Rider Confessions

My car smells like a tack room.

I know that to horse people, this is no big deal, so maybe I should clarify.  We have been putting our cars in the garage at night, because scraping frost off the windshield in the morning is not fun.  My husband is very sweet and less deterred by cold (He can wear shorts and move the cars in the cold.  Not me!), so he has been moving my car into the garage for me.  The first time he did this, he walked into the kitchen and said,

"Did Harley use your car as a bathroom?"

So maybe "smells like a tack room" is not the right description.  You might be thinking of freshly cleaned leather or the subtle, sweet aroma of horse cookies, but this would not be accurate.  Actually, I do not know how to describe the odor in my car, but it is bad and the problem seems to be coming from my trunk.  I own one horse, but one saddle pad is just not enough.  Apparently, the lesson goers at the barn did not think it possible to have so many pads and only one horse, so I noticed that my pads started migrating to the wrong side of the tack room.  Who can resist a quilted, navy pad with silver piping anyway?  I decided that the safest thing to do was to put my spare pads in the trunk of my car, along with the spare tire.  Some of them were clean, others not so much.  Honestly, I did not notice any odor migrating from the trunk until a few weeks ago.  I went to retrieve my trimming rasp (my trunk doubles as a farrier's box) and discovered that it was hiding under a damp saddle pad.  This was strange for two reasons:

1. I had only used that pad once the entire summer and
2. I did not put a damp saddle pad in my trunk.  Come on.  I do have limits.

This means that my trunk must have leaked during rainy November.  I drive an older Honda Civic, which is not exactly an ideal barn car and definitely getting on in years.  A leaky trunk is very likely.

And smelly, now that there are damp pads in there.  Or were.  No, I did not clean out my trunk.  Again.  I have limits and cleaning my car is very, very low on the "to do" list.  The truth is that none of the pads are wet or damp, so they must have air dried during the past couple weeks, slowly diffusing their noxious vapors into the cabin of my car.

My tack room on wheels.  Honda calls the color "Inca Pearl", but I call it "Metallic Mustard".

So let me rephrase.

My car smells like a really, smelly tack room, BUT
I cannot move "clean my car" up on the "to do" list,
because I have to ADD "do horse laundry". 

For the time being I should reframe from offering rides to nonfamily members.  As for family members, a tack room/farrier box/smelly car is part of the territory.  Sorry!

Dressage Civic