The Call Of The Open Road

On the road again!

This past weekend Team DF loaded up for a cross-country schooling trip.  We stopped in at Fresno County Horse Park and found that they were in the middle of some construction.  By all accounts it should be well finished by the time their mid-October event arrives, but it left us in need of a different plan.

We ended up re-routing to Connie Arthur’s Lone Tree Farm.  This added a few extra hours of road time to an already very long day.  Fortunately Lone Tree was kind-of-sort-of on the way home and welcoming enough to take us on two hour’s notice.  We drove thru miles of rolling yellow hills and past lakes and reservoirs.  It was warm out, but the air-conditioner kept things pleasant while I jabbed around blindly on the radio looking for something to listen to.

Truthfully, the extra road-time wasn’t bad at all. Road-tripping with horses-in-tow, whether it’s for an event or just a day-trip is one of my favorite things in the world.  There are special sorts conversations that one can only have with your barn-besties in the cab of a truck.  Whether it’s putting together a game plan for the rest of the show-season, debating which clinic to attend or verbally crafting the perfect pair of custom tall-boots odds are good that you’ll find plenty of smile-worthy conversation.

Those moments are the memories that come first when I think of showing – all the inside jokes, the shared dreams, the boundless hope and all of the hypothetical and would-you-rather type questions that come on the road.  We laugh and joke about what our horses would do if they were people – write Mad Men Fan-Fiction, have a Twitter account more incomprehensible than Courtney Love’s or be a hopelessly-coffee-addicted hipster.  We insist that we remembered to pack everything and then relentlessly tease the friend who meekly suggests a 1am stop at the local 24 hour super-store for some forgotten essentials like oh, say… something other than show-clothes? (We should have made you sleep in your hunt-coat.)

And then at times there is an odd sanctity to those conversations, an unspoken agreement that the things said in that private space are never to be repeated.  The truck-cab serves as a confessional booth, letting us share things that we might not necessarily share otherwise.  I suspect that has something to do with the fact that at least one party to the conversation must keep their eyes on the road and that redirection of focus grants the freedom to a bit more open and a bit more vulnerable.  These moments in the crew-cab confessional are often the ties that bind barn-besties and the barn-family.  As the wheels turn and the road hours go by, those bonds are cemented and sealed by the shared experience.

Go Team DF. Go Road Tripping. Go Eventing.

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