August 1, 2010
Travels with Betsy
Karen L. Myers Photo Our photojournalist friend Betsy Parker has set out on a cross-country horse-hauling journey with truck, trailer, two horses, her friend Beth, and Beth’s seven-year-old son John. Betsy is also carrying her laptop and camera and sending a daily journal of her experiences—a discourse that flies from her keystrokes tap-tapped in the harsh light of morning or the dead of night, whenever the day’s events are ready to be put to bed. Most foxhunters trailer their horses to hunt meets and competitions without thinking much about it, but hauling cross-country has to be epic. Since Betsy’s writing talent allows her to switch from pure reportage to poetic musing to humor, effortlessly, from paragraph to paragraph, we couldn’t resist taking the journey with her and experiencing vicariously the good, the bad, and the ugly happenings as our intrepid trio meets and deals with them. Here is the second installment. Previous accounts are available for access from the Horse and Hound drop-down menu above. Click on Travel.August 1, 2010
Read More
The Road Warriors
John Rera and Mo Trail, our first stop-over host, pose with the evidence.
The eternal query—where does the rubber meet the road?—was definitively answered at the witching hour last night. It meets the road in Beckley, West Virginia. And in East St. Louis. Let me explain.
We've embarked on the quintessential road-trip, my friend Beth Rera, her young son John, and I. We’re traversing the nation, literally, from coast to coast over an eighteen-day period.
I'd been charged with delivering some horses from the East Coast to the Santa Barbara area of California. I also picked up a job to ship some furniture from Middleburg to its owner in Albuquerque, and some stuff' for the return trip back east. It's sort of the tale that creates road legend, this nearly 6,000-mile journey crossing the spine of the U.S.
We're stopping along the route westbound with friends (I-70 route, primarily) and eastbound at several commercial horse hotels (I-40 route.) It is a three- to four-day journey no matter what, each way, with forty-five-plus hours of driving in each direction. I like to think of it as a twenty-first century variation on Steinbeck's Travels With Charlie. Beth likens it to a version of Thelma and Louise minus the man-hating aspect. John considers it the opportunity of his seven-year life: the ultimate show-and-tell for the first-day of school next month.
