6. The reason donkeys have a reputation for stubbornness is because they take personal responsibility for their own safety. A donkey is not going to hurt herself on your say-so. A horse will.
The deal about living with donkeys and teaching them about taking your word about edges

7. Is that donkeys reason. So it's not like you have to teach them to accept each edge forever. But you have to teach them that yes, you're qualified to say an edge of that sort is safe, and they'll take your word for it. And railroad tracks are dangerous for small hooves.

8. So I quit bothering with the tracks and worked on simpler, smaller edges.
A totally green donkey who doesn't take your word for anything will not cross a paint stripe on the ground for you. They won't cross from gravel to grass. That's a line. I've had runaways over it.

9. Missy ran away from me the first time I tried to get her to turn out of the gravel road onto my grass field. Almost level, easy for a person to walk across - she looked at it and said, You're crazy, I'm outta here, and...
She was.

10. If you're training a donkey and she really wants to run away from you, the smart thing to do is let go.
She's a *lot* stronger than you are.
She knows where home is. That's where she is going.
So - it's a long way from there to crossing a railroad track.

10. There is a flat space made of timbers, made so cars don't bump up and down crossing the tracks, and then there is a void about 3 or 4 inches wide and a few inches deep. Where the rim on the railcar wheel rides.
Then the steel rail, another space, more timbers, do it again.

11. If I could force a donkey to cross that, I wouldn't. The damn thing is dangerous. One of her little hooves falls into one of those narrow gaps, it could kill her. She's got to work this out for herself. And she's capable of it.

12. Sydney's pony came from the Amish. He's done this stuff for a living. He crosses railroad tracks ho hum. But his feet are bigger than hers. A hackney Pony is about the same height at Missy, as a large standard donkey, but half again as big in breadth and mass. Bigger hooves.

13. And Missy and I have done a whole lot of stuff together since we last looked at the tracks.
So that's where we went. We slowed, at the tracks, with Sydney's friend Kylie, about 12 I'd guess, driving, and they crossed, and Sydney said "Stop," and Kylie said Whoa, and they

14. Stopped and waited. Missy walked up to the tracks and looked at them.
This particular crossing, the tracks and the road aren't perpendicular. Aren't square. The tracks come from behind to the right, and go ahead off to the left. Virtually any equine is going to look at that

15. And naturally bear left, to maintain forward progress without having to cross that line. It's not like horses don't notice lines, that's a matter of degree.
So, we've already established that we aren't doing that. That is the sort of thing you can learn without crossing.

16. So we land there, and she just looks a bit left, moving just carefully, and I touch the right line, say, Walk on, Baby, we can do this... She hesitates, but she can see Sydney over there, and she knows Sydney, and she trusts Sydney. Sydney tamed her from wild.
She trusts me.

17. You cannot teach a donkey how to do anything. You can't work a donkey body. You have to persuade that donkey that it would be worthwhile to do that thing because you asked them to. Then they figure it out and do it.

18. Watching her explore that surface with her feet as she prepared to cross it was educational and comforting. I saw those cracks as threats to her safety. So did she, but she explored how to work around those hazards, and did so.
The second track was a lesser effort.

19. As I have said here, I hope to minimize or eliminate my reliance on automobiles to provide for my needs. That means I've got to get to Richmond by donkey. My choices are, go a mile by gravel to a 55 mph 2 lane blacktop with very little shoulder, make a left (lane crossing)

20. Immediately go under the railroad tracks, which cross the highway on an overpass, and travel that highway a mile or more, to where the speed limit drops to 45, then later to 35, 25 and the town square.

21. Without going into too much detail, this is a scary proposition.
There are gravel roads going two different directions. One will take you into town where the speed limit is 30. We're good with that, we travel in that environment already, on the gravel. But.
Railroad tracks.

22. Plus, the long gravel into the back side of town is kind of a roundabout way and adds a few miles. When you're going four miles an hour, two extra miles is noticeable.
The in-between gravel goes pretty directly toward town. About 3/4 of a mile away it crosses the tracks.

23. Up some hills, down some hills, past some homes including some of my friends' homes, and hits the blacktop just where the 35 and the 45 meet. Not too scary a spot.
This would be the regular way into town in a buggy.
We went there.

24. All this way Sydney's cart is leading, with Kylie on the lines. We're just walking. It's about the same speed a person who walks a lot, walks. Their legs are similar length to ours, their walking stride pace is similar to ours. There's maybe a cart length between us, mostly

25. After we make a turn, the gravel turns to low speed blacktop, it's a long steep downslope. Paved steep downslopes are a hazard to equines. Pony Hawk is shod, wearing drill-tec shoes which bite into pavement, but she's limited it. She's the farrier, so... And Missy is barefoot

26. Pony Hawk works on blacktop, regularly. Missy mostly works on dirt. And as I said, she's under expert hoof management. I just do what Sydney says they need, which so far is just regular trimming. We discuss options for when she's on the road more.

27. So... When we hit the blacktop, after brief discussion, we headed back towards home.
This means we start off on 45 mph blacktop, headed away from town.
There was an amazing amount of traffic for a Monday mid-afternoon. Sydney was still in front, which meant overtaking traffic

28. Passed me / us first. Missy was solid. She knew what was going on. Cars, trucks, an ambulance (no siren, but they're big heavy diesel trucks and loud) part of the way there is a crummy, narrow shoulder, and part of the way we just got on the lane and trotted.
We're legal.

29. Like Sydney, I was wearing an orange safety vest. My cart has a slow moving vehicle emblem on it, up in a driver's field of vision. We trot in the neighborhood of 10 mph.
Got chilly, trotting west into a west breeze. Warm for December but not *that* warm.

30. It's a whole different world when you see it from an open cart behind a walking donkey. Cars are... Weird. Noisy.
--later