Long time no post, but honestly? what else is new. I’ve done very little with the horses since I’ve been home because… trailer problems. But hopefully I can start moving forward. Or I can if the weather decides to not be 1041293484012480192 degrees with 1021384092348% humidity.

I had plans to get a ramp added to my trailer. This should have been a short process. The ramp was ordered at the end of April. And arrived at the end of May. Except we waited. And waited. And waited. I could go into details, but I’ll save you the saga. The long and the short of it is that any delay that you can think of happened. Births. Deaths. Floods. Farming. And everything in between. I’m not actually exaggerating. Maybe not the flooding, but I saw floods so… But everything else did happen.

I finally dropped my trailer off 2 weeks ago. And picked it back up Friday. So the actually work didn’t take very long, but the wait? Forever. But it’s done, it’s here, it’s over budget, but whatever.

What they did was add the ramp to the outside of the swing door. It was basically a ramp kit directly from the manufacturer, though the welder made some modification as he saw fit. Primarily, he added some extra stabilization so that the ramp doesn’t make any noise when closed and I’m driving (you’ll see in the photos that the closures on both sides don’t match — the kit only had one side, he added the second, simpler side and modified the first to make it more secure). I can also adjust the height of the ramp in the future if I find it’s too steep with an easy modification though I likely won’t. The step from the ramp to the inside of the trailer is flat and the welder did a great job.

And a better view of the closures:

So the big question, does Cairo load? And for that matter, what does Nay Nay think?

Nay Nay loaded fine. He was a touch sticky, but he got on with encouragement the first day several times. Second time? Loaded without hesitation. I’ll start self loading soon. As for Cairo, he immediately stuck his front feet on and then refused to go further and would step back and pull to the left. I was fine with backing up, I was not fine pulling left. Once we had a rather major discussion about pulling left, he proceeded to walk on the trailer 5 times in a row. Fully on. He had zero issues backing off (this was all in 25 minutes). Second session? Immediately walked on. He loaded with the divider all the way open (so he almost had a full box stall), with it closed, and on both sides. No issues. He will also learn to self load next.

I’d say this modification was a huge success!