By RON WILSON
Huck Boyd National Institute for Rural Development
“I’d like a non-smoking room for one night, please – with plenty of prairie hay in it.” That probably doesn’t sound like a typical request at your local lodging establishment. It demonstrates the unique needs of someone traveling with horses.
When going across country with a horse in a trailer, that equine can’t just check into the room next to you at the motel. Today we’ll meet a rural Kansas woman who has built a business by hosting equestrian travelers.
Terri Anderson is the founder and owner of the SlideonInn Horse Hotel near Goodland. Terri grew up at Oberlin. Her parents had been involved with horses, but her dad was killed in a tractor accident when she was little.
“I begged my mom for a horse every single day,” Terri said. “She finally gave in. I think she figured I would get tired of doing chores pretty quickly, but it didn’t work.”
Terri had a lot of success showing horses in 4-H. She was especially interested in the reining horse competition, where horses show their athleticism by performing patterns, doing flying lead changes, and making impressive sliding stops.
Terri put horses aside while she attended K-State, came back home, married and raised a family. Years later, her postal service job brought her to Goodland. She got back into horses, bought a reining horse and started competing again.
For years, she looked for a rural property to house her horses. She finally found a place east of town near I-70 and had a metal building built. “I just wanted a barn with a tack room and bathroom,” Terri said. She and her husband, a carpenter and contractor, did most of the inside work.
One day some friends stopped in. They were traveling to Arizona with horses. Terri’s barn made the perfect place to put the horses up for the night. She recognized that other equestrian travelers had this need as well.
In 2016, Terri opened her own horse hotel. She called it SlideonInn, taken from those characteristic sliding stops performed by reining horses. The Andersons added on to the building. Business took off when a Facebook group of trail riders posted about her place.
Today, SlideonInn Horse Hotel has a large metal barn with three bunkrooms, feedroom, and hospitality room with kitchenette, plus rubber matted stalls, pipe runs, round pen, arena area, asphalt parking lot and four RV hookups.
Terri has hosted equine guests from the east and west coast and from Argentina, Germany and Poland.
“From the 10th of June to Aug. 20 last year, there was somebody here every day,” she said. They hosted more than 400 equine guests in 2019.
Riders from the northwest will stop on their way to the big horse shows in Oklahoma. Riders from the east will stop on their way to trail ride in the mountains. One guest is Mustang Maddy, the famous wild horse trainer.
“I get to see every different kind of horse, from retired racehorses to polo ponies to gaited mules,” Terri said. With more people buying horses online and having them shipped, more horse haulers are stopping at the SlideonInn also. She’s even hosted a baby camel.
Terri has become certified to do equine massage using acupressure and red light laser which can benefit the soft tissue of a horse. “Horse people are special,” Terri said. “They’re typically very grateful to find a place where they can put up their horses overnight. I get to meet the most amazing people.”
The SlideonInn Horse Hotel is conveniently located just a couple of miles from Interstate 70, near the rural community of Edson population 288 people. Now, that’s rural.
For more information, look in the Kansas listings at www.horsemotel.com.
If you’re traveling cross country with a horse, where do you put up your equine companion for the night? We salute Terri Anderson for making a difference by responding in an entrepreneurial way and creating a business to meet this need. So, when you’re traveling cross country with a horse, you can SlideonInn to this horse hotel. They’ll leave the hay out for you.