Caroline didn’t choose horses — horses chose her.

Raised by a mother who put her in the saddle at age 4 near Washington, D.C., she grew up with her nose in Black Beauty and Billy and Blaze, their illustrations as magical as the stories themselves. National Velvet. The Black Stallion. These weren’t just books and films — they were a blueprint for a life she didn’t yet know she was already living.

Her father’s diplomatic postings took the family across the world, and horses followed her everywhere. In Poland, she rode in WWII-era saddles with no stirrups. Just outside Rome, she started competitions with her two ponies: Biscuit, a cream colored Welsh pony, and Kelly, a beautiful Irish Connemara. Caroline was, by any measure, living every horse-crazy child’s dream. Then came Paris — beautiful, horseless Paris — and the heartbreak of leaving her ponies behind in Italy. The Philippines were too hot to ride. Nearly 15 years passed without a barn, without that smell of horses and leather, without the particular silent language that only exists between horses and their riders.

It was Caroline’s daughter who brought her back to horses. Watching her play with the old saddles and helmets, Caroline made herself a promise: she would not keep her daughter from something that had given her so much joy. She took her to pony camp at age 6 — and standing there, breathing it all back in, the smells and sounds and the feel of a horse’s coat under her hand, she realized she had missed it more than she’d ever let herself admit. She finally understood why she had felt lost for so long.

Caroline resumed lessons alongside her mother, sister, and her daughter. Three generations, one barn. It was her mother who had first handed her the reins, and it was during those years together that they built something else: a travel company called All Around the World, planning and leading cultural tours through Europe, including one equestrian trip — a week of riding outside Killarney, Ireland, an inn-to-inn ride around the Ring of Kerry. A journey that would mark the end of an era neither of them knew was ending. Less than a year later, Caroline’s mother was gone, taken by an aggressive cancer.

Her mother’s final gift, just the year prior, was a school horse named Parker — a dark bay Hanoverian Thoroughbred cross with a star on his forehead, just like Black Beauty. A simple horse on loan to their lesson barn, who became Caroline’s for the next 17 years. Parker was the anchor, the gift that kept on giving — the first horse her daughter rode moving up from ponies, and Caroline’s trusted forever horse, whom she rode until he was retired at 28, living to the old age of 31.

Every school break, Caroline and her daughter traveled the world, chasing riding holidays — from safaris on horseback in Kenya to swimming with horses in Jamaica. Caroline wrote travel articles and taught children to ride ponies to pay for it all, while still working a nine-to-five. After Parker retired, their trainer made a perfect match with Stoney, a young grey warmblood from Latvia that both Caroline and her daughter could ride and show. A new chapter, mother and now adult daughter, ready to begin together.

Then came COVID. A jump. The fall. A cervical spinal cord injury. Doctors spoke of wheelchairs and walkers and told Caroline to sell her car and plan for full-time care. Caroline told them she would be getting back on her horse. What followed was years of a meticulously self-designed regimen: four hours of daily physical therapy, treatments, and a determination that left no room for defeat. Her trainers never let her give up. Stoney was waiting. With the grit of the athlete she had always been — and the help of her family, friends, and barn community, a new helmet and her Helite safety vest — she got back on.

“The fall was merely an inconvenience, and I’m lucky to have been given the opportunity to attempt recovery.”

She will not jump again. The nerve damage is permanent. But she is, unmistakably, herself again. Having been given a second chance, she knew exactly what to do with it. Equestrian Destinations was born from that clarity — from the belief that resilience is not just surviving, but choosing, deliberately, to spend the rest of your life doing something you love and something that matters.

As a tribute to her mother and the first travel company they built together, we borrow the slogan All Around the World — because some things are too important to leave behind. Not everyone gets a second chance. Caroline knows that. With Equestrian Destinations, she intends to use every mile of it curating the best places to horseback ride, all around the world.