Betsy Parker's Journal

John makes a sign for the truck window: East Coast or Bust

Photojournalist Betsy Parker, her friend Beth Rera, and Beth’s seven-year-old son John embarked some days ago on a cross-country horse-hauling odyssey—Virginia to California—to include a West Coast summer vacation tour. Since Betsy can be counted on for compelling copy and excellent photography, FHL decided to go along for the ride. Betsy’s earlier reports may be found under the Horse and Hound drop-down menu/Travel.

Beth was the one who first noticed.

Since Utah on the way out, we’ve been in high desert sierra or rocky mountain morraine. It is beautiful out west, but verdant and lush it isn’t.

Yesterday we stopped over at a horse hotel just west of Albuquerque, New Mexico. We’ve grown accustomed to the western horse-keeping style: outdoor covered stall attached to a twelve-by-twelve-square-foot paddock. And that’s all. No communal pastures, not a blade of grass, no group turnout. It’s not wrong or bad, just different.

Betsy Parker

Photojournalist Betsy Parker, her friend Beth Rera, and Beth’s seven-year-old son John embarked some days ago on a cross-country horse-hauling odyssey—Virginia to California—to include a West Coast summer vacation tour. Since summer vacation appealed to us as well, and since Betsy can be counted on for compelling copy, FHL decided to go along for the virtual ride. Betsy’s earlier reports may be found under the Horse and Hound drop-down menu/Travel

I anticipated that today’s adventure at Universal Studios in Hollywood would be so...o...o different, and far less real than last week’s adventure in breathtaking Yosemite National Park. After all, how antipodean....

Yosemite: Natural splendor—one million-plus acres of untrammeled grandeur, the very definition of real.

Universal: Unnaturally gaudy—less than 100 acres, a crush of humanity, miles of pavement, cartoonish reality at the heart of a Hollywood facade.

Still, after you take a good, hard look, you end up with—surprisingly—plenty of the same thing. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Glacier Point, nearly 7,500 feet, rises from the 4,000-foot valley floor. The trail, long and arduous, snakes along its face, but the view from the top is grand.

Photojournalist Betsy Parker, her friend Beth Rera, and Beth’s seven-year-old son John embarked some days ago on a cross-country horse-hauling odyssey—Virginia to California—to include a West Coast summer vacation tour. Since Betsy can be counted on for compelling copy and excellent photography, FHL went along for the ride. Betsy’s earlier reports may be found under the Horse and Hound drop-down menu/Travel.

I will compress the last three-and-a-half days of epic tourism into tidy note form. Any of these subjects is deserving of its own report, if not chapter, and in some cases a volume, but I’ll keep to the strictest of pyramid-style reporting.

 Left Merced hotel midmorning Tuesday to get to Crane Flat in Yosemite—the only walk-in campground within the Yosemite National Park with any chance of getting a site without twelve-month advance reservations. Pretty drive in, through California farmland. We left the valley about forty miles out from the park and began rising steadily, through changing elevation/topography/flora and, I’m sure, fauna. It got downright breathtaking, with valley views and granite outcroppings after we entered the park proper (Yosemite National Park is surrounded by a million acres of National Forest.)

"I want it to jangle."

This morning I daydreamed of my beautiful Virginia home, while I hurried breakfast and went out to ride Kit. I craved having a barn/stable/stall/crosstie to use for grooming and tacking. (Greg’s setup does not include a barn or shed; they use their horse trailer for storage as well as transportation.) I thought of the great footing on my Aiken line down by the Jordan River, while I tried to navigate between rabbit holes and ground squirrel holes in the corner of the field where I tried to work. I had a yen for some soft green clover as I stalked across the pasture through a healthy crop of tall tough native weeds to turn the mare back out (beside her nemesis Heidi, who, by the way, is realizing that having Kit as her one-and-only-friend may be better than having no-friends-at-all.) As I trotted along the cinder path in Greg’s development, I thought longingly of living in my Rappahannock 'hood with dozens of horsey neighbors to ride with on any of hundreds of miles of trails every day of the week.

I went so far as to yearn for Washington DC traffic later as I negotiated the 101 highway from Santa Barbara. With apologies to Yeats, this six-lane behemoth, slouching towards Los Angeles to be born is a rough beast. It wasn’t so much with introspection as longing that I pined for crew cuts and swingy bobs from back east, in lieu of the dreds and rasta hats that prevail here from downtown Burbank to the beach boardwalk.

There are "tonnes of olde towne" aspects to Solvang (much like Middleburg or Clifton), including this pair of Belgians pulling an old-fashioned bus.

There was no dawn today. I woke up with the first tinges of gray to the night sky (4:20 a.m., just like at home), but there was no sun to herald night turning to day. Beth and I figured, separately, that it was going to be a dreary, cool and cloudy day. Greg said something about the marine layer and how it burns off at 10 a.m, on the dot. I ignored him and pulled on a fleece sweatshirt I’d borrowed.

Sure enough, though, by 10 a.m. the sun was blazing, and the weather had turned to that famously California weather: clear, cool-yet-warm, dry (no humidity at all), and light breezes. The trees/flowers/shrubs here are used to persistent drought, so you don’t get the feeling that plants are thirsty as much as you get a feeling that they’re tough.

Ali and Kit (with Betsy) pose in front of Greg Steele's house upon arrival in sunny California.

We had a fun afternoon Wednesday at Alison and Bruce's in Colorado. We took Alison to late lunch at the toney Wisdom Tea House in Monument. She brought us up to date on the Fort Carson Hounds (they're getting some more hounds from the Arapahoe Hunt and are probably going for registered status or farmer pack status with the MFHA) and with her Wuff-It invention (a GPS dog collar that has applications in the hunt field with a virtual fence that can see which hounds are on riot and which ones are out of place when working and running), which is selling well.

 We loaded up Wednesday afternoon and got away by 5:30 p.m. (4:30 PCT). We took the I-25 to I-470 (loop road south of Denver) to the I-70 westbound. We could see storm clouds rolling in from the west, but I pressed on, with no idea how it would affect the trip, the mood, and the muses.

Kit (foreground) and Ali munch hay in the shadow of Mount Herman near Colorado Springs.

After a great day and nice early dinner with Mo and Jeannie Trail in Kansas, we were back on the road at 6:30 p.m., Tuesday evening. Kit and Ali had their dinner on-board (loaded up without complaint) and tucked into their hay as we headed out. They were like travel professionals. We, too. We had it down to a science: packing, loading, stopping every three to four hours for refueling (whether we needed it or not).

At the stops I start fueling, then carry the girls a snack (sloppy wet beet pulp) and refresh their hay and water. Every time I looked in on them they were cool customers, not a hair out of place, happy to eat, drinking well, interested but not loopy.

I'd gotten four brand new tires while in Paola to hopefully prevent more road-heat blowouts. The tire guy said my tires, while in good enough shape for winter hauling (mostly what I do), were not up to the relentless summer trip we embarked upon.

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.