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Home at Last: Galerio’s Fourteen Hundred Mile Journey to a New Life
Home at Last: Galerio’s Fourteen Hundred Mile Journey to a New Life
By: Alexis Arbaugh
“Galerio is a very special horse to me,” Ashley Nelson said. “I galloped and groomed him as a coming 2-year-old.” Ashley groomed and rode him until he was claimed during a race in November of 2019. She had had a special bond with the horse and one day hoped to retire him.
Though Galerio changed hands, Ashley never lost track of him. She followed his career as he moved through Maryland trainers. When she couldn’t make it to the races in person, she watched him on FanDuel. Ashley was able to visit Galerio a couple of times during his racing career, but those precious moments were few and far between.
In 47 starts from 2019 – 2024, Galerio earned over $687,000. He placed in 40 of those starts and won 14 times. His career highlight came in 2021, when he took the John B. Campbell Stakes at Laurel Park in Maryland for trainer John Salzman and owners Bird Moberly and Grady Griffin. That day, Galerio earned an impressive 116 speed figure.
As time went on, Galerio started to have problems with his knees. Fortunately for Galerio, he was with a trainer who gave him the knee surgery he needed. After the knee surgery, Galerio trained and was brought back to his top form. At a claiming race, Galerio was claimed by another trainer who gave Galerio the other knee surgery he really needed.
The knee surgery and time off paid off because Galerio came back better than ever to win his final two starts.
As time went on and Galerio exchanged hands, Ashley knew that Galerio was getting ready to retire soon and was fortunate enough to find his name in the Delta Downs program book. She immediately reached out to every contact she had on the racing circuit but couldn’t get ahold of anyone at Delta Downs. Thankfully, she wasn’t alone in her concern for Galerio. Bird Moberly and Grady Griffin saw Galerio’s entry too and were able to claim him to give him the retirement he deserved.
A month passed with no updates on Galerio, and Ashley grew anxious. She reached out to Galerio’s breeder to ask if he knew where the gelding had gone. He confirmed Bird and Grady’s intentions to retire him, but he didn’t know Galerio’s location.
Then came a Facebook post that changed everything.
“Only a couple days after that conversation, I saw a listing on Facebook from Remember Me Rescue of Galerio,” Ashley recalled. “Within minutes of me seeing this ad, I sent a message to the page.”
Ashley sent photos of Galerio as a young horse to the organization and explained their strong connection. Donna Keen, founder of Remember Me Rescue, responded almost immediately.
“Donna sent me her number right away. I called her and we spoke on the phone. Within a week, I had the paperwork submitted and had secured a farm to keep Galerio at—all I had to do was find a ride for him back to Maryland,” said Ashley.
Shipping companies were either booked or unavailable within Ashley’s timeframe, so she and her boyfriend, Brandon Arias, hooked up their trailer and drove 1,443 miles to Burleson, Texas.
“If you ever look at a map and say to yourself, ‘The United States isn’t really that big,’ boy would you be wrong. The drive took us about 28 hours,” admitted Ashley.
They left at 3:30 a.m. EST on December 31 and arrived at a truck stop just minutes from the rescue at 7:30 a.m. CST on New Year’s Day. “When we did a once-around of our truck and trailer, we found that not only did one of our wheels come off of the trailer, but the entire brake system came off with it,” Ashley recalled.
The couple started making frantic phone calls to local repair shops. Ashley called Donna to explain the situation, and Donna and her husband Dallas offered Ashley and Brandon a place to stay and helped connect them with a repair company.
“One of our wheel bearings got so hot, it welded to itself. The business owner told us that in his 35 years of doing that kind of work, he had never seen a wheel bearing weld to itself. It was a miracle we made it to Texas,” explained Ashley. The repair team also discovered another wheel bearing was about to snap in half. After the trailer was fixed, Ashley and Brandon were on their way to pick up Galerio.
Learn more about Remember Me Rescue Here
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