The Road Warriors: Day Seven
They told me it was worth it. To go to the hassle of dropping my trailer in L.A. To go to the trouble of wiggling east, then back west to find Highway 1. To suck up a whole tank of fuel just for a hundred miles of roadway.
And they were right.
The legendary Pacific Coast Highway earned top marks from our intrepid traveling band for beauty, raw power, force of nature, and inspiration, and not necessarily in that order. I read somewhere that lots of people fly into San Francisco, rent a convertible, and drive the route north to south (the preferred direction). I agree. This was fun enough in a diesel truck, but how much more so in, oh, say, a ’97 Esprit Turbo. Highway 1 is built for sin.
The Road Warriors: Day Six
Gave Greg a lesson on Kit this morning. She was up because we shipped her a few miles to the Santa Ynez Equestrian Center, a club-based training farm where the Steele’s have a membership. But Greg rode well and took my instruction to soften his back (think your seat when breaking a young horse or riding a tough one), forget his lower legs (think about riding a forward-moving Thoroughbred, which Kit is), and to become acquainted with his outside hand (think of a firm handshake.) She went from tense and quick to soft and supple. I assured Greg that he can ride this mare, and she can be everything he wants in the hunt field and more, but he’s got to ride her sympathetically.
The Road Warriors: Day Five
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.
The Road Warriors
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.