On the July 4th holiday, Laura and Julia went horseback riding in the morning. I had hurt my back at work, so I stayed home. They had been gone for a while, when Laura called me and explained that Cleo had a serious cut in her leg and I should call the vet while they load her and haul her over there. Luckily they were only about a 10-Min drive away from the vet hospital. So I called the vet’s on-call emergency number and then I drove out there, too.

Cleo’s cut was pretty bad – a 3-inch (10-12 cm) long gash in her right hind leg, down to the muscle tissue, with blood all over her leg. The vet tranquilized her, cleaned the wound and stitched her leg back up. After that, Cleo had to be on “stall rest” for two weeks, and so we fixed up their run-in shelter as an improvised stall. We had already set up a nice fan in the shelter and Wally and Cleo often spent the hot part of the day next to the fan. So they did not seem to mind too much having to stay in there. Julia spent a lot of time taking care of Cleo, cleaning her wound and walking her.

(truck trouble below …)

After two weeks we took Cleo back to the vat to have the stitches removed. Wally rode along for company. The vet was happy with Cleo’s progress and after 10 Minutes we were on our way back home. Right after leaving the vet’s office, I noticed the truck acting odd, revving high and loosing power at the same time. A couple of miles down the road we coasted to a stop in front of a fire station. Transmission problems.

We unloaded the horses and found a nice place behind the fire station for them to graze. Laura spoke with the office lady at the station and I called the auto club. While we were waiting for the tow truck, I unhitched the trailer and Laura called a friend to see if she could come with her truck to tow the horses back home. That is the main downside of a gooseneck trailer: it’s hard to find someone to bail you out when you’re stranded because so few trucks have them. Lucky for us, we have a friend who has one and does not live too far from where we broke down. So while I rode into town with the tow truck, Laura, Sam and Julia brought the horses home safely. Big thanks to the fire fighter who parked his fire engine in the right lane of the 4-lane highway to force traffic to give us (and our horses) some space!

So now the truck is in the shop getting the transmission rebuilt to the tune of $2,500.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 25th, 2012 at 1:19 pm and is filed under Go figure, horses. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.