Title: The Best That Can Happen: The Grand Trek
Author: Kathleen Schmitt
Publication date: March 2019
Available at: www.thegrandtrek.com'
Stories of a journey of discovery traveling cross-country by Kathleen, her horse, Murphy, and her Boxer dog, Country Boy. Unusual for travel memoirs, it explores preparing for the Trek (including catching Murphy and training Country Boy as a protection dog) and what follows such an adventure. It is an entertaining ramble along America's backroads meeting a very special cast of characters; a humorous and occasionally terrifying roadmap of Americana and pursuing the dreams of one's youth.
My Review
I have a friend that spends much of her day on horseback. In fact, almost every picture I receive of her includes her horse. I thought of her when I picked this read off my TBR pile.
It's a great adventure book. It's about a girl (Schmitt) who loves horses. At a young age, she attends horse-focused summer camps. While in high school she'd worked with a Davenport Arabian horse and jokingly suggested that she could ride a horse from Illinois to Arizona, and from that was born the idea for the grand trek.
Schmitt grew up to take riding training in Britain and Germany. This helped her earn her way through Georgetown University School of Foreign Service by retraining racehorses for hunting and the show ring.
Years later, she did the Grand Trek and people kept asking her to rehash what happened. So, one day, she pulled out the journals she kept while on the trek and began compiling and adding to it and created this memoir.
The trekkers departed from the Lincoln Memorial to hit the road to California. They went the backroads of rural areas paralleling the National Turnpike / Route 40. They passed many farms in small towns. Present in the trek was Jack, a National Champion Trail horse, Murphy a half- Davenport that had spent time in the pasture with cows and two Hackney ponies, and Country Boy, a Boxer dog.
I love dogs so her describing her first meeting with Country Boy and not knowing how to get him into the car was fun. Throughout the read, you can see she had a passion for horse training and for animals in general. It is an engaging read as along the way she meets a variety of people including a blind horse trainer, a coal miner, and a county butcher( retired).
I received a copy of this story from the author. I'm told that the title comes from the quote from Willa Cather: "The best that can happen is to fulfill the dreams of one's youth," which is completely appropriate!