Return Day in the First State

Down in Delaware, they have this fantastic tradition called "Return Day" on the Thursday following the Tuesday election in Georgetown, the county seat of Sussex County. With its origins dating back to 1791, and including such rituals as the ceremonial "burying of the hatchet" by the county chairpeople of the Democratic and Republican parties (the hatchet arrives via horse-drawn hearse) and the horse-drawn parade of winning and losing candidates, Return Day is quite the civic festivity. You can get your fill of Return Day at its official website: www.returnday.org.

Lest anyone forget that Joe Biden was not only elected Vice President of the United States but also reelected to the United States Senate, we have this photographic evidence:



I cannot tell you how ***happy*** this photo makes my die-hard-Democratic, equine-loving, top-hat-wearing, carriage driver self. And look, the VP is going green already! Tee hee!

Photo 1 from returnday.org. Photo 2 from flickr by Wilmington University.

What's black and white and red all over?

This photo of BB at his morning toilette, that's what! Even the tourists dressed to match his spiffy red lead rope.

Now THERE's a bourgeois tour!

Here's a fortuitous follow up to my recent post regarding whether or not horse and carriage tours were "bourgeois."

The answer is no.

This is the vehicle to take a bourgeois tour:




Photo 1: Chip is not bourgeois. The bus is.
Photo 2: Carriage 17 frames up the strange Canadian tour bus. Their tour bus name tops previous "silly tour bus name contenders" such as "Wombles," "Lamers" and "Kewl Tours."

Bubba the Round

"Is it OK to work a horse when it's pregnant?"

"Well, up to a point, but HE's not pregnant."

"When's she due?"

"HE's not. HE is just really, really fat."

Bubba barely fits in the shafts. He's one half of the hypothetical good ol' boy team of Bubba and Jimbo. Bubba and Jim are about the same height. But they are NOT the same width.

You wanted a Proletarian carriage tour?

(Pete is not advocating Marxist revolution.)

Recently, a mother and her two young children came up to me downtown wanting to pet my carriage horse, the amazingly cute and handsome Pete.

She said that they would love to take a carriage ride, but, unfortunately, her husband had vetoed that idea, claiming that carriage rides were "too bourgeois."

I shrugged, but I wanted to add that if anything we were "too aristocratic." After all, the vis-a-vis is the carriage of royalty.



Carriage rides might also be construed as rural or agrarian or even "developing world."



But "bourgeois"? Really? BOURGEOIS?

A tour by minivan is "bourgeois."

Pete thinks these are "bourgeois":



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Photo 1: (by thedrafthorse) Pete on the Street.
Photo 2: The Queen's Royal Carriage (Though I guess it's technically a Landau...but the passengers sit face-to-face: Vis-a-vis!)
Photo 3: This lovely horse in Georgia by Henning(i) is courtesy of flickr's Creative Commons.
Photo 4: (by thedrafthorse) Pete surveys the quack attack.

Maybe it was the big fancy truck...

Teddy in his sleek gooseneck trailer.


What makes us so blind that we cannot see what is right in front of us? Why do we let our prejudices and our past color that which stands before us, bright as day, bright as a white horse whose ancestors carried knights and kings?

I know that I spend an awful lot of time on this blog complaining about stupid things people say about me and the carriage horses, but sometimes they're just so unbelievably, entertainingly stupid they deserve to be retold here.

A couple of weekends ago, 76 Carriage horse Mike, fellow driver Kelly, Uncle Bill and I had a wedding to do in extreme South Philly. The job was too far for Mike to walk with the carriage, so he walked downtown to work, did a nice half hour tour for a lovely woman from Australia, and then was loaded on the gooseneck trailer for a short ride down to Oregon Avenue. Anyone who has ever been to South Philly knows that finding a place to park is no easy task, and it is even more difficult with a 30-foot horse trailer. So, we finally found a place near 10th and Bigler, right near Citizen's Bank Park (the Phillies were in town that afternoon).

We had the rear doors and tailgate down once the carriage had been unloaded and were re-harnessing Mike inside.

A couple of guys from the neighborhood pull up in a pick-up truck and strike up a conversation with Uncle Bill.

"That's a beautiful horse," they say, pausing to appropriately admire Mike's 2000 pounds of Percheron perfection. "So beautiful. Gorgeous. Very well taken care of."

Uncle Bill agrees. "Oh, very well taken care of."

They continue. "Yeah, not like those carriage horses you see downtown."

Oh, the look on their faces when they were told that Mike, the consumate carriage horse, had just come from work at 5th and Chestnut. Disbelief. Shock. And then, embarrassment. Humility.

And then they hit the accelerator.

By the Arc de Triomphe

by the arc de triomphe
Originally uploaded by span

Yet another carriage sighting in Paris by way of flickr. This time, we find ourselves in the middle of the Mother of All Traffic Circles--the Place d'Etoile. (One of the pluses of climbing to the top of the Arc de Triomphe, in a addition to the view, is watching the motorists below navigate the 8-lane, 12-street intersection below.)

Going around even the outside of Logan Circle with a single horse at a walk makes my lines a little clammy. I can only imagine taking the Place d'Etoile at the trot with a pair.

The photo raises a question, though. It shows the carriage and newlyweds on the innermost lane of the traffic circle. How many times did they have to go 'round before they got out? Did they end up braving the Champs Elysees?

Those beautiful black horses with their long team pole seem to be saying, "Attention, Monsieur SmartCar! Nous sommes les heritiers des palefreniers du Moyen Age. Nous vous percerons d'un coup de lance!" ("Look out, Mr. SmartCar! We are the descendants of medieval warhorses. We'll run you through with our lance!")

Happy circling!

There you have it, folks...

IMG_1328
Originally uploaded by inaki_goni

A horse and carriage giving tours in Paris.

But wait, flickr reveals more...

IMG_3207
Originally uploaded by oxfraudm

Here's another image of the horse and carriage on the Champs du Mars... Looks like a Shire... and it DOES like look they're giving tours.

My sympathies are with the driver dealing with the bleak midwinter. She's just got to make it a few months, and then it will be April in Paris. Mmmmmmm...

Just too cool.

Mais, OUI!

Horse and carriage
Originally uploaded by FL370

I was surfing through pictures on flickr.com, and I did a double take just like the lady on the bench, here, but that carriage is absolutely. right. where. it. belongs.

I don't know who the people driving the carriage are, or what they're doing on the Champs de Mars, or whether this is one-time or regular thing, but I do hope it's a regular thing. It would be so nice to welcome more horses back into Paris. (And, it would be a positive thing to welcome carriages into the enlightened City of Light just as the PETA nuts are trying to ban them in NYC...)

I rather fondly remember studying abroad in Paris in 2000, and on the early mornings in the spring that I rode the 89 bus across town, getting stuck behind the ponies in the bus lane on the rue Vaugirard, on their way to work in the Luxembourg Gardens.

Eh, bon...

Un tour en caleche autour du tour Eiffel?