Kat's travels and adventures

A friend of mine qualified for southwestern championships during the championships in Hessen. Maintal is relatively close by, so we decided to accompany and support her. The event started during mid-day, they possibly might not have had enough participants to start in the morning.  As much as I wished to be able to warm up with her, after my accident on October 30 I am on complete rest. I stumbled on a staircase and pulled both inner and outer ligaments on one foot pretty badly. Hope I'll recover soon. The day continued further and further, but my friend hasn't had a single fight yet and they had fights of every weight category but hers.  Eventually, her weight class started in the late afternoon. This was her second competition in not less than 10 years and she'd just had half a year off of training. She ended up being 3rd, which is a rather good accomplishment.  Just like being in the top 3 of your weight category of your states' championships qua...

Unlike last year, this time I planned my visit at the Friesian Horse Inspection in Schlüchtern months before. I was the official photographer this year, so I had a little bit more preparations to do this year. We started the day with Ibop tests, which are basically friesian-specific riding tests. This time, we only had dressage entries, but driving tests are often just as popular as dressage. Like most riding arenas, this one had almost no windows. Schlüchtern is located in a valley, and at this time of the year the sun rises quite late. There was no light during the first two tests, but it got better after an hour. The fact that friesians are always black didn't help the lighting problem in the morning.  The award ceremonies then took place outside.   After the ceremonies we continued with the actual inspections. The individual horses are inspected seperately and then may be integreted into the different studbooks. The foals might be entered into the foa...

After the 'Check Engine' light went on Saturday evening, we had decided to start our way home immediately and stay in Gallup for the night instead of going further east. The distance from Gallup to Phoenix is about 320 miles.   We didn't do a lot of stops on our way back to Phoenix, but every now and then we saw some horses and pulled over. After all four days I can say we were fortunate enough to see and photograph horses on every day. Arizona is one of the few places where streets are going strait to as far as you can see. Later we ran into a traffic jam caused by a truck that flipped over and blocked both lanes, but it didn't cost us too much time. It would've been different if we came out of California though! But also due to the earthquake that happened while we were in New Mexico I am glad we chose to go the other direction.

We left Durango pretty early in the morning in order to have more time in Chaco Culture. Unlike the last time Caroline and John were here, we didn't see any wild horses roaming around as we drove over 16 miles of unpaved road this time.  None of the ruins have a roof anymore and many walls got (partly) destroyed over time, but it is still impressive how many stones were used to build all of this. I wonder how long it took the people back then to build all this? A misunderstanding led Caroline and I not only climp up the crack in the sandstone up to the mesa and down but walk to the Pueblo Bonito Overlook where we got this incredible view.  Caroline currently takes photos of her newest pair of socks that she made for their river guide in Croatia. Climbing up the crack was not much of a deal but climbing down was pretty scary. We also met some people climbing up halfway and had to get out of their way. This turns out to be a challenge as the crack is so slim tha...

We started friday way earlier than we thought, who would have guessed we wake up at 6 in the morning after we went to bed by midnight?  Anyways, on our way towards Colorado we stopped at the Antelope House Overlook where we found two cicadas stitting in a tree. Caroline was able to hold one on her hand while it was still buzzing. John has got a photo of it on his Blog .  From the right angle the cicadas wings reflected the sunlight and glittered in many different colours.  The overview of Canyon de Chelly from the Antelope House Overview is pretty spectacular.From far away we could hear cows mooing and it took us a while to identify the sounds as moos. On our way through to Colorado we came across Shiprock, the remains of a 27 million year old volcano. As I tend to get both motion sick and sleepy on long drives we took a lot of little stops to strech our legs, do a couple starjumps and take a few photos like this one of 'Sleeping Ute'.  My first tim...

I used the first few days in Arizona to overcome my jetlag and get used to the climate. The time difference from New Zealand is nothing less than -19 hours which makes up to +5 hours. Nevertheless the climates are just as opposite as they could be. New Zealand had a maximum temperature of 5°C during daytime with over 90% humidity every day while Arizona with its desert currently gets up to 40-45°C every day with very low humidity if at all. For the 4th of July weekend we had a roadtrip going northeast planned as everybody else drove west to California. We didn't know how far we would drive yet, but Caroline and John took me to the Petrified Forest.   In these special trees the organic material was naturally replaced by quartz crystals in a process that takes millions of years.  While I was busy working on my first Junior Ranger booklet, John saw this ranger on her horse outside and took Caroline and I to get a photo and pet the horse. Quater Horse mare Hick...

The day of my departure from New Zealand had come. My feelings about it were very mixed. On one hand I was pretty sad about leaving all my new friends knowing I'll probably never see most of them ever again and to be honest overall I had a great time in this country. On the other hand I was very excited to visit my aunt Caroline and my uncle John over in Arizona in the United States and I was pretty glad to leave the dark side of New Zealand that I've lived in for a while. Maria and Marlene kindly accompanied me to Napier airport to spent my last few hours with me. Unlike me, both of them haven't had breakfast yet and I don't even know how I could have breakfast at 5am. My flight from Napier to Auckland left at 08:15 and I've decided to do all 3 flights on one day. Auckland wasn't worth to stay there for one more night and technically the flight from Auckland to Phoenix with transit in San Francisco would have taken only about 15 hours. The flight from...