Sam loved Colorado. Like, a lot. Like, so much that in the month that we’ve been back he’s been noticeably less exciteable in general. Most evenings when we get home he just sorta lays there, looking at us like, “God, you people are boring.”

Really, who can blame him? In Colorado he got to go on hikes:

Where he saw – and smelled – gray squirrels and any number of other exciting things that caused his little doggy heart to pound and his ears to perk with excitement:

Even when he was getting almost too tired to keep going, he still didn’t want to go back to the cabin:

He was sad to leave, and it’s shown in his decidedly less-than-enthusiastic behavior over the last few weeks (next week’s post will likely focus more on that). I could tell the moment we got in the car for the 11-hour drive home that he didn’t want to go. Just look at that punim:

I volunteered to take the backseat for the entire return trip to Oklahoma, because I didn’t want my little brother to have to deal with Sam’s antics while he tried to sleep. So, I let Brian drive, I gave up shotgun to my bro for the first time in my life, and I packed, my camera ready to go when Sam got all cute. Mostly, the poor dog, sad to be leaving the Colorado he’d come to love, slept on me. Or under me:

When he wasn’t lying down, he loved to stare out the window. Like me, his favorite bits of scenery were the mostly-flat ones in eastern New Mexico, the Texas Panhandle, and Oklahoma:

All told, I was pretty proud of the way he did on the way back. I’ve been, at times, significantly less proud of his behavior since we’ve returned, but I’ll discuss that more next week.