Friday, July 11, 2008 | by nathan

Sam Fridays: Sam Hits The Road

So the other big thing that happened this weekend was that Sam got a test. We’re headed up to Colorado for a week later this month, where we’re renting a cabin that is pet friendly. I had really, really wanted to bring Sam along for this vacation, but he’d never spent any prolonged period of time in the car, and given how excited he usually gets when going for a ride, and the fact that our old, stupid vet had told us not to let him get too excited, I was leary.

But, last week, Sam had a checkup, and the doc said that his heart was fine, go ahead, get him excited, let him run and exercise. He’ll love it. That Friday, we were planning to head out to the Panhandle, and we were taking two cars, the Flynns and us, and they were bringing Hera along.* So I figured it was as good a time as any to test Sam out - if things didn’t work, if he didn’t do well on the long trip, at least it was a short one, comparatively. If he did fine, then at least we’d know.

Sam likes the car:

He was very excited to get to go on the trip. He did really well on the drive up. We kept the windows open a crack so that he could stick his nose out and sniff things as we went by them, and he loved this. After awhile, though, it got too hot for anyone in the car to have the windows cracked, and Sam, like a good boy, laid down in the backseat and just rode along.

He did really, really well the whole way up, as did Hera. Both dogs were so excited every time we let them out to go pee that they actually forgot, for quite some time, that they had to go at all. Particularly funny was when we let them out in Boise City, and Hera decided she NEEDED TO SMELL EVERY INCH OF THAT TOWN OMG.

No less hilarious was Sam pulling me and Brian all over creation. When we stopped in Woodward to let the dogs do their business, Hera and Sam dragged us almost a block away before finally going, and even then, they only did it reluctantly, like ,"if I pee, I have to go back in the car! OMG THE CAR!"

When we finally arrived at the Bed and Breakfast, we found it populated with some other dogs for Sam and Hera to befriend. One of them, Angel, was a dalmation who was mostly averse to Sam’s amorous advances, if you know what I mean, and who snapped at him every time he got close. Another, however, was Star, who was just really friendly and sweet:

Aside from their new friends, Hera and Sam were in Dog Heaven at the farm. Not only were there all kinds of new things to smell, it seems that Sam’s dads didn’t feel the need to keep him constantly on the leash while he was there. He had plenty to occupy himself, and spent a lot of time exploring:

We did leave them in our rooms when we went out to the Three-State Marker at night, and anytime we were away from the ranch, so as not to bother our hosts with their care. But Sam seemed to like it all right in our room, too:

The afternoon after our hike to the top of Black Mesa was mostly spent lazing around in the air conditioning. Once the sun started to go down, however, and the heat waned some, Brian and I took Sam for a walk on the nature trail directly behind the B&B. I kept the leash in my pocket, just in case, but Sam was having such a good time and mostly staying close to us, and so I decided we’d let him walk freely. Which is what he did. He mostly stayed close to us at first:

But after awhile he started getting braver:

When he’d get too far away we’d call to him, and he’d come running back, sorta reluctantly, only to whip around and take off in a different direction:

Boy, he sure did like it out there. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Sam happier than those two days we spent at Black Mesa. He was into everything:

When it was time to head back up to the Bunkhouse, we called Sam to come, and he ran ahead of us, where we figured he’d wait patiently while we opened the gate and let him through, like he had before. Something had come over him, though, his indominable dog spirit, I suppose, and my sweet, timid dog went squeezing through the barbed-wire fence. Brian and I shouted, and watched with horror as he made his way through that barbed wire, emerging safe and sound on the other side. We checked him for scratches or injuries, but there were none. He had, however, left a present on the fence:

At some point on the walk, Sam did slow down enough that I could capture this photo, which is going to be framed somewhere in our house in the coming week. I love it so much; how awesome is our little family?

Or perhaps the black and white version?

*I’ve been told to say that, for months, I’ve been misspelling Hera’s name; I’ve been calling her Harrah, which is wrong. It’s Hera, like the wife of Zeus. For that, I apologize, and I offer the following: I’ve searched this site for misspellings and corrected them, and here’s photo of lovely Hera’s lovely face. She, like Sam, was crazy happy the whole time we were in the Panhandle. She and her parents went on to Colorado from there, where I also imagine she had a wonderful time: