Before She Leaves: Iceland Is Coming

This is Glytja. I have news.

Robin is going to Iceland.

Not someday. This summer. She is going to the place my family came from, the place every horse in this herd traces back to, and she is going to ride across it.

What she is actually doing

Two things.

First, a multi-day horseback trek across the Icelandic landscape. Open country. Real distance. The kind of riding where the weather has opinions and the horse knows the ground better than you do. She will be on Icelandic horses the whole way, which means she will finally understand the tölt the way the rest of my family does. The tölt is our gait. It is smooth and it is fast and it is the reason people who ride Icelandics get a look in their eye when they talk about it.

Second, Landsmót. This is the big one. Landsmót is the national gathering of the Icelandic horse, held at Hólar, and it happens every other year. Thousands of horses. Thousands of people who love them. It is the closest thing my breed has to a homecoming, and Robin will be standing in the middle of it with a camera.

Why this trip and not another

Because this brand is named after me, and I am an Icelandic horse, and you cannot build a whole life around a breed and never stand in the country that made it.

Robin came to horses through her father, Sam. She came back to them, harder, after some years that tried to take everything. The herd is what she built on the other side of that. Six Icelandic horses in Wisconsin. Me running them, because someone has to.

Iceland is where the thread started. She is going to go pick it up.

What you will see here

This blog is where the trip lands. While she is gone, expect dispatches. The trek, day by day. The horses she rides. The weather doing whatever it wants. Landsmót in full. The honest version, not the postcard version. If a day is hard, you will hear that too.

It will show up here, and it will show up in our emails first.

Come along

If you want to follow the trip as it happens, get on the Iceland list. That is the whole ask. The people on that list see the photos and the video before anyone else, and they will be the first to know if something Iceland-shaped shows up in the shop later.

[ FOLLOW THE JOURNEY: signup form goes here. ]

A trip like this has been a long time coming. For Robin, and honestly for me. I do not get to go. Once a horse leaves Iceland it can never return, and I was born here in Wisconsin, so I have never seen the place my family is from. Robin is going to go see it for both of us.

Tell her to bring layers. Tell her to wear something bright. Tell her to take a lot of pictures.

I will be in the salad bowl, holding down the herd, waiting to hear how it went.

Glytja
Boss Mare. HestaRokk Farm. Cambridge, Wisconsin.