Location Taken: Arcadia, Michigan
Time Taken: January 2011
My family is rather fond of road trips. I’m writing this early because I’m about to head off on one. By car, mind you. I’ve only taken a bare handful of plane trips (five planes, four of them on one round trip to Seattle) in my life. I do like traveling by train, but the US Amtrak system goes to a rather limited number of places, and usually would require a car on the other end of the travel as well. Cars, on the other hand, let us go where we want when we want, and take the dogs along as well.
I know a lot of people will kennel their dogs for the duration of their trips. It does make sense, let someone else take care of them so you don’t have to worry about it at all while you’re having fun. My family, though, prefer to let the dogs have fun as well. Most of the places we visit are rural enough that we can let the dogs run around leashless, and boy do they run! It’s the only chances they get to really stretch their legs. We’ve got a yard at home, but it’s a small suburban yard, and our dogs can cross it in five seconds, three if there’s something really exciting on the other side.
Still, we do have to take some precautions before just kicking the dogs out the door to go get in trouble. First, you have to make sure they’ll come back. This means you’ve got to finish bonding (which for my mom and her dogs, doesn’t take long). Teaching them to come when called really helps, too. For the first bit when we’re off-leash training our new dogs, they spend most of their time on leash. We let them off in safer areas, away from busy roads or interesting people, and where you can watch where they go. Places like deserted frozen beaches work really well. After a few times of this, if done right, the trust will build up and you’ll know it’s safe to let them out of your sight. Certain dogs do require a little more, though. Revel (the black dog in the photo) loved chasing cars at first, and it took a year or so to break him of the habit (though if a really large and rare catch comes by, all bets are off. He managed to corner a snow plow once). He also likes wandering largely out of sight when we go walking in the woods, which can get a bit worrying, so he has a bell on his collar now. It’s oddly fun to listen to the jingling go back and forth, stopping when he finds something to sniff, speeding up when there’s something to chase.
Now I just need to figure out how to hook up the dogs to my bike so they can get up to the speed they want while we’re in areas with leash laws…
