Have Dog, Will Travel

Right now, I'm watching River doing an interpretive dance with the ancient plastic riding toy that my mother got for visiting grandchildren.  It's all very dramatic, watching as she lifts the seat, collapses to the ground, and rolls around artistically in the fur embedded in my mother's living room rug.

*PAUSE TO SAY:  YES, MAMA, I KNOW YOU CLEANED THE FLOOR YESTERDAY.  IT WAS A THING OF BEAUTY AND LIGHT.  IT'S ALL THE FAULT OF THE DOGS, WHO HAVE SHED ENOUGH IN THE PAST TWELVE HOURS FOR US TO CREATE A COTTAGE INDUSTRY BASED AROUND YARN WOVEN OF DOG FUR.*

Frodo made his first trip to Cowtown yesterday.  Let me just go ahead and say that in the past, the NotHannah family has not been a family that travels with dogs.  I mean, I understand that there are folks who go everywhere with their pets and who have separate bags for them and passports and special collapsible dog bowls and feedoodles for them and I think that's spiffy, but we have never been that type of family.  However, it occurred to us after we paid the bill for boarding the pupple and our heads exploded that perhaps we needed to rethink the whole "we travel with dogs" thing.

Now, usually when there's a gathering at the 'rents' home in C-town, Heath and Kelly bring their two dogs, who are large and lovely.  BUT my parents' yard isn't fenced and everybody generally wigs out over the dogs going outside, so the dogs are inside all the time and since Mama adopted Carlie, the ginormous and awesome Lab mix and H and K got another lab, well, that's just a whole lot of dog for Frodo to deal with on his first overnight travel trip.  It's a whole lot of dog for anybody to deal with, let alone a beagle who might most delicately be referred to as "highstrung" and who is used to being outside a good bit of the time. But, both disappointingly and encouragingly, Heath and Kelly couldn't make it this weekend, so we were only going to be visiting with Carlie.  Accordingly, the CRV was loaded up, the pup installed, and we headed north.

First was a stop in Nearest Largesh City to pick up a backdrop stand and kiss the world's cutest new nephew.  Frodo romped around and whined at the dog next door.  But he was okay with getting back into the car and the interstate.  About ten minutes down the road, Jeffrey looked a little peaked and I asked him if he was going to barf.  Jeffrey isn't always awesome about telling me how he feels, and he really didn't want to stop playing his DS.  A fairly aggravating conversation followed in which I dragged from him finally that perhaps he was a bit hot in the backseat with the sunshine pouring down on him.  So we pulled over so I could could rig up a shade with his blanket and we got back on the road.

About ten minutes later, I looked in the backseat and noticed that Frodo was looking a little peaked.  (Hang on.  You DO know that this is pronounced "PEEK-id" with a thick Southern accent and it means "ill," right?  Mkay.)  I don't know if you're familiar with beagles, but I'm pretty sure there is no dog who can look quite so peaked as a peaked beagle.  I think the only way he could have made himself look more miserable was if he had painted himself a delicate shade of green.  Roughly fourteen seconds after I said something like, "Frodo looks awful," he backed me up by barfing all over the floor of the backseat.  Loverly.  We pulled over AGAIN and Will ran inside for paper towels while I let Frodo walk around the side of a shady-in-a-country way store and explore all of the various piles of waste.  I think there was a gopher skeleton back there.  Shudder.

Back on the interstate!  Huzzah!  Ten minutes later, the kids had to pee.  Holy deity in a delicatessen.  We pulled over for roughly the 90th time and I took the kidlets in to pee so Will could probably eat a pack of cigarettes.  The potty place was a combo truck stop/restaurant/convenience store with aisles and aisles of candy, chips, CB radio parts, and wolf-emblazoned dream catchers.  Jeffrey commented that it was like the Lotus Casino from Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief movie.  I muttered, "Without the pretty ladies and the nice, narcotic pink flowers..."  I might have been a little bitter at this point in time.

Of course, there was a traffic jam around Jonesboro, because that's one of the Laws of Physics, but eventually we arrived on the little country road on which I grew up and I let Frodo stand on my lap and flap his ears in the wind out the open window.  I sang "Born Free."  He seemed to enjoy it.

At the rents' house, he sniffed around at Carlie with a bristly back and whined until I took him outside to walk around poolside.  It was all very decorous until he puked again.  Have I mentioned I don't like puke?  I hosed it off the patio and gagged.

Let me remind you that Frodolicious is used to roaming an acre lot AND he's a beagle, which means he's pretty much all nose.  He's also used to being the only animal in a house and coming and going out the back door as he pleases.  I'm reminding you of this so that when I tell you that I left him with the folks who were also watching the kids in the pool (and were thus a little, you know, busy) so I could gather some towels, you are not shocked when I then tell you that Frodo saw the opening in the gate and took off (literally) for greener pastures.

A little background:  my mother spent our entire childhood living in fear of "the road."  It was a gentle, beautiful, curving road everywhere else except the area in front of our house, where it became the Screaming Stretch of Stinking Asphalt Death.  I mean that pretty literally:  numerous cats and a couple of dogs from my childhood met their maker there.  My brother rode his bicycle smack into a van there.  I can't tell you how many times we've heard the particular squeal of a car going to fast hitting the curve, going into a series of doughnuts, and ending up in the ditch or straddling the fence.  My mother has probably done irrevocable damage to her vocal cords shrieking at us and various animals to stay away from the road or to warn drivers backing out that another car is coming, a trait she passed on to her children.  So pretty much the entire family lost their minds when we realized Frodo was missing.

Aunt Kitty took off for the garden, Daddy wandered into the side yard, I looked out in the side pasture, Hayden and Uncle Dan went across the road to check the other pasture.  Mama did laps around the house.  Will stayed in the pool with the kids, probably wondering if it was too early to toss back a couple of shots.  Hayden eventually tracked the dog down across the road, eying some cows in a predatory fashion.  Jeffrey likes to remind me that beagles are VERY close to being wolves.  Maybe Frodo thought he was White Fang or something.

The next day we had a Fourth of July picnic.  One of my cousins brought some folks who had no idea that a dog wasn't supposed to go outside, so when my dog politely asked to leave the house, they let him right on out.  And he set off for...I don't know...Paris?  Timbuktu?  Who knows?  All I know is that the situation ended with my husband running down the road following the Pupster, me walking up the driveway clutching my temples in aggravation, my mother interpreting this as the dog being injured or dead and bellowing, "What HAPPENED?  WHAT HAAPPPPPEEENNNNNNEEEEEEDDDDDD?" and then threatening to disown me when I told her to chill out because--although in her defense, she had no way of knowing this was happening--my brain was about to leap out of my head and beat me about the ears with its stem.  A good dang time was had by nobody but Frodo who had tasted FREEEDDDOOOMMM and set out to find a way to paint his face blue and fashion a kilt from the covering of Carlie's bed.

I am sure it is a coincidence that I drank my way through half a bottle of citrus rum over the course of the weekend.

Now we're getting ready to head back home after a long weekend of sun and eating and swimming and getting the river recharge that seems to keep me going when I'm slogging through bad days in Dingleberry.  I have not fed the dog, which might seem cruel, but it's only because I don't relish the idea of him barfing in the car again.

Before the next Frodo visit (if there is one, OMFC), I've assembled a list of items we might need:

1. Doggy nausea medicine
2. A roll of industrial strength paper towels
3. Doggy Valium
4. People Valium
5. A much longer leash
6. An industrial strength vacuum because, seriously, the fur was INSANE.  All fur, all the time people.  River's wearing a dog fur stole right now.
7. A collapsible dog bowl.
8. Technically, I don't NEED a collapsible dog bowl.  The unmatched fake Tupperware bowl we brought along did just fine.  However, if we're going to be some of those "have dog, will travel" people, we're going to have to step up our accessory game.

Hope you all had fun, doggy-drama free Fourths!