COVEN CAT ON TOUR
1000 km Challenge on a Horse in 45 days
From Zurich, Switzerland to Mont Saint-Michel, France, one direct line
Rider: Terry-Ann Frencken, residence in Switzerland, nationality Dutch, 01.04.1978
Horse: Coven Cat, Irish Cob, residence Switzerland, nationality Irish, 01.01.2000 Distance: 1000 km
Travel time: 45 days
Departure: Samstagern (Zurich), Switzerland, 10th of July 2014 Arrival: Mont Saint-Michel, France, 22th of August 2014
A one and a half months 1000 km trip from Zurich to Mont Saint-Michel, overnight stays will be arranged on a daily basis. 30 km a day with every fourth a break of one day.
Route will be followed in a preferably straight line from Zurich to Mont Saint-Michel.
870 km as the crow flies plus 130 km deviations for a total of 1000 km.
Challenge, mission, nature, fear, horse, new places, people, silence, identity, architecture, competition, rest, determination, friends, cities, arts, thoughts, landscapes, time, distance, impressions, reconstruction, fast, slow, freedom, passion, strength, protection, doubts, together, cultures, annoyed, media, will, travel, fashion, trust, bound, JNBY.
Sometimes I ask myself why I exactly wanted to do this tour. In the end it is all about emptying the head and get space again to think about what means you.
Our lives tend to fill up and than end up in an unsatisfied daily grind. The longer you stay in it, the more you get used to it. You even get used to unhappiness. We tend to forget who we are, what our identity is. Maybe we all do not know it as we go on constructing this life by ourselves. It seems like we can make our own decisions nowadays and that often ends up in an enormous number of possibilities which often do not make us understand who we are and what we want.
Get back your roots ? Which roots...? A general problem of the last two generations and probably also for a few to come . LOSS OF IDENTITY
One can realize that the head is full. Burn out or getting simply nuts. Panic attacks they seem a common thing of nowadays’ society.
Reconstruct what your real wishes are and let all the things aside that actually are not making your life any better. Go back to zero. Free yourself from the daily grind, you have an empty paper to be filled again. Choose the road that you love.
Reconstruct your identity.
I could have also chosen another way to deal with my identity again, but I like riding. So I went riding.
I even wondered why I thought I had to organize my tour, as I actually should not have organized anything and just should have rode of.
I wanted to arrive for the World Equestrian games, on the 28th of august 2014 in Normandy, Mont Saint-Michel for the discipline endurance (a 160 km race in one day...).
I though understood this tour wasn’t about seeing the race. It was an imaginary goal. Just to be sure I would take off.
During my first days of riding I noticed I wanted to keep control over my own situation. Tense about everything; the road, the weather, sleeping place, things I brought.
After several days I started to calm down.
Who cares where you are, what you have, and where you sleep.
It is all our imagination that we need things around us.
You only feel this when you get into an environment again, where you are surrounded by other people who think they need things.
Today’s society makes us often live unnaturally. We are busy day by day to fit into a box we imagine that we would like to belong to. We are busy possessing things, not loving and respecting things.
On my tour I started to get rid of my brought possessions. In the end, I only had some clothes from JNBY with me as I wanted to make some nice pictures with it for them.. Passport, water and my phone for navigation and making photos. That was all.
I started to envy the one direction minded people I met on my tour. Busy taking care of their farms, they were the most happy ones. Lovely things came automatically to them as a result of working hard in one direction. Clear people, happy people.
I wrote my day by day notes pretty quickly on tour. In a simplistic way of writing as I often was exhausted at an arrival in the afternoon. I left them written like that, so do not expect a bible.
It is actually through the photos that you can experience the journey. They have been made with the iPhone. I was supposed to bring a that expensive Leica camera with me, but I did not. It was not about a good camera. It was about clicking what caught me. My view of what I reckon fitted me. I always prefered photos to words. It is a better expression of who you are.
When I look back at these photos, I realize that I always chose pretty clean scenarios. It's probably a reaction of my needs.
Riding with a horse is the best of all. No need to talk, but still together.
Coven Cat took me all along this personal journey.
I would do a tour like this again as soon as I'd notice getting stuck again.
Some people call it an escape from reality. But what is a bloody reality? What does it mean?
Nobody should stop doing or not doing things because others have their pointing fingers on it.
Do what you feel like.
On my tour two things came into the foreground.
I like fast horses to race and I would like to have a farm.
I can write about it in a pretty complicated way or in a more defined style, but this came out of the tour and this is what I want.
Whatever I am doing now or in the future, all my actions will be linked to this inextricable vision of what I want. I am keen on keeping these feelings and desires alive and focus on what I want to achieve. Not more, not less.
Reconstruction of Identity
Many Many Thanks to JNBY,
JNBY did not doubt one minute about being part of this tour. They understood without too many words what this tour was all about: “Just naturally be yourself”.
Without them I would not have been capable of getting my head were it is now.
Thank you
Special thanks to
Apollonia, Marco, Aloyse, My Mother, My Father, My Sister, My Family, Shantala, Gaby, Hans Jörg, Kafi Fuer Dich, Wes, Fei, Shumin, Lin, Jean-Pierre, Carole & Cyril, Odile & Julla, Philipp, Bert and Robin Hood.