Horsing Around in Julian : Tourist Enterprise Lends Touch of Class, Ensures That Past Is Little More Than a Carriage Ride Away

Rockford prances down Main Street in Julian as if he owned the town, his aristocratic gait winning him the attention of idling motorists and bundled-up tourists.

Rockford and his mistress, Suzanne Porter, are the mainstays of a budding tourist business in this mountain town, which prides itself on remaining in a time warp of the early 1900s before horseless carriages and anti-freeze displaced the horse and buggy on Julian’s narrow streets and even narrower country lanes.

Porter, the owner and operator of Country Carriages, perches in the driver’s seat of a classy black vis-a-vis carriage seven days a week, almost every day of the year, or parks in cramped quarters in front of the Julian Drug Store at the town’s main intersection.

From there, tourists and townsfolk alike can hire the rig for a nostalgic half-hour trot back into a simpler time when wood smoke--not auto exhaust--perfumed Julian’s rustic landscape.

A native of suburban Manchester, England, Porter has lived around horses and loved them all her life. For the past 13 years, Porter has lived in Julian, where she says she wants to live and work for the rest of her life.

Before establishing the carriage business, Porter was working in a Julian apple-pie shop, but it was not her cup of tea, she said.

“So I started to look for something else I could make a living at and that the town needed,” Porter said recently on a cold and windy circuit of the town, her passengers tucked warmly under a goose down comforter.

Country Carriages was the result.

Porter has invested about $36,000 in the enterprise since she started it two and a half years ago, estimating that a like amount of time and money will turn the business into a comfortable living for her and her fiance, Wayne Moretti.

“I’ve ridden horses all my life, and it seemed to me that a horse-and-carriage ride was one thing that would fit right in here,” Porter said.

At $15 for a half-hour ride, Porter has not made a mountain of money, but the horse and carriage has brought a touch of class to Julian that even the anti-tourist residents approve of.

She pays her civic dues by joining the local school’s homecoming parades and by bringing Santa Claus to town in style.

On Christmas Eve, with a heavy snowfall carpeting the mountainsides, Porter learned that even the locals are suckers for an old-fashioned Christmas.

“About 80% of my riders that day were locals. And they loved it,” she said.

“By midnight, it was down to 12 degrees and we were still working,” she added with a shiver.

Winter is not Porter’s favorite time of year. She prefers the long daylight hours of summer, and evening drives under the stars with the carriage top down.

For Rockford and the two other geldings that draw her carriage, Porter picks spring and fall as their best seasons because the weather is not too cool and not too hot--just right for clip-clopping up country lanes and threading through traffic on Main Street.

Over the months, Porter has added to the carriage ride a number of special services, such as dinner rides for overnight guests.

For $20, she will pick up a couple at their local hotel, deliver them in style to a local restaurant of their choice, then return

about an hour and a half later to take them on the regular carriage ride around town and back to their hotel.

She also provides elegant transportation for weddings, anniversaries, birthdays and special events in the smooth-riding, velvet-lined carriage. Because the vehicle is registered as a limousine, riders can bring along their own bubbly or other spirits on the ride without fear of breaking public drinking laws.

Unincorporated Julian is the perfect spot for operating a carriage ride, Porter said, because county regulations on such enterprises are non-existent and no special licenses or inspections are required.

Costly Insurance

But she still must have liability insurance--at $1,200 a year and rising--and a local business license, as does every other merchant in town. She says her carriage meets vehicle safety standards with sturdy hydraulic brakes, rear lights and a large triangular reflective sign on the back to alert motorists to the slower-moving carriage.

The horses never work longer than a five-hour shift daily, but Porter and Moretti put in 12 hours or more.

Porter’s day starts at 6 a.m. with tending the horses and mucking out the barn before harnessing Rockford, Ricky or Tuffy for the business day. Evening reservations often stretch her workday late into the night because nothing stops the tourist flow in Julian except rain.

Moretti helps Porter with the morning and evening chores and spells her on weekends when he does not go to work in Temecula, an hour and a half away where he operates a bulldozer.

His pay keeps the couple in groceries and the horses in high-grade fodder, Porter said, while the profits from the carriage business are plowed back into the firm so that one day the couple can depend on the carriage trade alone to support them.

The first expansion will come this spring in the form of a second fancy carriage and one more horse. Come April, Moretti will drive the second rig on weekends and evenings when business warrants it.

In two or three years, “after we’ve paid our dues,” Porter said Country Carriages should run itself and let her and Moretti take a day off when they feel like it.

As she sat in the driver’s seat, bundled up from head to toe against the winter winds howling down Julian’s streets, Porter confessed that she did have another dream too: “To be in the Caribbean, lying in the warm sand with a mai tai in one hand and suntan lotion in the other.”