They’ve been popping up in my FB memories for several days now. And, it was not until today…Dec 13, 2021 that I thought about writing a blog about them. Them being the images taken while driving across the county.
It is our 10 year anniversary of the big adventure.
It is 10 years today that my 21 year old son, our four dogs and myself, pulled up to our new home in Cos Cob, CT. It was very dark when we arrived and I really didn’t even know what it all looked like until the next morning. I think it’s a great story, although there are very sad parts to it; but it is worth telling or reading about. So let’s go back to where this all started, for those of you don’t know the story.
December 8, 2011, my son, our nearly 16 year old Jack Russell Jessie, our nearly 15 year old grey Standard Poodle Tilley, our 11 year old blonde Standard Poodle Luke, our 5 month old blonde Standard Poodle Elsa and I head out across the county. We piled into the SUV in Orange County, California and arrived at our destination…Connecticut, 5 days later.
As a professional canine photographer I had decided to do a photo journal as we made our way across the country; but things took a turn for the worst very quickly. My photo book turned into 2 novels (the first I am rewriting) about our journey across the country with our 4 dogs…And Back Again.
I couldn’t fly my old dogs across the country; I knew that they would never make it. The stress would have been unbearable on them; so it was not an option. They all enjoyed riding in the car so I thought, “I can do this.” We rented a U-Haul and hooked it to the back of my SUV, put the the back seats down and filled the back with dog beds. “We can do this, right?”
I thought I could do it, but by the end of the first day as I sat in the hotel room with my head in my hands, shaking my head I said “what was I thinking?” I was shaken to the core by what the first day had brought with it; and the worst had not even unfolded yet. It was in the next moment that I knew we would make it and I could do it because my son told me I could. “You got this Mom,” he stated very confidently as if he knew it was so. I could not have done it without him(Brad); he was my rock throughout the trip from start to finish.
When our dogs age and are past their prime, entering into their very senior years; the ones well past the golden years, everything is hard on them. We had two dogs in diapers, one with severe dementia, the other living with the remnants of vestibular disease. Luke was great, at 11 he was in great shape, so the trip had been pretty easy on him. And Elsa…Miss Elsa, well she proved to be an angel at only 5 months old and she handled herself like an old travel pro.
During our drive across the country we lost our most senior little lady (Jessie). Her age had caught up with her and in the middle of Oklahoma she left us…devastated. Only weeks later our beautiful Tilley succumbed to a ruptured tumor on her spleen that we had not known about. All the details of the journey, heartbreak, challenges are in the books. The first book is being rewritten (I think I’ve evolved in my writing over 10 years).
We had a great deal of support from our social media following. I was reporting regularly to all of my FB groups at the time. Members were interested and so supportive of our journey. Many members remember our trip and comment on it regularly. I’m sure some, even remember the face of poison ivy I also had during our adventure.
Traveling long distance with dogs can be challenging; traveling with old dogs is hard on them, requiring around the clock TLC. Flying our dogs was not a risk that I was willing to take; driving them was the only option to get our k9 family to where we were going.
There were happy moments scattered in all the sadness…
The journey started out negatively and never did turn around enough to make it a good and lasting decision. Little did we know that only 3.5 short months later; we would be turning around and driving back to California with only two dogs. The story is intense, living it was not easy and as it all unfolded and we landed back in California, I had to write. Writing about the journey definitely helped me to deal with it all. I hadn’t had time to deal with it when it was all happening.
Looking back I can barely believe it was 10 years ago. Miss Elsa is now 10.5 which is crazy and little Riggs only entered the story 3 short years ago. Life is a story, each and every one of us has so much to live, learn and share. We all have no idea what tomorrow brings which is probably a good thing. When we do look back, we may want to change the story. But life stories are cast in stone and unchanging; as hard as we wish we could, we can’t change the past.
Happy 10th Across the Country Anniversary Brad, we did it and lived to tell the story.