Saturday Soapbox: Get Off My Road!

If you ride me with you will most likely hear exactly that:

“GET OFF MY ROAD!”

Because invariably some idiot gets in front of me and does something, well, idiotic! Here’s one of my “favorites”:

Quite often I am on the road with the truck and the big trailer, loaded with horses.


The big trailer is older, so NOT aluminum.

That means it’s STEEL.

That means it’s HEAVY – even when it’s empty.

Did I mention it’s big? That’s why we call it the BIG trailer… it easily holds 6 “regular” horses and we put 10 minis in it for the Parada del Sol last year with plenty of room to spare. You can imagine how much it weighs fully loaded.

And THAT means it does not stop quickly.

Now I’ve seen this same thing happen with semis… cruising down the road, approaching a parking lot exit or side street where sits a little car, and I know what goes through people’s minds –

“OMG look what’s coming, that thing is HUGE, it will go SLOW, I do NOT want to be behind it!”

So they pull out right in front of the HUGE thing… which (DUH) also stops SLOW! No matter how hard the brakes are applied, that much weight just keeps on moving, a lot faster and a lot longer than most people imagine. More than once I’ve off-loaded a horse with a bloody nose…

I realize that at this point I am preaching to the choir, as most of the people reading this blog already know this, but hey, eventually it might reach someone who doesn’t know (and needs to)!

So please PLEASE PLEASE think twice before you pull out in front of anything big… for the sake of those you are pulling out in front of AND for your own sake, as getting your a$$ slammed by something so big and heavy WON’T be a pleasant experience!