Back in the 90’s, I spent an entire week between Vegas and Phoenix hanging out with vet school friends, during the entirety of which time I am certain my blood alcohol level never even began to approach zero. It’s been ..read more

There is a town in North Ontario With dream, comfort, memory to spare And in my mind, I still need a place to go All my changes happened there ~ Neil Young, “Helpless” I can remember driving the northern Trans ..read more

There are several theories out there as to why time seems to pass more quickly as you get older, but regardless of the reason for it, the fact of it is so cliché that it is tiresome to even mention ..read more

When you drive from sea to shining sea on the Trans-Canada Highway leaving from one coast or the other, and hit either central Alberta from the west or Manitoba from the east, you hit flat. You hit relentless, unchanging flat for many hundreds of miles. So much flatty flatness of flat that you fall into a sort of flatness-shocked daze. It’s very, very flat. I mean, the Big Sky is nice, and all, but… My uncle used to tell about driving across the prairies, and he would say, “You just start to ask yourself, ‘Did no one think to plant a tree?’” The Trans-Canada flatness leads many travellers with ..read more

On these X-Canada trips, meeting like-minded horsewomen (and, sure, horsemen, but truth to tell, it’s almost always women) is one of the best parts of the journey. Despite the fact that, given the option, the company I choose to keep is generally my own, I nevertheless delight in talking to women who share a similar feeling for the horses they ride and train and care for – and, who, ultimately, share a similar feeling about how life ought to be lived. Anna Maria in Oliver, Pam in Cranbrook, Vanessa in Taber, Dawn in Pilot Butte – these are ladies I first met sans their menfolk, and whom, after ..read more

If you’re not yet convinced that humanity is a pestilence upon this planet, I challenge you to go take a walk or a ride on any trail that is accessible by motorized vehicle, and be dumbfounded by how far into beauty people are willing to drive in order to defile nature with their trash. My short morning ride at Neys, Ontario, was one such reminder of the depravity of the human race. On my various X-Canada travels, my main goal when it comes to Northern Ontario has simply been to plough through it. I love the drive itself, with its miniature lakes and pink and grey rocks and stalwart trees, but ..read more

Bucket List: From “kick the bucket” (to die) + list, hence a “list of things to do before you die”. My summer 2023 stay on PEI was book-ended by two stays at Maritime horse camps, one in Nova Scotia and one in New Brunswick. I’ve never really had a Bucket List, and in actual fact, for reasons I can’t properly understand or enunciate, the expression, much like the terms “Free Spirit” or “Fur Baby”, gives me the ick. For a long time, I have very much wanted to be able to claim that I’ve ridden my horse Pai in every province in Canada, and given my finicky word preference, I’m not sure what to ..read more

Maybe most people are more worldly when I am when it comes to off-the-beaten-path sports, but when I heard that one of the events at the Festival Country de St-Antonin was going to be “bull jumping”, I had exactly zero idea what that might entail. The term initially brought to mind images of cowboys navigating a course of stadium jumps on bulls instead of on horses. But then I wondered, was it going to be some kind of Evel Knievel thing where some guy on a motorcycle soared over a lineup of twenty bulls? Or maybe it would be the same as vaulting, only on bulls? I could have Googled it, but I d ..read more

On my various drives back and forth across Canada, I pass a lot of signs. So many signs. The best ones are the ones that advertise incongruent merchandise (“Nightcrawlers – Apple Pie”), but the most intriguing ones are those that make me wonder, “I wonder what that place is like?” The mystery of the unknown is infinitely alluring. One of those signs was for The Historic Reesor Ranch, which appears along Hwy 1 near the Alberta-Saskatchewan border.  After first spying the sign in 2012, I finally paid the ranch a visit in 2018, satisfied my curiosity, and made some lovely new friends. Anothe ..read more

Back in 2015, when I first met Doug and Rob and Marv and Warren, they mentioned that their private men’s club sometimes included a woman: from time to time, a Marjorie rode with them. A year later, I got to meet the famous Marjorie, and her other half Blair, and have run into them a few more times again over the years. They have always mentioned that if ever I needed a place to stay, they were right off the Trans Canada. When I was planning out some tentative itineraries for this year’s trip, I thought that on the day I left Cypress, I might just give myself a cruise-y day: I’d pack up in a le ..read more