Atherton day 2

This morning, we went up at about 7:00 AM. After breakfast, Zoe and Toby (my host sis and bro) took me for a ride with the quad. We went for about 15 minutes (and no, we weren’t going very slowly) through a rocky forest with grass as high as my shoulders, which was absolutely beautiful (and also all my host family’s property), then we came across their creek – wow. Just… wow. It was amazing, I’ll put up some photo’s as soon as possible. We stripped off our shoes and jumped bare feet from rock to rock (sometimes it was very slippery, one time I slipped off a rock and my foot got caught between two rocks under water), it was just like an adventure park! The difference was, of course, that this was all naturally grown and if there were something like this back in Germany, it would probably be man made. On our way back home I got to ride the quad for a short distance, that was so fun!!

In the afternoon, Zoe and I went for a ride in their “garden”. My host family’s got 3 horses: Jack (he’s huge and an ex-trotter), Gem (about half as high as Jack and very cute) and Coco (ex-race horse). We wanted to take Jack and Gem, but they were in the back of their huge meadow so we had to take the quad again to reach em. It turned out that Gem’s hooves were in really bad shape and way too long, so Nola (my host mum) helped us to cut them off a bit – at home, we would normally have to wait weeks till the blacksmith comes, so it's pretty cool (and convenient) that they can just do it themselves here.

After we got rid of Gems dispensable hoof parts, we finally started our ride. It was simply… amazing. Again. Everything here is amazing – the grass almost reached my shoulders, although I was sitting on a horse! And the best thing was that we actually saw wallabies! There were a lot of them, and it was so weird to see those animals I saw just a few days ago in a zoo hopping around in wilderness... The ride was great, and we will probably going every day now :)