Travelin’ Havachon!

So….guess where we went for Christmas? I’ll give you three hints:

Where else would you see a gorgeous blue heron in a busy parking lot? You guessed it – Florida!

We definitely prefer frosty noses, building snowmen, and hot cocoa for Christmas, but we made a last minute decision to join the family down south for Christmas this year. So instead we enjoyed warm, sunny weather, flowers in bloom, and ice cold fruity Christmas punch. 🙂

The only annoying thing was that we kept singing that old Bing Crosby song about Christmas with palm trees in Hawaii…. 😛

But the best part was that little Miss Daisy had her first major travel adventure – a 2400 mile (round trip) car trip!

Lots of time to catch up on my naps!

I’m happy to say that Daisy did extremely well and surprised us with her instinctive travel smarts. Up until now, we’ve only driven 1.5 hours with her, so this was a HUGE difference! It’s a 22+ hour drive, but we stayed overnight along the way. We drove for 3-4 hours at a time, then stopped to take Daisy out. Sometimes, in unfamiliar surroundings, Daisy will just “go” when the spirit moves her (like in the middle of sidewalks! Yikes!), so we were concerned about the car and the hotel room.

Our concerns were unfounded. 😀  She was great in the car and waited for us to take her out to “unload”.

When we first started our drive, she whined quietly for a few minutes, but then settled in comfortably.

zzzzzzzzzzzzz

After our first stop, she whined a bit longer, and we realized that she’s used to cuddling if someone else is on the sofa with her. Well, DD was in the back seat with her – probably just a moving sofa to Daisy! – but she had the armrest down so she could put her water in the holder and her books in the compartment. We didn’t realize this was distressing Daisy to some degree, as she was being cut off from one of her favorite cuddlers.

Her whines got a little louder when DD piled blankets and a pillow on top of the armrest so she could snooze….with that wall of fleece between them, Daisy couldn’t see DD, and she really didn’t like that. She kept staring at me in the rear view mirror!

DD realized that when she wasn’t napping, she could move Daisy to the center of the seat and attach the center seat belt to Daisy’s car harness; that way Daisy could cuddle up next to her or even lie on DD’s lap. This created one happy little Havachon!

Snuggled up next to DD - NOW I'm a super happy passenger!

It was a bit of an adventure for us to travel with a dog as well. We’ve never done that before, since our previous dogs were large, so we read up on how to travel with a dog, booked pet-friendly hotels, and kind of felt our way along.

The only thing we didn’t like was that we had to eat in shifts. DD and I would eat in our favorite road restaurant:

Down home cookin' and a country store all in one!

….and then bring food out for DH, who stayed outside with Daisy and then ate in the car. I felt bad for my poor hubby, but he didn’t mind. First of all, we were driving in warm southern climates. Second, Cracker Barrel restaurants all have plenty of green grass to walk dogs and they have a covered porch filled with porch rockers where he could sit with Daisy on his lap. She was in her glory! And we met so many new people because of Daisy – everyone would come over to pet her and ask what kind of dog she was (most people thought she was a poodle!), which led to some long conversations. It was so much fun!

We brought Daisy’s wee-wee pads into the hotel room just in case, which turned out to be a good idea. Instead of marking the hotel carpet, she marked her wee-wee pad instead! Whew! 😉

We feel so much freer knowing that we can travel long distances easily with Daisy. It seems to me that she’ll go along with almost anything as long as we’re all together! 😀

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