Category: Trips & Activities

Merry Christmas From Montana 2009

Post author By Ashton
Post date December 25, 2009
No Comments on Merry Christmas From Montana 2009

We have survived another year in Northern Montana!

To the right, you can see Liana (pregnant Trakehner mare), Anna, Ashton and Maple Pancake in front of our house.

Our ranch is still keeping us very occupied. We planted another 15 baby trees just in case we run out of oxygen. 😉 We added 500 feet of underground water pipes to add 4 hydrants all around our property.

The largest project we have done to date was building a new “Epic Barn!” With the help of many great neighbors and friends, we took down and rebuilt this 1000+ sq ft barn! (You can see endless details on our AshtonAnna Blog. )

Anna’s Top Priority Trakehners is doing great. Liana (above) is pregnant (due 2010). They also purchased a new Trakehner named Elbe: an imported mare from Germany. She had a small meeting with Trakhener Breeders from Idaho and Montana, plus a special guest, Dr. Maren Engelhardt, a breeder from Germany.

Anna went for a 3 week apprenticeship with a Trakhner breeding farm in Florida and started showing the first horse she bred: Ossette.

On the nerd front, Ashton found a great group of web programmers in Montana. He has done a few presentations on topics like CSS and Search Engine Optimization. He’s learned a lot and found some more great friends.

Ashton’s Websites in a Flash business is still doing great, starting out the year with a brand new website re-design and another consistent highest-ever income year. The more he learns, the more he realizes that the learning curve for web developers never really ends.

Here’s a collection of my favorite posts from 2009:

Sledding on our neighbor’s hill

ATV 306’s on Ice

First 2009 Spring Grub Club

Epic Barn Project Begins

Digging a Moat around our house

Epic Barn Completed

<3,
Ashton and Anna

Tags 2009, Anna, Ashton, Ashton Anna, Merry Christmas, Xmas

Horses Trips & Activities

My Trip to Valhalla Farms

I recently took a very exciting trip for almost 3 weeks to Valhalla Farms in Wellborn, Florida. This was my first time to Florida and to Jean Brinkman’s 600 acre farm.

As a lot of you know I breed a type of horse called a Trakehner which is a Warmblood horse originating from Prussia. Jean Brinkman has been breeding Trakehners since the early 70’s and helped start the American Trakehner Association (ATA), which is amazing! I met Jean in November of 2008 at the ATA annual meeting in Los Angeles which I attended with a few of my horses. I told Jean I knew I had a lot more to learn about the breed and she very kindly invited me to come to her farm to learn. After I got home from Los Angeles I figured out the best time to go down there and arranged the trip with her.

I was gone from April 3rd – 21st and had an amazing time! Flying into Florida was the only horrible part about the trip. I left Montana at 9:00 am and didn’t arrive in Jacksonville until 5:00 am the next day due to the storms over Jacksonville. I stayed in a hotel at the airport and got maybe 5-6 hours of sleep then took a shuttle to the Jacksonville Equestrian Center to meet Jean and her Dressage trainers who were competing for the weekend. It was definitely a great introduction to the trip seeing the talented horses and riders from Valhalla at their best.

Competing for the weekend was Erin Brinkman on Imminence a young newly approved stallion owned by her mother Jean. Erin was also there with two of her dressage students so I was able to watch her coach them and compete on one of the horses. She placed 1st in all of her classes for the weekend which was very impressive! Also competing for the weekend was Iris Eppinger and her working student Anna Franklin. Iris was riding Prix St George on one of Jean’s mares Aura and did very well! Iris also rode a client’s horse Etoile who was purchased from Jean and the owner kept the horse in training at Valhalla. Anna rode her horse Walden at 1st and 2nd Level and won 1st place. To say the least there were a lot of blue ribbons hanging around our stalls.

Tags Florida, Horses, trakehners, Valhalla farms

Snow Trips & Activities

ATV and Ice

A cool thing about our property is that half of it is pretty steep 20+ degrees, and the other half is almost completely flat. This allows for lots of different activities. Well, that melt off that I mentioned in my last post drained down our steep hill and made a small pond in the middle of our “flat pasture.” And the latest cold snap has frozen the pond into a small ice pond.

If you’re interested in more back story: The previous owners lived in our current house for 1 year. The winter that they were here, the father had this great idea of dragging his children behind his vehichle on a tarp. I bet they had a blast, and it ended up killing a lot of the grass in a long strip. So now we have a fairly flat, slightly lower strip of land going through the middle of our pasture. It was this strip that now is home to our frozen puddle.

I think that’s enough details to enjoy our video. Donald and I (Ashton) took our friend’s ATV out into the pasture and had some fun:

Ashton:
Ashton on the ATV

Donald:
Ashton on the ATV

Here’s the video we made:

(If you don’t watch the entire video, watch Rosco (our dog) at 2:20.)

Wahoo! What a blast!
-Ashton

Tags Ashton, Ashton Anna, ATV, Ice pond, Montana

Snow Trips & Activities

Sledding in Montana

We have had 3 to 4 feet of snow fall here in Montana so far this Winter. Right now there is about a foot of snow on the ground. And since I’ve never gone sledding for more than a couple of feet, we went out and hit our neighbor’s hill. Anna purchased a sweet snow tube at the beginning of last summer, and we had some 1 person tubes we used on the river. Here’s Anna and Ashton in our river tube:

Ashton Anna Sledding

We’d estimate that this slope is 300 feet long. Here’s a video of some of the crazy slopes we took:

Then we got tired of hiking that ridiculous hill, so we had Cory pull us behind his old Toyota Land Cruiser.

Cory and his Land Cruiser

Happy New Year,
Ashton Anna

Tags Ashton Anna, Montana, sledding

Ashton Anna Trips & Activities

Maui Pictures 2

*Edit: As brought to my attention by the newlyweds, I forgot to mention why Anna and I went to Maui in the first place: (I blame lack of sleep – that’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it ;))

Anna’s father & step-mom decided to get married in Lahaina, Maui and invited all of his children and grandchildren to celebrate with him at a large house right on the beach, which they kindly paid for. (Most of the sunset pictures below were taken from the back porch!) We had a great time. Thank you John and Lisa for inviting us and providing such a great place to hang out and relax.

After Anna and I got married, we decided that we’re going to go on one vacation/honeymoon a year. And since we were married on September 21st, going to Maui for John and Lisa’s wedding in October was a perfect “Honeymoon Version 2.0.”

I think I have finally gotten all of my blog-worthy Maui Pictures cropped and uploaded. I’m not going to lie: I’ve posted way too many pictures, but it’s better than the alternative. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to add captions to all of the images, but I’ll try grouping them.

Anna’s sister, Diana Henderson, is an amazing photographer and posted some of her Maui pictures on her photography blog. I definitely recommend checking those out. (You may have to scroll down a little.)

Okay, let’s get started with a picture of us:

AshtonAnna

Now that we got that out of the way, time for some babies:
Maui babies

Madeleine
Maui
Maui
Maui
Maui
Jace
Maui Sunset

Mason

Turtles
Maui Turtles
Biggest Single Tree Ever
Maui tree

Etc.
Maui

Just because it was ridiculous, Anna and I will tell the story of our trip home to Montana from Maui:

On Sunday, we helped pack up the cars, and drove to the airport with the family. The family left on a 2:00 PM flight, and we left on a 7:00 PM flight. After dropping off John’s rental car (hehe), we “relaxed” in the airport until we could check our bags at 4:30.

We got on the plane in Maui at 6:30 and landed in Kona, Hawaii at 7:30. After sitting in the plane for another 45 minutes, we left again, arriving in Seattle Washington approximately 5.5 hours later at 5:30 AM (Ashton got 2 hours of sleep, and Anna couldn’t sleep.)

We switched planes again and finally arrived in Spokane, Washington at 8:00 AM on Monday. We got in our car, and drove for 4 1/2 hours arriving home at 2:30 PM (with baggage and lunch).

Yep, ridiculous.

Enjoy,
AshtonAnna

Tags Family, Honeymoon, Maui, pictures