We drove from Ohio to South Dakota for vacation
Big Girl had a Real Job this summer, so couldn’t go with us on vacation, which we were sad about. But that’s life–all that growing up stuff has to happen eventually. My husband and I, and our teen son (The Boy) were joined on this trip by our dog, Fezzik, aka Go-Doggy.
I know some dogs aren’t that comfortable in a moving vehicle, but Go-Doggy is always up for a ride. You have to even be careful using the word “go” in our house, because he knows very well that if you are going to “go” then it is possible he could “go” along too.
And people have asked me, doesn’t Go-Doggy have to make a lot of stops? You know, so that he could “go” #1 or #2? And the answer to that one is that this doesn’t slow us down because his endurance is at least as great as mine. So we were going to stop on that same frequency anyway.
NE Ohio to Rapid City, South Dakota is about 1300 miles each way. That’s two full days of driving on each end of the vacation. Plus, using Rapid City as home base, we drove all around the Black Hills, went to the Badlands, and otherwise toured the vicinity. We figure we drove around 3000 miles in total across about 8 days.
Attitude is what makes the trip
What made it all pretty easy is that Go-Doggy is not only always up for a good road trip or a new park (shoot, even a new sidewalk is full of exciting smells…he’s easily pleased) but he doesn’t mind spending half a day dreaming away in his travel crate in a hotel room, so that we could visit places that were too hot for him or didn’t allow dogs.
Bottom line, Go-Doggy’s a good traveler. He follows all the 3 rules of travel that I established long ago as minimum requirements for business travel. (Remember that my idea of business travel might be a bit off the beaten path, at least some of the time.)
My 3 Rules for Travel
- Eat now. You don’t know when you’ll eat again. This one is self-explanatory.
- Pee now. You don’t know when you’ll pee again. This rule is for anyone with a sense of modesty who doesn’t want to have to choose between a rock and a tree, and for dogs who don’t want to pee on the car seat where they have to spend the next six hours sitting.
- If the trip is going to be crappy, the people shouldn’t be. Because that only makes the trip worse. Applies to dogs, too.
This week’s poem is the equivalent of the back-to-school summer report: what I did on my summer vacation. As such, appropriately, it’s a prose poem…and I promise that all the various events referenced here actually did happen on our vacation.
Go-Doggy On Summer Vacation
They strolled by casinos, tee-shirt shops and bars in a townlet that faked a Deadwood-esque aura. They took along their poodle-mix, Go-Doggy.
He loved a road trip and a sidewalk and a garbage can and a hamburger and a hotel room. He was the king of hotel rooms.
They hiked rock formations that rose out of the eroding prairie like the spine of a dinosaur, which in a way the rocks were, but Go-Doggy couldn’t go there, because dog, and heat, and so forth.
They watched rain and hail out a hotel window as the winds reached seventy miles per hour and the hotel sign and streetlights waved back and forth trying to touch the ground.
Ate pizza they could have eaten back home. Drove about three thousand miles. Watched a car of tourists let a wild burro eat popcorn by sticking its head into the driver’s window.
Found an off-leash park for Go-Doggy. There was a cat that might have been a badger in an alternate life and perhaps still had the spirit of one. Breakfast was soggy eggs but early so met the main criteria.
Yellow flowers rode the prairie to the horizon. Invasive. Water standing by the road, by the parking lot, by the river banks, some rivers just in their banks and some out.
They were tourists doing tourist things they wished they’d done before. Their melancholy worked at odds with the itinerary. After hours of driving their eyes resisted close-ups.
They hiked around a flooded lake that wanted to be a diamond-encrusted mirror in its next life. Go-Doggy loved the waterfalls which reminded him of a large dog peeing on the universe.
If you enjoyed Go-Doggy On Summer Vacation
You’ll find more of my poems on this blog or in the collection Stars Crawl Out From Their Caves, which is available in both ebook and print.
Missed a poem of the week? Links to prior weeks are on this page.
A few more photos from the South Dakota trip can be found at this post.