It is fitting that the day I pulled out of the barnyard on a trek that will once again take me literally a mari usque ad mari, was Canada Day.
I think it is fair to say that I am logical, rational person. Paradoxically, I also engage in what is probably an alarming amount of superstitious behavour. (I feel like it might be a vet thing. If, for instance, one were to say to one’s Tech, who was about to draw blood from a cat vein, “Oh, that’s a nice vein,” said Tech would almost certainly throat punch the speaker for having cursed her chances of hitting that vein on the first go. That vein would have, by that phrase, been rendered un-stickable. Likewise, if one were to muse, “I can’t remember the last time we had to do a transfusion,” as far as all other veterinary staff within earshot were concerned, it was now guaranteed that some random dog would be bleeding out within the next half hour.)
This tendency to not want to jinx things is the reason my trip packing had me looking like a squirrel on crack for the 48 hours prior to my hitting the road.
In 2020, Pai and I were meant to road trip out to PEI, but then that pesky COVID pandemic started killing people, and our plan got derailed. And in 2021, it got deferred again. So, in 2022, with travel now once being a thing, this was our year. We were going.
Or so I hoped. Any time anyone asked me my plans, I qualified them with phrases like, “If everything works out” or “If nothing goes awry”. Given the fact that horses are instruments exquisitely and effectively designed to dash your dreams and destroy your plans (and, often, to bankrupt you in the process), it was my attempt to appease the powers that be by making no claim that my travel hopes would actually come to fruition – my personal equivalent of “Insha’Allah”.
As I worked out the trip details, I figured I might explore some new territory on my way east. I made tentative plans to meet up with a riding buddy at Kane Lake, and/or Fish Trap, both in BC and both easily on my route. I got the trailer cleaned and serviced and spruced up (new paint on the rusty cam latches, new paint on the wheels), got the truck serviced and cleaned, contacted potential new layovers along the way, reached out to veterinary colleagues on the route who might be willing to put me up, updated my emergency plans, got the truck half packed…
And then the always-precarious Metabolic Syndrome horse came up lame.
So here’s the thing. My packing list is 6 pages long, and that doesn’t even include the veterinary drug and equipment inventory, nor the groceries, nor my sizeable booze catalogue. It generally takes me three days to shop and pack. When Queen of the World introduced a whalloping magnitude of uncertainty to the 2022 plan, I pumped the brakes on my prep: I wasn’t going to devote days and days to packing up for a trip that had a high likelihood of never actually launching. Because if I did spend days packing up the truck as if I believed we might actually go, that packed and ready truck would unquestionably guarantee that my horse would get worse and I would probably have to shoot her.
But then the various medical interventions began to do their work, and she started to get better.Soon she even started to seem “better enough”. One afternoon when my lovely Mister kindly agreed to do me a favour and feed her lunch on his way past the barn, she barged through him at the gate and galloped around the field snatching mouthfuls of grass while trying to evade him. The Mister: “That horse can go. Anytime.” By noon on the last Wednesday in June, Pai had hit almost all my criteria for getting a green light to travel. And so I decided we should probably leave Friday, and immediately began to pack. On Thursday, she ticked off the last criterion, and so I packed harder. We were leaving the next day.
At some point during the non-stop packing, it dawned on me that the day I had chosen for my departure was Canada Day, and also that setting off last-minute on long-distance travel leaving from an island with a horse on the Canada Day long weekend is a spectacularly dumb thing to do. Getting off the Island with livestock requires a ferry reservation even under normal circumstances. By the time I cued up the BC Ferries online booking for the Canada Day long weekend, my options were limited. I managed to snag a Friday mid-morning sailing. No problem, I thought. With the noon arrival in Vancouver, I’ll make it a fairly easy day and just go to Salmon Arm (5 ¼ hrs) instead of Golden (8 ¼ hrs).
As the Mister and I were saying our goodbyes at the barn, I mentioned my general lack of enthusiasm for this particular trip. I wasn’t going to be meeting the cowboys at Cypress. I wasn’t going to be spending much time, if any, exploring new riding territory. This was going to be a very efficient and business-like drive out to PEI, with very few stops for hanging out with friends and family. He said, “Oh, you’ll get into it once you’re on your way, and you start doing all the usual things.”
I thought about that phrase more than a few times on Day 1 of my trip. The usual things.
The usual things, like traffic that adds an hour to your drive.
Like the things you inevitably forget (How? How? How does this happen every year? I have so many lists, and I check them off, and yet…). Things like the dog’s food and water bowls, and the igniter for the lantern, and BUTTER.
Like making wrong turns because either you’re an idiot who isn’t paying attention, or your navigation system is an idiot who doesn’t actually know where the roads are. Like making that wrong tuen with a horse trailer. A thing that is tricky to turn around.
And best of all: like things that don’t work. Things like your camp stove, when you’ve got all your food prep done and you’re ready to turn the stove on and do the cooking, and nothing other than a teeny, tiny flame happens, leaving you eating lukewarm chopped onions and herbs thrown into a can of chickpeas at 10:30 pm because that’s the best thing you can think of doing with your prep when pasta can’t be boiled and your butter-sage sauce (now just sage, because you failed to buy butter even though it was on the grocery list) can’t be cooked. The Mister, who was off salmon fishing, texted me about how crap his weather was. I texted back: AT LEAST YOU CAN EAT!!!
It’s fine. It was fine. It’s always fine, no matter what crap the trip throws at ya. Having things go wrong actually DID make me feel nostalgic, because one of the best carry-overs from these epic road trips is this: knowing you’re capable of dealing with the crap. The blown tire (make that tires). The drowned cellphone. The dog getting skunked. The fridge on the fritz. The awning blowing apart. The trailer needing repairs mid-journey.
And hey, it was Canada Day weekend. The weather was great, and the scenery driving through BC and Alberta and South Saskatchewan is breathtaking. Also, I can’t imagine any scenario other than horse camping in which I could phone up a venue on a long weekend and say, “So he-ey, I was wondering if you have space for me to overnight with you TONIGHT?”, and end up having the place to myself. Both Topline Stables (Salmon Arm, BC) and Silver Sage Community Corral (Brooks, AB) were easygoing and accommodating, and there were no layovers clients besides me and my posse of three.
It was Canada Day weekend. And I was driving across Canada with my beautiful horse, and my happy dog. Everyone should be so lucky.
una chica y su caballo 