Iceland! (Again)

Just got back from the most wonderful week in Iceland. I led a knitting and riding retreat at Hestaland, the most gorgeous horse farm I’ve ever seen! We had an amazing group of ladies (and one husband who was there for the horses and not the knitting) and not only spent afternoons and evenings knitting and chatting, but rode Icelandic horses out on the trails almost daily. When we didn’t ride, we went to sheep farms, mills and shops to learn about how yarn in Iceland is made!

Here are a few pics! (And things like luggage and needles are on my Amazon page if you like them!)

Of course I had to properly sticker my suitcase.

I love interchangeable needles for trips. The chances of being able to buy yarn and cast on right away is much greater when you have multiple sizes on hand!

Plus look at the cute pandas! (they turn your circulars into straights!)

I use cubes to squish in yarn for the trip. Since I was teaching classes I had to take a lot!

Obligatory cat in bag picture

Once we arrived at Hestaland owner Gudmar gave us a demonstration and overview of the Icelandic horse. It’s completely fascinating. No other horse can come into Iceland and once an Icelandic horse leaves it can never come back. Meaning when a horse goes to a competition outside of Iceland, it can’t return! That seems so sad to me, but it’s completely understandable. They don’t have the diseases in Iceland that we do in other countries, so their horses don’t even need to be vaccinated. Which means horses can move from one barn to another, the horse clubs can get together and there is no paperwork, vaccine checks, etc. It makes their horse culture so open and free!

We were free to walk out to the pastures and pet horses whenever we wanted. In fact you could open your bedroom window and see horses just a few feet away from you! I loved every second of that.

We definitely had LOTS of riding time. I’ll post more about that tomorrow. There’s just too much adventure to fit into one blog entry. But in the meantime, there was also this:

Baby Icelandic horse! Yes we got to pet it!

I’ll try to get more up tomorrow. In the meantime, if you want to go horseback riding in Iceland, I cannot stress enough how wonderful Hestland is!