January Impressions
While days are getting longer quickly and half of the winter is already over it is quite busy at Eldhestar, with many day visitors, guests on tour packages and groups of horses arriving and leaving for vacation. South Iceland has been covered with a white blanket of snow for most of the winter with beautiful cold, sunny days with powder snow and stunning Northern Lights in between.
In January, when horse life is getting interesting with most riders taking their horses in the stable, we always fill our stable with new horses, training horses and young ones. Unlike our furry herd outside they easily get too warm, so we shave them under the mane to give them some air condition. Besides the regular riding they spend some hours a day outside in the paddock and we often let them run a few kilometer to strengthen them and give them the opportunity to move freely, just like we do to prepare our tour horses. The herd enjoys the outdoors, either playing in the snow or cuddling tight together close to the solid wind shelter, with piles of hey.
Ida continues the training of Eldhestar’s really promising youngsters “frá Völlum”, perhaps a soon to be well known breeding name…? The youngest group went off to almost one year in freedom with the large herd, now she’s working with the horses which had their basic training last autumn. We are very happy with the offspring, some of them you might meet on tours while other will do well in competition or further breeding.
The new shape of Hotel Eldhestar is starting to look nice with construction work going very well despite of the long period of heavy snowfall. The interior work will soon be started and the first guests are scheduled to move in on May 1.
At the office, we have started preparing next season as bookings for summer are floating in. Many of our multi-day tours are already fully booked, but we still have spots available, in particular on the tours with many departures such as Tour 20 Kjölur, Tour 13 Golden Highlights of the South, and Tour 15 Volcano Hekla.
As for now, we are looking forward to welcoming participants of the Winter Riding Course, who will enjoy a nice week with us and our horses and visit one of the highlights of this season, the four gait competition of “Meistaradeild”. We still have a few spots available on the departures in February, March and April (either 3 or 4 days).