Of Dogs and Travel

I'm a bit of a dog fanatic. Ask anyone who's ever traveled with me, and they'll agree. When I'm away from my own poochie-poo, I fixate on other doggies.

This could mean puppies in pet store windows, dog-walkers in big city parks, sad-looking strays digging through piles of garbage. Doesn't matter. If it's a dog, it's got my attention.

This got me in trouble once. Years ago I spent two weeks studying Spanish in Guatemala. The school arranged a home stay with a local family and I was thrilled to discover my assigned family had a dog - Pasita.

Pasita, it turned out, was a flee-breeding machine. I didn't know that when I befriended her and invited her into my room. One particularly adventurous flee made it from Pasita's tail to the covers of my bed. That was a miserable night.

But I still love dogs. In fact, here's a travel secret of mine that (until now) only my closest travel companions knew: I carry dog hair with me whenever I roam far from home.

That's right. I carry dog hair with me. Not just a few random strands that stick to my sweater, but an actual snippet of hair.

That snippet of hair is from my now-dead dog Sadie. Sadie was a sheltie, one of those pretty dogs that look like a miniature collie. Sadie had ample hair.

My mom is a bit of dog nut, too. For example, she appreciates a birthday card signed by her dog. It was no surprise to me, therefore, that when I went off to college, my mom started mailing me cards from the dog. Sadie always signed her cards with a snippet of Sadie hair.

My college roommates teased me about these snippets of dog hair that floated about my desk drawer. I couldn't bring myself to throw any of them away as the act would be equivalent (in my mind) to throwing out the dog.

Sadie was still alive when I caught the travel bug. Before each big trip abroad, my mom would slip me a snippet of Sadie hair as a reminder of home and the loved ones that held me dear. I faithfully carried those clippings through each of my journeys. They became my talisman and I fully believed in them. If I ever felt a surge of homesickness, I would take them out and play with them, much to the horror of all my travel companions.

Sadie is gone now, but her snippings of hair are not and neither is my wanderlust. Even though she was dead, I carried her hair on my last big trip through Latin America and Southeast Asia. In this way, I guess, Sadie has seen the world.

Yet someone had to fill the Sadie void. Enter Aries and Abby. They live with me, not my mom, which means that now I can't just pack up and run off to Timbuktu. I have to find a dog sitter.

As I've recently returned from a trip to San Diego, I've also recently had a dog sitting experience. Talk about guilt. I felt guilty when I dropped them off. I felt guilty when I picked them up. And when Abby spent yesterday messing all over the house because her digestive track had been upset, I didn't complain or yell. I simply cleaned it up with a heavy, guilty heart.

And then I sat down to read the newspaper's Sunday travel section and started inspecting the airfare ads and scheming of my next trip. London, maybe. Amsterdam in the spring?

And then it hit me. The bill I just paid for dog sitting would have bought me a ticket to France.