When I’m trucking on down the highway, I invariably spend more time listening to Radio-Canada en français, or to the comedy stations on satellite radio, than I do listening to my own music playlists. Only once in a blue moon do I grab my phone and cue up the Tragically Hip, or some sweet Caribbean soca, or a little Eminem. On one particular day on X-Canada East-West, version 3.0, I’d had my fill of raunchy stand-up comedy from satellite. In the wilds of Canada, the radio stations were a hissy, stuttering mess. My audio options were going to be either road noises, my own questionable a capella ..read more

Given that my home address is the temperate rainforest of Vancouver Island, more often than not, on my travels across Canada, I get taken for a chick who has lived her life blissfully unscathed by firsthand experience of Real Canadian Winter. And when you top off my lotus-land postal code with a shameless propensity for February Facebook posts that feature green grass and a whole lotta flowers, even people I’ve know for a couple of decades sometimes treat me like I was born and raised in the Canuckian version of the tropics. My Vancouver Island lawn in February, 2022 Dudes. I grew up wearing a ..read more

“It’s perfect: just when team penning ends for the summer, the fall trail riding season starts.” So said my new friend Kristen as we chatted about all things horse while camping at Spruce Woods Provincial Park in Manitoba. It was the first time I had ever considered trail riding to be a primarily autumnal activity, but in this neck of the woods, it made sense: once the weather turns its thoughts to winter, the bugs tend to get out of Dodge. And the Spruce Woods bugs are legend – when I’d originally been told about the equestrian camp there, I’d been forewarned: DO NOT GO IN SUMMER. In that buz ..read more

Social media is like that colleague who likes to be a dick much of the time, but who has enough charm and who has saved your ass enough times to make them impossible to cut off. A few years ago, the mister and I and one of our gal friends decided to head down to Sedro-Woolley in Washington State for the weekend, to visit a Canuckian buddy of ours who had married a Yank. Said buddy had been talking up all the fabulous trails she and her husband had been exploring by mountain bike, many of which were horse-friendly. Her repeated invites and relentless photo stream of awe-inspiring mountaintop pi ..read more

Where I saw the constellations reveal themselves, one star at a time. Despite having grown up in Eastern Ontario – where every Christmas was Bing Crosby white, and where it was entirely fashionably for us kids to wear a skidoo suit under our Halloween costume, and where every playground and schoolyard had an outdoor hockey rink on which NHL dreams were made and dashed, and where we built snow forts in the yard and where we pelted each other with snowballs on the way home from school, and where temperatures in the -20C to -25C range never made anyone blink – and despite having been (and still b ..read more

Way back in the 90’s, when my mister and I and our university friends were all utter newbs to backwoods camping, Algonquin Park, with its 2,400 lakes located a few hours’ drive north of Toronto, was the epitome of a wilderness experience. We would go up there and rent canoes, driving down remote gravel roads to paddle chains of lakes that required multiple portages in order to hit a final camping destination, far from motorized access. We would cook over an open fire (because that was before we figured out that an unromantic camp stove makes way better sense), and would hang our food from tree ..read more

It is a rare, rare day when I set off from camp with no plan for where I might be spending the upcoming night. I’m gonna say that in six years of extended equestrian road-tripping, that situation has happened exactly once, ten years ago. It is a stressy way to travel, and this control-freak no like. On October 5th, a gorgeous, T-shirt weather afternoon, I left PEI, headed for the farm of my new friend Maureen. On my west-east journey, Maureen had put me up at her farm in Kedgewick, NB, and had mentioned that she also had a place in Miramichi that would be available for horse camping. Given my ..read more

My credo on my road-trips-with-horse-friend – in fact, my credo on any travel adventure of any type at all – has been that if everything goes to shit, at least you have something interesting to tell people. The converse being, of course, that smooth sailing makes for tragically boring stories. The last few days of my West-East journey to PEI – the legs from Massey to Cornwall, from Cornwall to Trois Rivières, from QC to Kedgwick in NB, and from NB to home on PEI – were problem-free and uneventful, and, hence, difficult to spin a good yarn about. Here’s how they went: During my stay in Cornwall ..read more

I have a brass “piggy bank” (more accurately, a “horsey bank”) that I procured when I was twelve years old, during an educational outing at the Canada-Wide Science Fair in Waterloo, Ontario. It was made by Mattias, a Mennonite harness maker whose farm we visited in nearby St Jacob’s. Over the years, I have had a few such fleeting encounters with so-called “plain communities” – the Mennonite and Amish and Hutterite folk who wear clothing that harkens back to a bygone era, and who, to a varying degree, eschew modern technology, and who, as often as not, speak German in the home. When I bought my ..read more

Although I am an Ontario girl born and raised, after living in BC for nearly 30 years, there are things about my native province that I don’t remember until I’m back in the ‘hood. One of them is the heady scent of clover. As I pulled into the driveway at Artimowich Quarter Horses near Dryden and rolled down my windows, the air that wafted in was so sweet it was like inhaling honey. And another one of those things is the bugs. Ontario is a very buggy place. Approximately 30 seconds after unloading my girl at Artimowich and letting her put her head down to graze on the lawn, we were assaulted by ..read more