Around the World with Horses

by Christine

One thing I love about horse novels – and indeed fictional works – is that you can travel around the world with horses and learn different cultures and hemispheres way of doing things.  There is so much to learn about horses!  Books can greatly increase your knowledge of them.

Me (far left) on a trail in South Africa

I thought I would focus this post on taking part in a blog hop titled Horse Travels over at Equus Education.  So I thought I’d focus on how we get to travel with horses in books.

In my debut novel Horse Country – A World of Horses, I explored four different women working in the horse industry or studying horses and their travels about the world.  Although the story was based in Australia (as I am), one character (Wes) travelled to Ireland to study horses and another (Maddison) travelled to England for awhile to work.

Because I have studied horses at the Irish National Stud in County Kildare, it was easier to write about the differences from Australia as I had experienced them.  Likewise, I had experienced working in a racing stable and was able to bring this into the novel.

In the Free Rein series I write for pre-teens, I explore running an agistment (boarding) property in Victoria as this is an area of interest and knowledge for me, too.  Currently I am also working on a new adult novel that explores running a trail riding business in the high country of Australia.  Updates on this novel are available through my Horse Country website.

The question of the blog hop is:

“If you could travel anywhere in the world for something horse related, where would it be and what would you do?”

I choose to travel to different parts of Australia that enable me to explore some of my favourite aspects of the horse world.  So in light of the question, perhaps you’d like to answer it?  Where would you travel and why?