Saturday, January 21, 2012

Question About Traveling in Winter With Horses

I've got a question for my more experienced horse-friends out there in the blog world.
This is as far as I got when I first started writing this post on January 21. It is now January 26, and we have changed our minds about the whole thing. But I am going to go ahead and finish the ost because I am curious to hear other horse-owners' views on this.
My brother lives in the beautiful North Woods of Wisconsin. He met some people up there who have horses. Of course he told them about his sister and brother-in-law living in Indiana with horses. Before too long we found ourselves in e-conversations with two different people up there who graciously and generously invited us to come up for some riding. They both offered their barns for boarding our horses (even had a little friendly competition between the two of them to try to "woo" us to their particular barn!). We were excited about the prospect of riding in the North Woods. We made plans to go up there over Memorial Day weekend 2011.
Then John got a temp job, and we could not go....it was disappointing, but the job was more important. So we put those plans on hold.
The temp job has come to an end, and we were toying with the idea of going up sometime in February to ride. We love winter riding, and it is just beautiful up there in winter.
Which brings me to my question......
It being about an 8 hour drive from Northwest Indiana to North Woods Wisconsin, and considering in February temperatures could be low -- anywhere from 20 degrees to Zero -- would it be too hard on the horses to make the trip?
Here are a couple of photos of our trailer. They are not the best pictures, but at the moment I am to lazy to go to the upstairs comptuer where there are better ones stored. But this gives you the idea.
We thought about blocking off the open space on the sides, and on the door at the back if the weather was severe. We thought we could also blanket The Girls.
But in the end we decided it would not be worth the risk. I would never forgive myself if one of them got sick from being too cold on the trip. Even though it has been a really mild winter around here so far (contrary to all the predictions that the Chicago area was going to have the worst winter ever in 2011-2012), it would be our luck the Arctic blast would happen right when we were making the trip.
So we will plan our riding trip for Spring.....