Newman’s travels have taken her around the globe, often to destinations the average person wouldn’t go. She has gone snowmobiling on a glacier dotted with hidden crevices in Iceland and helped herd bison in Utah on horseback. “It was almost like being on a roller coaster ride,” she says of the latter. “These bison are huge and they are dangerous and I had no experience doing it.”
She has climbed a 120-foot tree in Costa Rica, camped with the Bedouin in the Jordanian desert and learned in Belize how to use cutter ants to suture a wound. During last season’s trip to Botswana, she fished in a pond where hippos were swimming and suffered from motion sickness while flying in a small charter plane.
“We were flying so low to the ground,” Newman says. “I was like, ‘If this is how it’s going to be, I don’t think I’m going to make it through this trip.’ ”
She also has learned to deal with the unexpected, such as a sandstorm in Botswana and a hailstorm on a Colorado mountaintop. On a trip to Hawaii’s Big Island, the crew encountered an earthquake, a hurricane and a wildfire while trying to shoot.
Post-production for each episode takes place in the couple’s Bethesda apartment, with the editing suite and production studio located in their spare bedroom. “We put almost everything together in our home office,” says Newman, who writes and edits the episodes. A Washington, D.C.-based company helps with the technical production of each episode, which can take as long as a month.
Newman and Ward extended the Equitrekking brand in their 2008 award-winning book Equitrekking: Travel Adventures on Horseback (Chronicle Books), with Ward’s photographs and Newman’s travelogues from scenic rides. Newman also writes for True West and Practical Horseman magazines and is featured in the book How’d You Score That Gig?: A Guide to the Coolest Jobs—and How to Get Them (Ballantine Books, 2008).
A year and a half ago, she and Ward started Equitrekking Travel, an online travel company devoted to equestrian vacations, many of which are based on Newman’s Equitrekking adventures. The trips are coordinated by travel professionals in the featured countries.
When Newman isn’t jet-setting to southern Spain, the American West, the Irish countryside or Iceland and beyond, she’s out and about in Bethesda—but on a bike, rather than a horse. She rides the Capital Crescent Trail into Washington, D.C.
“I travel 15 weeks a year and I love doing the job,” she says, “but it’s always nice to come home.”
Andrea Leitch is a former associate web editor for the magazine. Julie Rasicot is an associate editor. To comment on this story, email comments@moco360.media.