August 28, 2015

Fif is calling me a heroine. If a dog could blush, I might be, but on the other hand, my understanding is that we are to be taking care of each other on this journey. So here is what happened.

After a couple of expensive motel nights on the Oregon coast we drove a bit inland to stay at a cheaper motel. Did I mention that it was cheap? The air conditioner was on a shelf so high that Fif had to get out a stool she brought along and stand on it to reach the controls.

It also had inadequate locks--this photo is from a different motel, but you get the picture...

It was a warm night and as we drove to the exterior door and parked we saw that the occupants of the next room had their door open and were drinking and watching TV. It was three construction-type guys, and they looked pretty rough. They watched Fif carry stuff into our room. Last she unloaded me and as we walked past them one guy said, "look at that big dog!" I kind of puffed up a bit and for once Fif didn't say how much I love people.

About 2 a.m. I could tell Fif was awake and suddenly I sprang to my feet and ran to the door. We both had heard something right outside. Softly Fif called me to her. At first I was reluctant to come away from the door. I sniffed at the bottom and knew someone was right out there, but I turned back and the two of us sat on the floor behind the bed for awhile.

Finally it got quiet and then we heard someone running water in the unit next to us. Fif gave me lots of hugs and said how much I helped her be brave. In the morning we didn't go outside until the workers (who made lots of noise coughing and spitting and swearing for an hour) left.

After we got into California we went to a very special place -- the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas.

At first the folks there said I wouldn't be allowed to come inside. But since one of John Steinbeck's stories is about a dog named Charley who took a long trip with his friend and we had come more than 5,000 miles to see his truck Fif really wanted me to be with her. She suggested that sometimes rules are made to be broken (I suspect Steinbeck might have agreed) and a very nice lady said that she loves dogs so that it would be ok.
Here we are posing beside the truck, which was named Rocinate. A boy named Hugo Semel, who was visiting from Paris, France took this photo.

We also visited the Mohave Desert, where the temperature was about 106 degrees. Fif made sure I was only outside early in the morning or in the air conditioned motel room or van. It was morning when we visited the Calico Cemetery where people are buried under piles of stones. Fif lived near here when she was a little girl and remembers playing around the ghost town and the cemetery. She even named her first horse 'Calico.'

I did lots of panting and drank lots of water.

A nice park ranger took this photo.

We also discovered the "siesta." It really is the only way to spend the afternoons in the desert!

We visited Fif's brother, Don and his wife, Vicki, in Mesquite, Nevada. Everyone disappeared for awhile one day while I got to stay in the cool house. When they came home they smelled like creatures I had never smelled before. This armadillo who lives at the Roos-N-More Zoo was one of the critters Fif told me I was smelling.

One of my hosts was CeCee, a 16-year-old cat who actually showed up at our farm in Ohio about 15 years ago and Fif convinced her brother he needed a cat. You can see here that I am being the perfect guest .
CeCee has traveled thousands of miles with Don and Vicki both on airplanes and in cars as they have a home in Kentucky too. Can you believe she actually LIKES traveling? Speaking of traveling, I've noticed the past couple of days that the sun is in our eyes when we start out in the morning. Hmmmm, I sense another change is coming.

Thursday, August 20

Just had to post a couple of happy-looking Lyla photos taken by my sister-in-law, Irene, yesterday in her backyard in Bakersfield. It is amazing what a couple of days of R&R can do for human and canine alike.

August 19, 2015

If it seems our posts have been spaced further apart that would be because they have been. Lyla and I have driven more than 5,000 miles at this date and are both getting a bit road weary. Some days, like the day we visited Mount St. Helens, we drove up and up mountain sides for at least three hours, which meant we also had to come back down mountain sides for almost that same amount of time. I was told that the last 20 miles to the site we visited -- where you can peer straight down at the sad remains of Spirit Lake and see the naked, steaming mountain to the left -- was a gravel road just a few years ago. Today the road is broken asphalt, teetering toward the downhill side of the road, which, if one was brave enough to look at, would probably be a sheer drop of thousands of feet. Have I mentioned I am not a fan of great heights when it involves me standing on them?

Lyla has been a spectacular travel companion, in that she endures the winding, bumpy roads without complaint and has yet to utter, "when will we be there?"

Now we are holed up with relatives in Bakersfield for a couple of days and I can get off a quick post before the next segment of our trip--into the searing Mohave desert. The temperature Monday in Bakersfield was 109 degrees and we are told it may be a tad cooler today, say 104 or so. Now that sounds really bad and it can be, especially, I would think, for the homeless people we have seen on the streets. But the natives who live here know to get outdoor work done early and stay indoors from 10 a.m. to dark. Across from us this morning yard workers were buzzing away loudly with maintenance equipment at 6:30 a.m. and I did not notice anyone complaining. These desert folks remind us, "it is a dry heat." And truly, it isn't that bad out at night. I wonder why more people don't just flip their days around and sleep all day and work and play at night?

Here are a few photos of our days from August 11 to August 15.

Steam continues to vent (lower right in photo) from Mount St. Helens, which erupted explosively May 18, 1980 and blew out the north side of the mountain. The volcanic eruption was the deadliest and most economically destructive volcanic event in the history of the United States. Fifty-seven people were killed; 250 homes, 47 bridges and 185 miles of highway were destroyed. The day we visited we could smell a faint odor of smoke, or was it brimstone?

Remarkably, after 35 years, skeletons of dead trees still stand or lay on the forest floor, amid the rebirth of pine trees and flowers. Mount St. Helens is ghostly-looking in the far background.

A crushed and now rusted miner's car is left as part of the memorial to nature's robust ways. Plants and flowers are nourished even by the decaying metals of human endeavors.

We all know our homes are usually built from wood and our "dead tree" books too come from, well, dead trees. But you have to drive through Oregon to appreciate how many trees bleed their sap for our use. In the photo below a hillside begins to recover from timbering.

Logging trucks barrel down two-lane as well as four-lane roads. Beware your back bumper! A motel owner told me the story of his years in the timber business. He said he once cut (and showed me a photo of it) a 600- to 700-hundred-year-old tree whose butt end (when laying sideways on the ground) was eight-feet tall and the length of the tree was 250 feet. "When they (I suppose the government) told me we couldn't cut any more of those big ones, I quit timbering," he said. He also reminded me that timber is a renewable resource. And so it is--right now I can't count how many generations down the road would use that renewable tree that would take 600 years to grow.

Spectacular cloud formations added to our drive on this day.

Along the Oregon coast a vulture swoops over Pacific waves.

Shasta Lake, near Redding California, is the state's third largest body of water after Lake Tahoe and the Salton Sea. The red banks exposed in the background reflect the long and severe drought conditions in the state -- the water level should cover these exposed banks. One source said the reservoir contains only about 30 percent of the water it did 10 years ago. When I asked a local employee at the lake how much water it would take to refill the lake, he merely said, "a whole lot!" Then as an afterthought, and in keeping with comments I've heard from other westerners, he added, "but that's just nature at work."

One of the scariest nights we spent was in Douglas, California, while we were trying to reach the redwood forests. A forest fire was burning several miles away and the next town down the road had been evacuated two nights before. We retreated indoors to escape inhaling the thick smoke and the next day had to retrace our route back over mountains the way we had come because of road closures.

Lyla's bane: small dogs and

very large dogs.

Watching from her bed in the van, Lyla scrutinizes the landscape for the presence of dogs. Her animal behaviorist from OSU has helped us through several phone conversations to deal with her fears, which instead of decreasing with daily exposure, have increased. We are trying a new medication to lower her anxiety levels and also continue to work daily on "fun" things, like long walks in quiet places and practicing our obedience commands.

Wednesday, August 12, 2015

First off, I have to say this traveling is not exactly all it's cracked up to be. Ok, I am over being carsick, but I am really homesick. I know these are human words, but they actually pretty much convey how I, a dog, feels. At home I have only one dog in my life--Emma--and now I really appreciate her. On the road there are so many dogs that I feel pretty overwhelmed. Not only are there dog smells everywhere Fif and I get out to "relieve" ourselves, but even in the motel rooms I am surrounded by dog smells of every type. To be fair, Fif has come up with some innovative places to stop for a stretch of the legs, but yesterday even in a remote area I swear I heard some kind of barking--maybe a wolf or coyote?

Well, I have no idea if this is to be my life forever, so I'll stop with the whining and show you some of the stuff we've done in the past couple of weeks.

This was the day we drove through Yellowstone National Park. The first photo is actually the very last Fif took that day. In more than three weeks we've only seen rain during the day one day and that is our Yellowstone day. At the end of the day as we came into Montana, the sun was low and the clouds parting. It was one of those days I heard Fif mutter, "I'm stopping one more time for a photo. Sure glad you aren't whining about it like a person would..." Can you see the faint partial rainbow?

The GRAND Tetons were truly magnificent! Or so Fif says.

One of those places we like to stretch our legs. Nice and quiet.

The weather on Yellowstone day was so cool Fif said I could stay in the car while she watched Old Faithful go off. (Sure were lots of people who took their dogs right down to the seating area, which the literature said wasn't allowed. Seems stupid to me to think dogs would like to be where a geyser was spouting.) Anyway, it started raining, which didn't really daunt Fif and some other folks, like the ones in this photo. But then a ranger came along about 10 minutes before Faithful was to blow and said to clear the area because lightening and hail were imminent. Fif ran for the car.

 Now this was actually a fun day. We visited an American Indian cemetery on the Flathead Reservation in Arlene, Montana after talking with a special lady you'll see below. I got to do lots of sniffing and it was a very quiet place.

 Some of the sculptures in the cemetery were really neat.

So far, the only bear we've seen. However, read on for close encounters...

This is Windy Windy Boy and she got that name because she was named Windy (her first name) by her parents. She is part Cherokee Indian and is a general manager at the motel where we stayed. She married a full-blooded Salish Indian named Windy Boy. The tree where Windy is standing is where a mama bear and her cub climbed a couple of years ago. As you can see it is right next to our motel. Windy told Fif that one day she was standing a few feet from this tree and she felt something lick her leg. She reached behind her and patted it on the head, then turned to see it was a bear cub. A few feet behind was mama standing on her hind legs. Windy ducked into the motel. When help came the bears had climbed this tree so the people with the darts had to go to the second floor to reach the bears. Meanwhile, Windy and the other motel employees were very concerned about the bears being hurt when they fell so they gathered up all the (brand-new) pillows in the motel and put them on the ground till they provided a "mattress" about 10 feet in diameter. The bears were not hurt when they fell and were taken back to the wild. Apparently, a forest fire not far away had driven them into town to find food.

Some wildlife in Yellowstone.

And in Packwood, Washington. This handsome male elk was just a few feet behind us while we were eating dinner in a quiet park at the edge of town. We didn't notice him until Fif saw a man taking photos from the highway. She turned to see what he was photographing, gasped, hustled me into the van (leaving behind the food on the table) and got this shot.

Finally, we are as far west as Fif says we are going--the Pacific Ocean in Oregon! I honestly don't know why anyone wants to wade in water that moves and get sand between their toes.

Although the sunset last night was kind of pretty.

And lastly, my friend Emma at home. Where I long to be.

August 4, 2015

Every day I meet someone who has an amazing story. I hope I can tell them all in detail eventually.

Colin Leath is bicycling from Atlanta to San Diego, about 3,000 miles with his route, a feat that I suppose has been accomplished by a number of people. But most would have a high-price, high-tech bicycle. Colin got his for about $20, put on some new tires and a chain and was about mid-journey when we encountered him at a rest stop. Look at the "shoes" he wears, made from cutting out soles of old shoes and rope! He carries a small tarp to shelter him from storms. Colin kindly let me interview him, so there will be more about him later.

It is so hard to keep driving when going through scenery like this near DuBois Wyoming.

Bob and Kitty Willis are just two of thousands of people who volunteer for historical societies and museums around the country. The Willis are posing in front of an old doctor's buggy in Upton, Wyoming that is part of a large collection of wagons, sleds and buggies from the 1800s and early 1900s. Every month they help with a buffalo burger feast, served out of one of the wagons to help fund the collection of buildings and other antiques at Old Town, just outside of Upton. So many people have shown me their dedication to preserving history I hope to write a chapter about just that.

So far, the highlight of my trip--a horseback ride into the mountains at the CM Ranch in Wyoming. I will write more about the rich history of this ranch later. My trail guide is Bryce Street on Dex and yes, that's me on a horse named Fudge (and he was as sweet as his name)!