80 Days in America

The 11th day of my journey started early in the morning. Around 04.30AM we woke up and after a good breakfast we went for a three hours drive to a tiny place called Swoope in Virgina for a horseback riding trip.

When we arrived at the range, we really found ourselves in a dream location. The cowboy (he really looked like one) that took us for the ride lived in an old house made of wood with a huge porch, located in the middle of nowhere. There were 20 horses at the ranch, but today we made a ride with six people including the cowboy. Because of narrow paths and the fact that I was the only experienced rider, we only went quite slow. That was a little disappointing for me, but despite that we had a nice ride through very beautiful nature. Halfway we had a nice picnic and after something like four hours we arrived back at the range. The cowboy told me that he had a real Mustang (horse born in the wild) and I was very happy that he wanted to show me the horse. It was really cool to see a Mustang in real life for the first time.

On our way back we chose to drive via the Shenadoah National Park, a long way of about 100 miles through some beautiful nature. It took us about three hours to drive from one side of the park to the other side and we had nice views on our way, but after three hours I had quite enough of all the s-turns, because we crossed several mountains and we had to go up and down all the mountains every time.

At night we went to a local diner to celebrate Rick’s birthday and I had my first real big hamburger here in the States. I think I would really gain a lot of weight if I had a diner like that everyday. Not too late we went back home, because we were all very tired of the long, but really exciting day in nature. It’s a good thing to exchange the cities for the nature from time to time.