours but long enough to enjoy and after a little push and pull I was back in Chris’s truck, we would drive our assigned route, up and down Main street, and headed back to the safety of the farm and watched Austin Powers on the VCR with Chris, which by the way I did NOT get the first 2 times watching…

Life was good in Canada

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Oh Canada!

This is the first part of a 3 piece post about my adventures in Canada… I hope you have as much fun reading it as I had “doing it for real” in my 6 months there!

In Holland when your about 17 years old and you go to “college” you get the chance to go on a practical training period in the profession you most desire. And yes I am a dairy farmer now, but at that age I still had my heart sold on horses…

My stud: Fox Trim Classic with Christina Jones





Everybody knew that I was the (slightly crazy) girl who went to America and Sicily all by herself and had a need to go far, far away again if the option was presented. My favorite teacher asked me one day where I would like to go for my practical training period. And without a hesitation I blurted out, Canada!

To this day I have NO idea why I said Canada, but I did and so I had to face the consequences.

My favorite teacher told me a couple of days later he had the perfect spot for me. They had hundreds of horses, right where the Rocky Mountains rose up so lovely surroundings, tourists would come daily to take trips on horseback into the mountains AND they had a pool!

Well….. Sign me up!

Not that I like swimming (I HATE SWIMMING) but the rest sounded like a dream come true. And for the rest of the school year I was preparing for my practical training period. I dreamed about training horses during the morning, showing people the surroundings/mountains in the afternoon and relax in the evening by the pool!

My teacher made it only better and better (he told the best stories about other students who went to Canada), the drive from the airport would only be one hour and the people would pick me up, so I shouldn’t worry…

The day of me leaving came and I went in good spirits, longing for another adventure, to Canada.

Mares and fillies at Touchstone Farm






After a close to 16 hour flight, we had some delays and stops; I arrived in Edmonton, Alberta. By the baggage claim there was a scruffy guy holding up a sign that said Touchstone Farm...

That would be me…

So I went to meet the guy and he told me “sorry” for looking so scruffy, he just had an incredible busy day and I didn’t have time to get changed. I didn’t mind I was already happy I saw a friendly face. We hit the road and after an hour I started wondering if we were going to get there… “Just a little bit further” Chris (the friendly guy) told me.

After an hour and a half, being sleep deprived and watching the landscape changing from “pretty out in the bush to NO CIVILIZATION AT ALL) I really got a bit worried… The further we got away from the airport the lonelier it got, I started to wonder if Chris was really who he said he was... No lights from cities, no street lights, more trees, a bit more trees and only trees…. and mountains… NOT the Rocky Mountains but mountains to me… Holland is as flat as a coin so if you have a little hump that would be a mountain all right!

I found out later that the Rockies were two hours away…

Beautiful landscapes and skies at
Touchstone Farm



Finally after driving for a good two hours we got to a drive way, and Chris told me “This is it!” By this time I was awake for over 23 hours. It was getting dark, and the first thing I saw was the indoor arena…

And the thing that stuck as a bullet in my scull was, “I Can see TRUE the indoor arena!” No state of the art arena like I was used too in the Netherlands, no, just a very sturdy, see true arena.

We drove up to the drive way and to my left I see a huge pond… No cemented pool with little benches and towels and martinis (I don’t even drink, but that was in my head) ready to go. No, a dug out pond with lovely little birds and critters (I didn't even think about the bloodsuckers until later!)

We drove even further up the driveway and I see a BARN… But the barn was rebuilt into a house… And I thought “O my Gosh”, I’m gonna live in a barn for the next 3 months!!!???

In front of the barn/house were a little lady and another lady standing/waiting for Chris and me to get out of the car. As soon as I stepped out of the car I felt the love of the two ladies surrounding me. They welcomed me into their country and into their house and they asked me if I would like to call home to tell my parents I arrived safely.

Until that moment I hadn’t been homesick, EVER!

The house!










I called my mom and dad and as soon as I heard their voice I started crying. Not quiet crying, no bawling like a maniac! And the worst part was, I just couldn’t stop! I was crying because I missed them, I was missing my friends, that teacher lied to me, I felt swallowed by this huge country, it’s loneliness, an because I imagined this place soooo much different and these people were soooooo sweet!

The little lady (Mavis, the mom), the other lady (Wendy, Chris’s sister) and Chris showed me the house which was actually pretty amazing and put me to bed…

The next morning I woke up by the sound of horse feet thundering down a pasture, I jumped out of bed and looked out the window and saw 50 broodmares coming over the hill running towards the house true a creek…

Right at the moment I thought…. “Well…. I think I can handle 3 months here in Canada!”

Next week… part 2 of Oh Canada!



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