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Big and Beautiful!


Okay, so this doesn’t have anything to do with dressage, but my BIG DEAL this week was the Budweiser Clydesdales.Anyone who appreciates beautiful horses has to take advantage of seeing the Clydesdale hitch up close.They were the headliners of a “Week of the Horse” parade in neighboring Landrum SC.

The Budweiser Clydesdale hitch, up close and personal.

With the parade due to start at 6 p.m., I thought to get there by 4:30 to watch the tacking up.Wrong.With parking already nearly impossible, it was so thick with crowds that I couldn’t so much as see the ears of a Clyde, even as tall as they are. There were three tractor-trailers for the Clydes and their hitch, plus another for the Wells Fargo hitch that lead the parade.

I left to get a good curb seat on the half-mile parade route, where people ended up six-deep in spots.Basically, I sat on hard concrete for 2 ½ hours for two glimpses of the Clydes, since the route looped back, but so did thousands of other people.I ran into a lot of my local dressage friends.

Afterward, the Landrum police couldn’t begin to estimate the size of the crowd, and it was reported that the highway exit a mile away had been jammed.There’s an interesting thought, a traffic jam caused by horses, not just cars.My Northeast friends can’t believe that I no longer own an EZPass since I moved to this southwest corner of North Carolina three years ago.We don’t have traffic jams, just horse jams I guess.

It was worth the 2 ½ hours on the pavement curb, made easy since my Corgi puppy was passing out kisses to hundreds of her new friends.I saw the Clydesdales up close in a stable setting 30 years ago, but seeing the full hitch right up close is amazing.And they ARE huge!

My second favorite part of the parade was a local woman driving a mini donkey with fluffy booties, just like the Clydesdale wannabe in the beer commercial two Super Bowls ago.

A “Clydesdale-in-training.”

If you want to see what a rural town looks like when the Clydesdales visit, click this link: http://erikolsenpictures.com/blog.html

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