Because I am going to ramble when it comes to this horse show, I am going to start out this post with a few bullet points of important facts I learned over the weekend.
- If you want to show your horse on a budget, do not go far away. It does not work.
- There are parts of the state of Virginia that are so rural you can drive through them for 45 minutes without encountering a gas station or having cell service. God bless Eisenhower.
- REINFORCEMENT: People have trainers, haulers, braiders, and grooms for a reason. Those people sleep. I am unclear as to whether or not the aforementioned professionals do.
- No one is there to help you once you go through the gate. It is a very good thing to do some work on your own so you can school yourself once you get there.
So, let's begin with a little story about your resident hunter princess, myself. My mother calls me "her snake bit daughter". If you can imagine an obscure way for fate to just cause someone to have a really hard time with something, it's going to happen to me. This is important to keep in mind not just for this series, but throughout the blog. I have had friends ask me how it is that I always have a story to tell, and the bad luck combined with my tendency to be an airhead explain why. It just is the perfect storm of "hold on, you said WHAT happened?"
A congressman wanted to honor my late grandfather by flying a flag over the capitol building for a day in his honor and then presenting the flag to his family. The date for this event changed three times, starting in September. Naturally, last week my father announced that the ceremony would be Friday, the one day of the entire year that it would be most problematic for me. Any attempts to explain this to him delicately were not met well, so I resigned myself to a very, very long day. 6 AM wakeup call, dress up in business attire, makeup, hair, heels, the works. Drive to Orange, Virginia to pick up the feed I realized I was out of when I had packed the trailer and a couple other last minute items. Then head over to the vet to pick up a few medications that I keep with me at the show just in case. Having finished my errands (thankfully horse people are up early and getting all of this done before 8:15 was not a problem), I drove to Culpeper, Virginia, where my sister and I had planned to meet so that we could drive into DC together and use the HOV lane. Henry of course could not be stuck sitting in the truck waiting on us all day, so I checked him into Mountain Run Kennel for the day so that he could run around, and hoped and prayed that he would get plenty of exercise. The staff was as sweet and accommodating as could be, and the facility was a dog paradise, set in the middle of acres of farmland, so I felt good leaving him there. Poor Oliver was not so lucky, since he is not allowed to go in high traffic areas, much less a boarding facility, grooming place, dog park, or anything like that, because he is on a bunch of medications to suppress his immune system to treat his neurological condition. He spent the weekend at VETSS, the emergency veterinary clinic in Charlottesville that has treated him, and received his second round of chemotherapy from Dr. Miller with Virginia Vet Specialists who without question saved his life. I'll do a post on Ollie and his condition later.
Annie and I had been in communication the whole morning, starting when I called her to get her out of bed half an hour after she was supposed to be up, and she was still in recovery from the prior night's sorority date function. To those not familiar with the practices of the greek community, a date function is what fraternities and sororities will have as a social event, usually themed. The idea is that every member of the organization will bring a date (presumably of the opposite gender), hence the title, but I have never seen this actually executed with the sororities. Generally a bunch of sisters will bring good friends who are not in the sorority as their dates, or people will bring multiple "dates" with them, and it basically turns into a big fun theme party that you need to be invited by a sister to. Themes vary, but there will invariably a vast quantity of alcohol, beginning around 8 PM at several pregames, both organized by sisters and of the unorganized, "let's start drinking early and get dressed together" sort. The event ends at 2 AM, and while most people go home at that point, it seems that annie elected to attend a fraternity function that continued past that time. Needless to say, her 7:30 wake up call was received with bitterness and hostility that can only be compared to a terrorist group ranting about the evils of the United States. She also probably should not have been driving, and while I maintain that she would have been under the legal limit, she was not of the same opinion. The combination of sleep deprivation and residual alcohol was nevertheless not a good idea, but the drive to Culpeper from Charlottesville is a straight line on a 4 lane road, so I felt it was manageable provided she drank plenty of coffee and had a greasy breakfast. I had apparently underestimated the prior night's activities, since I had to stay on the phone with her for most of the drive, and she managed to hit a temporary construction sign that was in the median and damage her driver's side mirror.
Despite all the morning activities, we were actually exactly on time according to my schedule, which still had extra built in time for traffic and getting a little bit lost. The trip into DC was not too difficult, and after detailing all the events of the night before and purchasing a whole lot of gatorade, Annie took a long and much needed nap. An uncharacteristic lucky turn of events had me staring across an intersection at my father while I was on the phone with him trying to figure out the logistics of getting past the barricades and into the appropriate capitol parking garage. The ceremony was really lovely, and I had a good time seeing some extended family and hearing stories about my grandfather's influence in the community. I probably should not commit this to writing, but the most interesting part was when we briefly spoke about some political issues with the congressman, which is not remotely in the theme of this blog so I won't go there. Suffice it to say that I left DC wondering if there was any reliable source of information about political events available to me at all, short of living in the district and knowing everyone.
Of course, my plan that the ceremony would start promptly at noon, and that we could then be leaving the district by 1 or 1:30 was completely imaginary. Everything started at 12:30, took quite a while, and lunch was at an actual restaurant. We finally got going at 2:30 and, thanks to what I am sure was comparatively mild DC traffic, the 70 mile drive back to Culpeper took two hours. I grabbed Henry at 5, just before they closed, and began wondering how on earth I was going to drive nearly 6 hours to a show when it was getting dark before I even got to the barn.
I arrived to the barn with the vague memory that last time I was at my trailer, the ground had collapsed underneath my block, but assumed that just meant I might have trouble getting the coupler high enough to get onto the ball, which has happened before and I have been able to handle it. In order to explain the issue, let's first look at a picture of a trailer jack:
The jack basically consists of two metal tubes, one smaller and one larger, and a crank handle that moves the smaller one out of the larger tube, thereby raising whatever heavy object is attached to the bracket. Well, when the ground collapsed, the smaller tube, which was resting on a wooden block, bent at about a 30 degree angle to the larger tube, thus rendering the jack useless, since it would not lower the trailer onto my truck. A combination of banging, cursing, battering the coupler of the trailer with the ball on my truck, and lots of sweat on my part meant that 45 minutes after I initially backed up to my trailer, it was finally attached to my truck. I had also rendered the jack even more useless in the process, and resigned myself to having the trailer attached to my truck until such time that a professional could remove it. Everything was thankfully packed, so the rest of the loading process went smoothly and I pulled out of the farm, with horse, great dane, and all the necessary accoutrements, at 7....
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