In honor of National Road Trip Day on 24 May 2024.
After my young dog's first successful hotel stay a couple of weeks ago, I cannot stop daydreaming about our next short road trip that will include another hotel stay with my dogs.
In case it's helpful, below are the topics covered in this post:
My Daydream Road Trip with My Dogs
Although Lucy, my young dog, had a successful hotel stay this month, the pessimist in me is prepared for that first experience to be a fluke. I believe it is best for our next road trip to be in-state just in case.
I want Lucy to experience something new on our next trip. I thought about creating a bucket list of things and places I want her to experience that my first two dogs, Shadow and Rascal, were fortunate to experience. For now, I just daydream about places I want her to visit and things I want her to do.
Lucy has yet to experience fireworks in-person. I know there are many dogs that despise the evil explosions in the sky, but I will not know if Lucy feels this way until her first firework experience. Therefore, I believe a short road trip for Independence Day (4th of July) would be a unique experience for her.
Rascal does not panic during firework shows, but he never watched it. My late Shadow loved watching firework shows. Shadow loved the picnic leading up to the nighttime spectacular the most. Since Lucy is like Shadow, I believe there is a chance that she would enjoy the experience.
My hope is to head to another city a few hours’ drive from my home that offers dog-friendly activities and a decent firework show. I want to make a hotel reservation for the night so that we can rest after a day of fun (or chaos if it turns out that Lucy hates fireworks).
I need to decide if I will take both Rascal and Lucy on this daydream road trip. Rascal is well-behaved on road trips, but easy to tuck under my arm if his anxiety amps up. Lucy, on the other hand, is a tad challenging to manage if her excitement or anxiety amps up.
Rascal and I visit my Mom every other month. Mom refuses to let Lucy join our visits because she believes I adopted Lucy to "replace" Shadow after he passed away. Since I treat those visits as special one-on-one time with Rascal, hopefully it would not be unfair if I treated my next road trip as special one-on-one time with Lucy.
If only Lucy and I went on a road trip, I could use it as training experience. I would solely focus on correcting unwanted behavior and rewarding preferred behavior. This may be ideal since I cannot predict how she would react to large crowds, holiday activities, and fireworks.
It could be a fun experience, or it could be a nightmare experience I can learn from. Either way, that is my daydream for our next road trip.
What's Next?
Now that I wrote about a daydream road trip, I think I will treat my dogs to an actual road trip to a pet store. A small gesture will make their day!
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Thanks, and have a great day!
Simply Jelly Jam
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