Finally Back Home!

After a few days of recovery I figured it was time to update with the final details of the 'hell tour'.....which really from start to end was genuinely the drive from hell!  Seeing as we couldn't get the truck in to be fixed until Monday we decided to make the most of our stay in Rapid City and rented a car to drive up to Mount Rushmore and the Crazy Horse Memorial, I have to say I've always wanted to take in these sights so although it wasn't a planned trip I'm glad I had the chance as they were incredible to see.  I found the Crazy Horse Memorial to be very interesting, it was facinating to watch the video of the sculptor who started it and how he used to pack the dynamite up the mountainside day after day-made me really aware of just how lazy modern day society has become with all the luxuries that we take for granted every day, hard to imagine how this guy found motivation every day to hike up that mountain all by himself packing tools the whole way.  We took the truck in to the dealership first thing on the Monday morning to get the tires replaced and the alternator fixed...took them two hours to fix the alternator and ten hours to track down and put all six tires on the truck (after taking them off they ended up finding structural problems in two more of the tires so basically I managed to drive from Tennessee to Rapid City with only one half decent tire out of six-I think that's pretty darn impressive!!;)  We left Rapid City at 6:00 that night and made it to Billings, Montana where we overnighted at a very nice jumper facility, we were up at the crack of dawn and on the road again at 5:30am, heading to Libby, Montana to pick up another horse enroute to Canada.  The drive to pick up this horse involved winding up a muddy dirt road before arriving at the place where the driveway was washed out....so we had to drive truck and trailer through a lake up to the bumper to pick up the horse....the excitement never ends!  We made it to the boarder crossing around 8:00pm and this was the only portion of the trip that was easy, the poor lady at customs was so befuddled with the horses and their paperwork that she didn't even bother to look in my passport oops!!  We crossed the boarder in to Creston where we were met with a snow storm passing through so once again we were back driving around 30km up and down the mountain (I was feeling pretty thankful for the new tires at this point in time!).  We made it in to Kelowna around 2:00am and got the horses off safe and sound, I have never been so happy to see Kelowna before in my entire life!!  I had barely been home for two days before my sister in law went in to labour and had a little girl, so I arrived back home to Canada just in time to become and aunt!  Needless to say it has been an exciting week, hence the late post!  I'm back to my regular routine now of riding and teaching, have had a really productive week getting everyone back on track, my young prospect Roz is doing very well, Sylvie had been keeping her fit for me over the winter months and did a great job as little Rozzie is definitely starting to grow up and I am excited to see how she progresses over the next few months, also had some great lessons this week and am thrilled to be back working with everyone and to see that they all did their homework diligently over the winter months and also excited to have some new faces at the barn and in lessons to work with!  I plan to keep this blog going now that I am back home, the posts may be less frequent and will definitely still be mainly about horses, training and my experiences and sometimes I might throw in some other interesting topics along the way (haha be prepared it might get weird but it will always be entertaining!!:)

Never A Dull Moment!!

At the beginning of my last post I made the comment that it would likely be my last post from Florida, for the beginning of this post I am going to make the comment that I HOPE this is going to be my last post from South Dakota!!  So I figured I had better update just in case people start wondering where the heck I am, I promise I AM coming home and haven't just disappeared into the abyss (although that's what it feels like!).  So day one of the journey home began perfectly, we hit the road around 2 am and were cruising along fine, got through the agriculture inspection and crossed into Georgia, thinking life was good and we were making excellent time and then went to pull off to fuel up and bang the truck dies right in the middle of the exit ramp, I tried to turn it over several times and nothing, thankfully there was a gas station five minutes down the road so ran down and got one of the service guys to come up and he 'guaranteed' me that we had run out of fuel....now I'm looking at him skeptically because I never let the fuel guage go below a quarter tank but he assured me that was totally it (okay now I admit I'm no mechanic but I know what a fuel gauge looks like when it's empty:s) so he pumps some diesel in and says turn it over, of course nothing, then he messes around for what seems like an eternity, meanwhile people are screaming at us and honking for us to "move the truck".....right because I thought I would just park it in the middle of the exit and take a nap for a bit, sometimes you have to wonder what goes through people's minds!!  Finally he concludes that he can't fix it and we have to get it towed, now the good news in all of this is that McKenzie who was stabled at the barn with us in Florida was driving behind us with her trailer (we had decided to trailer both Nico and her horse Prinz in my trailer so that they had company to Tennessee so they were driving behind us with their empty two horse trailer) so we were able to get the trailer towed to the gas station and quickly off loaded the horses and reloaded them onto the other trailer (the one bright side to a crappy day!) so we got the truck towed in and they determined there was a problem with the pressure getting the fuel to the engine, they did some work on it and we were stuck in Georgia for the night, we had an interesting meal at a local buffet (O'Neils' Buffet to be exact and you're greeted at the door by O'Neil himself who assures you that it's the best chicken n' dumplins you'll ever have-needless to say there was not a normal sized person in this buffet;).  The next day we got back on the road around 1:00, made it to Atlanta just in time for rush hour and got in to Tennessee where Nico was about 10:00pm.  The next morning we got on the road around 7am heading out for Omaha, Nebraska, made great time in the morning, as we got past Saint Louis we stopped for fuel and pulled back on the highway just in time for it to be closed due to accident, we had to be rerouted off of the interstate and naturally the guy gave us directions that took us down all sorts of tiny side roads and twists and turns, finally we rerouted to the interstate and arrived in Omaha around 10:00 yesterday night.  We got up and hit the road this morning at 8am, heading out on our 'easy' day to Rapid City, South Dakota, making excellent time, as we pulled in to Rapid City (a full 45 mins ahead of schedule) I stopped to top up the fuel and noticed a nail in the back left tire of the truck....great......then I walked around to the other side of the truck and both the rear and front tires were completely stripped to bare......even better!  We had just enough time to rush Nico to the barn and get him settled for the evening before zipping in to Wal-Mart to see if we could get the tires replaced, as we pull in the battery light all of a sudden pops on as well.  So to make a long story short.....something in the alignment made the tires strip completely unevenly and NO ONE in Rapid City carries 19.5" tires so we are stuck waiting for new tires.....and......the alternator is in the process of crapping out on us so that will have to be fixed before we can hit the road, yikes!!!  Now the saddest part of the whole story.....I had the truck serviced last Friday before the big journey, a lot of good that did!!!  So all in all I really thought this road trip was worthy of having its own blog post as it's definitely one for the record books, so I am now on a forced holiday in South Dakota until Monday and hopefully will be back on the road as soon as possible!:p