This is the last installment of Octavia Pollock’s blog chronicling her five-day drive across the country with horses in tow.
Maxine and I are in love. With a barn. Specifically, the Morningside Training Farm, The Plains, Va., an equestrian idyll.
The drive passes a rolling cross-country course, then offers views of two outdoor dressage arenas, a show jumping arena and gallop track, laid out around a pretty lake with lush grass and clipped hedges everywhere. The barns are large and airy but not overly manicured Californian fashion, just cool and comfortable. Flags waved on the lawn outside the barn, a sweeping drive allowed the trailer to be turned easily and there was even a red English telephone box.
The lovely Morningside facility.
Eigen objected to leaving, which could have had more to do with the beauty of the place than the loss of his travelling companion. Echo looked very happy to be staying!
We set off reluctantly at last for the final leg of our epic journey, due south to South Carolina. Google maps told us the drive was a mere 7 1/2 hours, which started off feeling terribly short, but eventually felt the longest yet. Psychologically, I think we were expecting it to fly by, but the anticipation of reaching the end meant time crawled.
Keeping up a steady 65-70mph also starts to feel very slow when you’ve been doing it for five days straight. This may have been something to do with the monotony of the view: trees. Virginia is vaunted as having some of the best foxhunting country in the United States, in particular around the village of Middleburg, but we couldn’t see any of it from the I-95 south.
We could have taken a slightly more direct route down the middle, but the interstate is easier with a trailer, given that there are fewer stops. We did see reminders of the hunting world, however, including the Rappahanock River that flows through the Rappahanock hunt country and a Lord Fairfax Community College, presumably named after Thomas, 6th Lord Fairfax, who founded the first modern-style fox-hunt in 1735.
Counting down the miles—going south, the mile markers tick down toward the border—we reached North Carolina with no appreciable difference in view, and despite an increase in the number of bogs glimpsed through the foliage, mist rising, nothing changed all the way through South Carolina. Fortunately, we still had plenty of billboards to amuse, including consecutive images of William Shakespeare and John Wayne, apparently advertising the same nameless company, a garish sign for psychic readings and the giant announcement of Hat World on the border of the two Carolinas.
The skies did give us some exciting panoramas, though, one minute bright blue and the next black. We passed through some spectacular rain, with quarter-sized raindrops and the road barely visible ahead, but with the trailer festooned in lights we fortunately avoided making contact with anything untoward, and were rewarded with a double rainbow as we reached the last state. A good omen, we feel!
South Carolina rainbow welcoming us.
Reports from Paul revealed that the drama he had experienced the day before with flooding and near-tornados was continuing: he got halfway down the drive to the new house when he realized that he could go no further. It was muddy, unmade and prohibitively bumpy for his low-slung UHaul and trailer, forcing him to reverse several hundred yards.
He’s not a race-car driver and BMX champion for nothing: a bit of trailer backing in mud is child’s play to him, but we were extremely glad we weren’t having to do the same with the horse trailer. In true pioneer style, it turned out that the landlords were, literally, making a new road in time for our arrival. Paul needed a tractor to pull his truck up a steep bit, but we were assured that hard core would have been laid by the time we arrived.
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It made for a few dramatic text messages back and forth, which, when read by the deadpan female of the truck’s Bluetooth system, were hysterically funny. She had been a source of amusement throughout the journey, especially when reading out “smiley face,” “winking smiley face,” “laughing out loud,” and so on. Nothing fazed her, whatever text-speak we used to try and confuse her.
Maxine and I whiled away the time with a discussion of what to remember when trailering a horse such a long distance.
It should go without saying that truck and trailer should be fully serviced before you leave, with tire pressures adjusted and electronics checked. The heaviest horse should be on the left to compensate for road camber (which, incidentally, seemed to cant to the wrong side in parts of Virginia), and a half-hour break should be made every 4 1/2 hours.
You don’t need to take the horses off, just stop moving to rest their legs. We walked them before the off every morning, to loosen them up and to give them a bit of exercise that didn’t involve staring at the inside of a trailer.
Make sure you have plenty of water, enough to water them for five hours: five gallons per horse. It didn’t get too hot for us, fortunately, but if the temperatures go over 92 degrees, travel at night, as even with all the windows open, trailers can get very hot very quickly.
Wrap or don’t wrap for a long trip? It’s your own preference.
Take more hay than you think you’ll need—it’s extraordinary how much they can chomp through and horse hotels don’t always provide hay for overnight. Pack a full equine medical kit and an emergency tire repair kit, just in case. For the horse hotels, take cash and ensure all your horse’s papers, vaccine records and so on, are to hand.
The driving itself is nothing out of the ordinary, except that if you’re especially heavily loaded, as we were, stopping takes longer and fuel consumption is higher. Travelling west to east is much better than east to west in terms of gas prices: diesel dropped from nearly $4 in California to $2.44 in South Carolina! Maxine and Paul’s projected gas expenditure was thus far less than expected.
Do leave plenty of time: we were lucky to make our intended deadline as, although the days were much longer than scheduled, we never had any major hold-ups. The morning routine and day stops always took more time than planned, hence the late nights, so do be realistic in planning.
After one last truck stop—gosh, I’ll miss the friendly staff and huge fluffy coffees for $1.60—we left the interstate to wind through the inevitable trees to the entrance to Narnia Farm. Yes, Maxine and Paul are going to live in Narnia, and they don’t even have to use the wardrobe.
Our last truck stop.
Disappointingly, Aslan wasn’t there to welcome us, but the lush foliage dappled with sunlight looked just as beguiling as springtime after the White Witch’s winter. We halted at the driveway entrance, whereupon a large and cheerful couple passed us and waved a hearty welcome, proof of Southern hospitality. A call to Paul revealed that the new drive began 100 yards further on, where the heavy-duty earth-moving equipment had been working all day.
We crept forward, the truck in four-wheel drive, and bounced safely down and up to a tree-lined drive that led to an exquisite little three-sided yard, complete with cupola, weathervane and hanging baskets of ferns. Eigen fairly bounded off the trailer, as if he knew we had arrived at last, and we all breathed a sigh of contentment that the epic journey, across 10 states, was over.
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New home at Narnia.
What an extraordinary five days. We’ve all eaten far too much—no wonder the stereotypical trucker is so fat when there’s nothing but burgers and variations thereof available at truck stops. Mind you, hush puppies, barbecued ham and Chick-fil-a chicken tenders are delicious… It’s shameful how much we grazed, too: hours that would be spent cheerfully food-free when at a desk have to be filled with chips and homemade brownies when in a vehicle.
We’d escaped tornadoes and floods, survived spectacular thunderstorms and stayed on course in the teeth of fierce winds. Nothing had been lost, amazingly, apart from the cats’ litter box that had apparently bounced out of the flat bed somewhere in Texas, Oklahoma or Arkansas.
After the initial puffs of smoke when climbing the hills out of the Californian central valley, the U-Haul van had performed admirably and despite an ominous “tire-sensor” warning in Arizona, Maxine’s truck had been brilliant. The only teeny hiccup had been a close encounter with a gas-station barrier in Oklahoma, but the resulting fender dent will be easily pushed out and the handsome cowboy who helped us reverse made it all worthwhile.
We’d all sustained the odd bruise from manhandling horses and equipment, and I’d managed to cut my finger trying to flush a loo in Virginia (attributed to it being 11 p.m. when my faculties had decided to close down for the night), but otherwise we were in good shape. Maxine and Paul did a fantastic job of driving and both horses reached their destinations fit, glossy and well, which is the most important thing.
Eigen getting comfortable in his new home!
Now I will fly back to San Francisco and leave Maxine, Paul, Eigen, Taz and Izzy to start a new life in the steamy woods of South Carolina. Already, the days spent in our own little metal world, the rest of the world reduced to a series of panoramas glimpsed and replaced, seem like a dream.
The circus has come to rest and we say farewell to the open road.
CLICK to see more photos of the last day’s journey!
Day 1: San Francisco To South Carolina With Two Horses, Two Cats, Two Trucks, Two Trailers And Three Humans
Day 2: Fueled By Truck Stop Coffee
Day 3: One Day, Four States, A Few Tornadoes And Too Many Armadillos
