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Traveling with a Canine Companion

I'd originally planned to bring Lily along to help me out in Homewood. However, despite the extra work and minor stress involved, I ended up being really glad I had her companionship on this solo trip. The stress for her was probably quite a bit greater than it was for me. I am used to taking long car trips, but she is not.

We had very good weather on the way to Pittsburgh. It was sunny and warm, but not hot. Considering that my Jeep has no air conditioning, that was a good thing. I would normally only stop once between Ann Arbor and Pittsburgh (a 300 mile trip), but for Lil's sake I stopped twice. As it turned out, I needed those stops, too, due to the amount of coffee I had drunk.

The "Dog Exercise" pens that the turnpike rest stops offer are pathetic excuses for an environment that Lily would enjoy. They were fairly small fenced enclosures with gravel surfaces. I took her into one, but she did not find it to be very interesting. Across the truck ramp into the rest stop, there was a wide open grassy field. We went over there, and she got to roam and sniff, which is how she likes it.

When I reached Mom and Dad's house, Lily and the Pittsburgh "pups" (see the "Aging Pet" section) got along just fine. That is, until the food came out. Both Lily and Wally are food aggressive, and they got into several tussles. Wally came out of one of these with a small laceration on the skin next to his eye. I learned to keep Lily's food well away from Wally, and never to feed her near him.

Lily seemed comfortable in Mom and Dad's house and yard, yet when I went somewhere she could not go, she whined until I came back. Her whining is not very loud; it's more like a very high pitched whistle. I've never figured out how she makes that sound. Since she seemed so dependent, I was going to have to figure out how to get her up to the second floor, where I'd be sleeping and watching the Summer Olympics in the evening.

The only route between the first and second floors is a highly polished, tightly-wound wooden spiral staircase. Lily was quite unwilling to use these stairs. Although I tried to coax her with dog biscuits, and then later, a juicy hamburger, she would not go up more than a few stairs. At first, she would only place her front paws as high as they needed to be for her to snatch the treat. Once, she placed her back paws on the first step, but then she moved the wrong way and came tumbling down.

It didn't take long for me to realize that Dad had been right - it would be very unsafe for her to use these stairs, and Lily knew it. She is not too hard to pick up, so I ended up carrying her up and down the stairs as needed. She is nervous about being picked up, but she seemed to realize that struggling while we were on the stairs, high above the tile floor, would be a bad idea.

Fortunately, I only had to leave Lily behind once (see the "Bicycling" section). She came with Dad and me on a walk along the Montour trail and with me on a short hike through the Baker and Mayview woods (see the "Hiking" section).

The first night, I set Lil's travel crate up in the bedroom where I was staying because I was afraid she'd be too lonely in another room. This worked out just fine. She never woke me up, and waited patiently while I slept in. The next night, I was the one who didn't want to sleep away from her!

Our day in Homewood (see the "Homewood" section) was probably a bit much for Lily, and the long hot car trip back made it even more unpleasant for her. It probably didn't help that I'd managed to forget to feed her some dinner the night before. When it gets too hot or she's feeling anxious, she does not eat. She was pretty apathetic on the first part of the trip back. She enjoyed the rest stops, but I felt bad that she had to spend so much time in a hot car.

I was glad mostly on her behalf when we arrived back in Ann Arbor. She needed to be back where she belonged, where she felt comfortable. She still did not eat, but she did settle back in pretty quickly. In the next two days, as I recalled the trip, part of me felt nostalgic for the car trip with her, but the other part of me remembered just how hot and kind of awful it had been. I would like to travel with her again, but hope it will get less stressful for her over time.
^ Pittsburgh - August 2004 < Being Home What's your Totem? >