Celebration On Wheels, Destination Unknown

It's good to learn new things.

Especially things you never imagined you'd do, ever.

Random example: after years of visiting Hawai’i (and dreaming of living there, as most visitors do), we actually did something about it.

If that sounds simple (and maybe even easy), it was not.

But at some point during the US pandemic experience, we had a mutual epiphany: we’re not guaranteed another day in this life. All the things we’ve been wanting to do for years? We should do them now, before it’s too late.

A (very) busy year later, we found ourselves living on the Hāmākua Coast of the Big Island.

A couple years after that, horses entered our lives. I mean, they didn't just wander into our yard—we went out and got them. What—doesn’t everyone who moves to Hawai’i start an equine rescue at some point? [points to the “Things we always wanted to do, but had no realistic prospect of doing them” sign.]

Almost all of the horses (and two mules) came from kill pens on the mainland. Every one arrived with a mystery bag full of trials and trauma—learning how to speak their language and listen to their stories has become a mandatory and lifelong project-in-progress.

Equally important are the complementary skills we never imagined we'd need, but now can’t function without. Among the many:

* How to dress for doing chores in a hurricane

* How to calmly drive a truck pulling a horse trailer with actual horses inside

* How to load an agitated horse into said trailer at a bustling airport

Full disclosure: the last two still make me anxious, every time. These vulnerable creatures found their way from a kill pen to a sanctuary to an airport on the mainland to an airport on an island in the middle of an ocean—and somehow ended up with me as their Uber driver? [checks travel itinerary—nope, nothing there about that].

The universe relentlessly has a way of sending us in directions we never imagined. Our job is to be as ready as possible for [gestures at everything].

It’s an impossible task, we’ve learned—but it’s what we signed up for.