Our Journey Around the World – Amsterdam & Denmark

Wowzers. What a trip. This was Equine Connection’s first time heading to Europe and boy oh boy, was it a trip to remember!

We started the trip by heading to Amsterdam (The Netherlands/Holland) from Calgary with Kari, Karsyn and Karsyn’s husband, Ben. It was a beautiful flight and once we arrived we were taken downtown to as close as we could get to our Airbnb. Now we had arrived fairly early in the morning, so we had to hike to our hotel, drop off our suitcases and wait another 6 hours before we could check-in.

We were all exhausted, however, we had one goal. Stay awake!

To start our Amsterdam tour, we went to this lovely little restaurant called “Toastables”. Then we did a walking tour around the Singel Canal. It was beautiful, the people were friendly, life was good!

While we were in Amsterdam, we did so many incredible things and tours! We walked over 15km every day we were there (it honestly didn’t seem like that though with how uplifting and upbeat the city was). We went to the Red Light District, went on the Heineken Tour, went to the Anne Frank House (#holyjumpintunafish – if you ever have the chance to go to Amsterdam, this is an absolute must!), ate Amsterdamian Crepes loaded with all of the things you would never think to put on a crepe, met up with some friends from home and so much more.

Oh, and did we mention Cheese?! And bikes?! INCREDIBLE!

If you had to ask us if Amsterdam was somewhere to check out… we’d say absa-freakin-lutely! It’s amazing!

Next, we were off to Copenhagen, Denmark. This is where the Certified Course was hosted and so we were very excited to be on our way and spend some time with some pony-pones!

We arrived and spent an incredible night in Copenhagen touring around. And the best part…

Jane Hemingway-Mohr, our Instructor from our Sydney Campus, met us to come and spend the week with the team! It was so exciting seeing her in person again and we had a beautiful dinner to catch up with each other!

We soon went to Holte, Denmark to set up in our Airbnb (which was a very unique experience, to say the least) and prepared for our very exciting first European Certification School!

Not only was this Horse Certification Course the very first that Equine Connection had ever hosted, but it was also filled with the most variety of International peeps! It was too cool! We had Slovenia, Denmark, Sweden, Australia & Canada all in one room!

This week was filled with laughs, learning, friendships and of course, horses! And so, so, so many incredible people! And so many laughs over the language barrier! We all spoke English, but being from different countries and having different terms for certain things, made this week all the more hilarious! Words lost in translation, words that sounded made-up (Holy Jumpin’ Tunafish) and words sounding worse than they were (hehehe – Snez knows what we’re talking about!).

We had the opportunity to work with some beautiful horses, two that come to mind were Bent & Porto.

Bent was a little Fjord who had just arrived at the facility.

And Porto was blind in one eye. He was so beautiful. He loved Equine Assisted Learning and was one of the most incredible, inspiring teachers.

These two horses both put an imprint on all of our hearts!

This trip truly showed us the Universal power of the horse and gave us so much gratefulness for all of our incredible team around the globe. Isn’t it magnificent the power behind a team of like-minded people lifting each other up, supporting each other through the trials and tribulations and helping each other grow?! And it blessed us with meeting so many beautiful people.

Thank you, Denmark for all that you taught us.