I was born in the Netherlands.  As a young child, my family immigrated to the US and settled in Tulsa Oklahoma, where I was raised.  When I was 13, I started taking English riding lessons at a hunter/jumper stable.  I worked cleaning stalls to pay for my lessons.  When I turned 15, my parents bought me my own horse, a 3 year old thoroughbred mare off the racetrack.  Boy, she was pretty, but I remember not being able to walk in her stall because she was so afraid of humans.   I spent every minute I could with her and somehow ended up re-starting and gentling her myself.  I wasn’t afraid of anything and could ride her anywhere.  However, no one else could ride her.  She definitely did not trust other humans, just this human.  Looking back now, I realize I was just really lucky I didn’t get hurt.  She was struck by lightning a few years later.   I then got out of horses and went off to college.

I earned my BS degree at UCSD in Animal Physiology and Neuroscience, wanting to become a vet.  Putting myself through college with bills piling up, I decided I didn’t really want to go to school 5 more years, so I decided to look elsewhere for what I could do with animals.  I was fortunate enough to become an animal keeper at the San Diego Zoo.  What an awesome experience it was.   I cared for and trained many animals from apes to bears, big cats to river otters.  I shared my knowledge with the Zoo visitors by giving tours and presentations and wrote articles for the Zoo News magazine.  I worked at the Zoo for 15 years, eventually becoming a Senior Keeper.

While I was still working at the San Diego Zoo, I met my husband Mike.  He’s the one who brought me back into horses.  In 1995 we bought a small ranch outside of San Diego and settled into the country life, but we didn’t have any horses.  He had ridden horses as a kid, but never owned one.   To make a long story short, we bought a couple of young horses and started raising them on our own.  A friend or ours had Pat’s Western Horseman book and let us borrow it.  We read it cover-to-cover and applied what we learned on our young horses.  We found the web site, contacted a “Level Two” instructor ( back then there weren’t that many instructors  around), passed our level one and got our Red Strings.

I met 5 *Parelli instructor Dave Ellis, early in my education and he assessed our level two and eventually my level 3.  This was back when instructors could assess in the field.  Since then, Dave has become my mentor and dear friend.  I’ve spent a lot of time with him at clinics and at his ranch near Porterville, California.  I have been attending the University at the Parelli Center every summer since 2001.  The one exception was 2003, where I spent a month in Montana with Ronnie Willis starting  teaching colts.  I passed my Level 3 in 2003, and in 2004 I became a 1* instructor.  In 2005, I became a 2* instructor and 3* in 2006.  I have passed 3 savvys  in Level 4; I have  one left to go!  I spent a month riding with Pat  Parelli in the Mastery Program in 2010, where I again learned a lot of Level 5.  It is a never ending journey this learning of horsemanship.

I love every minute I get to spend teaching students to be perfect partners with their horses.  Horses are amazing creatures that have been put on this earth to teach us so many things about ourselves.  Like someone once said “the outside of a horse is good for the inside of the human”.   Mike and I still live on our ranch in Valley Center, California.  We have a few horses here and are lucky to both enjoy them.  One of the best parts of this journey is that my husband has the passion too.  He has just passed his level 3 freestyle on his quarter horse, Buster and is ready to submit for his level-3 on-line and liberty.