One of the main catalysts for my camping adventures were as I mentioned in a previous post, globetrotting horse riding holidays.
I’ve been lucky enough to go on the Kimberley ride WA and Glenorchy back country ride NZ, the reason I’m mentioning these rides is you get to fill in a questionnaire on what kind of horse you want to ride?
Forward?
Plodder ?
What is your experience?
Through this process I found that the kind of horse I wanted to ride on a holiday wasn’t necessary the kind of horse I had at home. This started me on the journey of reassessing how I wanted to spend my hours in the saddle.
Enter stage left Sergeant, sarge, barge who’s previous name was jimmy, unfortunately jimmy was my grandads name and he was a d*ckh*ad so the name had to change.
Sarge is a camp drafter but has had a change of pace joining the Hartwell team, I had a lengthy must have list when shopping for my next ponio and a longer list of all my idiosyncrasies which soon whittled down those horses would be suitable for this crazy lady.
So apart from the tolerant husband, Sarge is the main man in my life. He has taken to this pace of life really well and is one pampered ponio.
Now our rig 🙂 well the one I have used for 2020/2021
Maude the Mercedes is a 2006 ML320 she doesn’t look that old but I was drawn to the Mercedes for the following reasons
- Tow capacity – 3500kg
- V6 turbo diesel, tows like a demon
- Low kms 140k
- Price $13,000
- Automatic and an easy drive not too big to be a daily driver
- Lots of space for passengers and all my camping gear
Ivan the Imperial is a 2016 Imperial 2 hors angle load with swing out tack box, front storage
We have made some modifications to the float, recently moving the front bay back partially back to allow room for a bed and storage for camping gear. As I only take 1 horse away with me this allowed for a larger back bay of the float over the axle and the ability to not have to move my bed when we head off on day trips.
I’m lucky that the tolerant husband is also a handy husband. he made this set up for me. The bed is an old futon couch frame, these are a handy cheap alternative with lots available second hand for free or next to nothing. We have also used these for gates in our walk in walk out yards, handy to recycle. He did a simple mounting on the front panel with the panel resting on the front shelf it was a secure bed for putting my swag on to sleep.
The other adjustment was the installation of a addition padding to protect Sarge from the existing fitting on the rear wall where the second partition was normally fitted, this again was a simple and cheap solution.
It took us awhile to get to this set up, I had also used a roof top tent on Maude and a camp stretcher tent within the float but the bed on the divider was the way to go, it allowed me to shut the whole float up and have a chemical toilet in there for those nighttime toilet habits.
So we consider this set up the winner for camping with horses utilising the float.
Also included on the float was the following items
- draw bar mounted toolbox with kings battery pack within, this was charged by a solar panel, we used this to run the engel fridge, charging phones and running 12volt shower
- 8 double yard panels for those trips where you don’t have access to yards or paddock
While I am off galivanting with Sarge, the other herd members at home consist of Sam (tolerant husbands) stock horse and Doug our grandsons’ shetland pony
We are also blessed to have another long serving herd member is Archie who is a quarter horse x he lives off property with a lovely family but we borrow him for Light Horse activities like Anzac day
Hope this gives you guys a little bit of information as to what we are working with on these trips we have done during 2020/2021.
Thanks for reading now onto the adventures.
Hartwellshavehorseswilltravel
Hartwells: Have Horses, Will Travel 