Broke horse, broke trailer

This weekend I got out to another regional park, Tilden, to ride with a new friend K and her friend E. K is an elegant, classy, former dressage rider who is interested in possibly slumming with us grimy colorful endurance folks, and she's bringing a green little Arab along on the trails.  E was riding another green Arab, not her usual mount, so we had a long slow afternoon ride.

I'd been planning on meeting them in the park's parking lot (man, that sentence looks really funny, but I can't think of any other way to say it without it being really clunky), but it was absolutely packed with cars.  There were like three major kid-and-dog birthday parties and a bunch of random people.  I drove into one lot looking for an exit, realized it dead-ended, and backed out of there like it ain't no thang.

Side note:  California drivers are just as idiotic as you've heard, guys.  I had people DRIVING AROUND ME as I was backing up.  Pugs biting my tires.  Dads leading toddlers straight behind me. Ugh.

But eventually I got turned around, and down the twisty road to the even twisty-er private driveway, and I found a nice pulloff and unloaded my phenomenal horse and got her ready to ride.  I accomplished all of this without any drama.  Because we're pros.

Isn't Gino cute?

We headed up to the park, past the miniature steam train and the birthday parties and the dog-walkers. Dixie was all "ain't no thang" about everything except the horse trough, which she refused to approach. Keepin' it classy, mare.  We wound our way up into the park, across a few roads and up and down hills, over a little spillway bridge and down the side of a dam.  I finally remembered to take some pics after that.

 Dixie was such a good girl all day.  The green geldings were silly and green, and Dixie didn't pick up on it at all.  She was just unflappable.  I'm so, so glad I put in the time on her.

Eventually we curved east and started climbing up onto the ridge to head south to the barn.  The footing got a little worse - I hadn't booted Dixie, and I should have, but we weren't going fast.

It was a really gorgeous day, maybe in the 70s and sunny.  I know, literally everyone who doesn't live on the California coast is really jealous, but them's the breaks - the weather here is awesome.  

We climbed a hardened fire-road for at least a couple of miles.  K, when you can trot up that and have horse left, you're more than ready!  

There were views from the ridge.  Mt. Diablo to the east:

And San Francisco to the west:

You can't see the Golden Gate Bridge through the fog in the strait, but you can see the city, Yerba Buena Island, Treasure Island, and the pretty new span of the Bay Bridge.  Yerba Buena is the hill in the Bay; Treasure Island is the flat bit of land just to the right. 

I like that one too.

We looped on back to the barn and I left Dixie at the trailer with a bucket of EGM pellets.  I chatted with K and E as they groomed their horses for a while, then realized that I had to hurry to get home and feed Cersei and the cats.  I trotted back to the trailer, stowed the buckets, yanked the rope off the hi-tie, and loaded Dixie.  Then I threw the stool and lead in the tack room, locked up, and drove away.  

(You probably know where this is going.)

I got up the drive to the road and started for home.  A woman on a horse yelled "your hi-tie is out!" as I passed her.  I yelled "Thanks!", muttered "fuck," and pulled over.  

Yeah, I crunched the shit out of the hi-tie.  

The pool noodle betrayed me.  It's supposed to be nice and visible so I notice the hi-tie's out before I hit a tree.  However, I will say that it sacrificed itself to save the precious fiberglass.  The hi-tie isn't even scratched.  

The guys at Barstad & Donitch are gonna fix it for me.  

I'm not embarrassing myself by telling you this just out of some sense of masochism.  (Although I'd love to hear your biggest facepalm I-can't-believe-I-did-that trailer mishaps!)  I want to talk about the actual stupid mistake I made.  

It wasn't "driving away with the hi-tie open."  It was "not having the right mental checklist ready."  

It's really important to have an unbreakable routine for a lot of things.  I have a really good one for actually hitching up the trailer, and I won't let anyone disturb me while I'm running through the steps of hooking up every bit of the trailer to the corresponding bits of the truck.  I have a pretty good one for checking my tack before I untie and mount up.  But I don't - or I didn't - have a good one for packing-loading-leaving.  

Everybody seems to have an irrational or quasi-rational phobia about trailering - I can't back this thing up, or what if the hitch comes off the ball, or what if the safety chains break - something that's unlikely to happen that you can't help but double and triple-check.  Mine is that the horse door will come open.  Since Dixie rides loose and backwards (and she rides so well that way I just can't change it), this would be epically bad.  I triple check the door latch.  Sometimes I don't make it out of the driveway before I jump out and check it again.  I get fixated on that latch.

And that's what I did wrong on Sunday.  I made 100% sure that the door was latched, and I wasn't thinking about anything else, and I didn't have a mental checklist to run.  

I think it should go like this, every single time no exceptions:

• stow the tack
• stow the loose junk, like hoofpicks
• stow the buckets and haybag
• tie the horse to the trailer
• stow the hi-tie
• stow the stool
• load the horse
• stow the lead, lock the tack room
• check the horse door one last time
• drive

If I always do that in that order, I won't have to visit the trailer mechanics nearly so often.