It's good to be home. Here's how the last couple of days went:
The night of my last entry I started to get pretty tired as we got into Montana, so I started calling Motel 6s. At the one in Billings, no one would answer the phone, so I figured 'screw them' and made a reservation in Butte. After trying to find a Pacific Pride (the members-only commercial fueling stations I try to use when I'm on the road) near Bozeman and discovering that all three of the ones in the area had converted to Commercial Fueling Network (the members-only commercial fueling stations I ought to be using when I'm on the road), which I discovered by driving all over the Bozeman area and going to all three stations, I filled up at Flying J, already fighting to stay awake, and made the rest of the drive to Butte. The Motel six in Butte is right at the junction of I-90 and I-15, and should be easy to find, but when you're exhausted and relying too heavily on GPS, things aren't as easy as they should be. Instead of having me exit I-90 and basically drive right into the motel parking lot, the GPS had me go down I-15, exit onto some middle-of-nowhere road, and drive into what looked like the hybrid of a trailer park and a train station, where I crossed no less than 30 sets of railroad tracks before ending up at the other end of the road that the motel was on. But even when I was going the right way, the GPS was trying to steer me back in the wrong direction, and when it started repeating, "When possible, make a U-turn," over and over without even a second's pause between repetitions, I threw it against the door of the truck.
I got all of the dogs inside the room and was ready to sleep by around 4:30 AM. Guido and Tony slept in crates, same as the night before. I slept about four hours before getting up and loading everyone out again, and this time it was an older, white, non-Russian man who kept asking me if he could clean my room yet. What the hell, Motel-6? Tell your housekeepers that check-out time is at noon and to leave me alone, especially when I've only been there four hours.
We got back on the road and had a pretty uneventful day. Either that or a lot of things happened that I can't remember because I was so tired. We got into Forks around 10 PM; all the dogs looked good, and my little ferals were all happy to see me, which was a little surprising, because in the past they've tended to revert slightly to their former, wilder selves when I've gone away. I took Maddie up to the small dog room and introduced him around; he was a little confused but he'll figure it out. Tony and Guido went into kennels, and Katie stayed in my room with me and the ferals. She is so good with other dogs, I may just keep her in here with me.
I have a couple of photos to share, taken with my phone again. The first is Maddie looking sad in the truck when I came back from lunch -- this was the sight that greeted me every time I returned to the truck after leaving him, even if it was only for a minute. (Don't worry, I always left the engine on during the day.) The second is Maddie when he smelled the ocean for the first time, as we crossed the Tacoma Narrows bridge.
I'm sitting at a truck stop with some dogs in the back of the truck, and I have to take a leak, so I'm going to try to write this quickly. Here's what's happened since I left the hotel with the old guy in his pajamas sitting in a chair in the hallway:
First, I got my pizza, thanks to a late start when I left Madison:
That's at Gino's East in Chicago, and sorry about this, vegetarians and vegans, but there's a sausage patty that covers the entire surface of the pizza. (I can get into a whole meat discussion some other time.) It took me 2 days to eat this thing.
I had hoped to be able to get to the Anchor Bar in Buffalo in time for dinner, to have a repeat of my last drive to the east coast where I ate Buffalo wings in the place where they were invented, but it wasn't to be this time. So instead I pulled an all-nighter to get to Massachusetts and pick up Maddie, my first rescue of this trip. That's right -- Madison, WI to Templeton, MA without stopping to sleep, and then to Warwick, NY, where I grabbed a shower, picked up another dog, and hung out for awhile before finally sleeping. It took over 36 hours. It was only 1,300 miles or so, but there was a ton of road construction, plus the stop for pizza, the time it takes to do a rescue, the time it takes to get lost in Warwick, NY, the most confusingly laid out town I've ever been to, where despite having been there twice before, I couldn't find my way around. Anyway, the dogs:
Maddie is a cockapoo (a huge one) with numerous, severe bites in his history, including at least one that sent someone to the ER. He's been good with me once we got over the initial meeting. He sleeps with his head on my lap while I drive.
Katie is the dog from Warwick; the reason I have Katie is a little complicated, or maybe it's not. I got an email from a woman named Eileen in NJ who volunteers at a shelter in Trenton that had a dog named Dillon who had knocked heads with a small boy at a Petco adoption event. The shelter decided Dillon was probably dangerous and hired an outside firm to do a behavior assessment. The people who did the assessment were imbeciles and chose to interpret normal dog behavior as unpredictability, and decided to deem Dillon non-adoptable. Eileen wanted me to take him, but being in the hands of idiots and assholes isn't enough to qualify a dog for placement with me. So I worked it out with Warwick Valley Humane Society to take in Dillon, assess him, and if he turned out to be truly dangerous I'd take him, either now or in the future should his behavior change over time. In return for them taking Dillon, I took Katie, a little pit-type dog with a pretty interesting behavior pathology. Katie obsesses over objects, and her obsession can escalate to the point of losing control and becoming dangerous to anyone trying to handle her at the time. It's a behavior I've seen in other dogs, but where I've seen it the most is with wild cats. Katie loves plastic water bottles, Frisbees, blankets, but she can also obsess over things like grass or a person's fingers. It starts with nibbling and progresses to biting and shaking, so she has to be diverted. So far it hasn't been too difficult, but as she becomes more comfortable and settles into the Sanctuary, we may see some changes. Anyway, here's a picture of Dillon, now at Warwick, where he's available for adoption -- he looks like a boxer/pit mix to me:
From Warwick I went to Noblesville, IN. I picked up Guido and Tony; Guido was kind of a high profile dog -- here's the story. That's the first search result I found -- there are a lot more stories about this if you want to hunt around. Guido is interesting; he definitely has barrier issues. When I first met him he was very 'mouthy' but I could keep him under control fairly easily; when I left the yard and came back a few minutes later he bit me. The bite didn't do any damage, but probably could have. He went for me again when I was lifting him into the back of the truck, but since then has been fine with me once he is out of his travel crate. Inside the crate, he's pretty defensive. We'll get through it. Here's Guido:
Tony bit a couple of Hamilton Humane's board members, and truthfully, I took him because board members of animal rescues are usually a total pain in the ass and a thorn in my side. I instantly liked Tony when I heard he'd bitten not one, but two of them. Here he is:
Tony was named Toby before I took him, but I have a dog named Toby who looks just like him, so that needed to be changed.
From Indiana, it was back on the road. I stayed at a Motel 6 in Sioux Falls, SD last night, and this morning the Russian maids were hassling me at 10 AM to get out of the room so they could clean it, even though check out time was noon. So I've had bad experiences with Russians on both road trips I've taken to the east coast, the previous experience being at a restaurant in Jackson, WY, staffed entirely by Russians who wouldn't take anyone's order. But I'm not willing to give up on you yet, Russia.
So now I'm at a Flying J, and this entry ended up not being so short, didn't it? And I still have to pee. So I'm going to wrap this up. Seacrest out.
I'm not really the 'planning ahead' type when I travel. I'd rather be spontaneous and just see where the trip takes me, whether I'm getting dumped off in a foreign country or driving across my own. But the downside to spontaneity is that during the peak travel season, the hotels and motels fill up pretty quickly, and since I like to drive until I can't keep my eyes open anymore, getting a room can be a real problem. The first night of this trip I ended up spending $150 on a suite with a huge jacuzzi because all the cheap motels were full. The bed was uncomfortable, and bear in mind that my bed at home is a homemade wooden shelf with an old futon mattress and a bunch of dogs on it. Night two I stayed at a Super 8 with a really nice, soft bed, spent around $80, and slept for around 14 hours. I guess I needed it. Night three was a Best Western in Bismarck, North Dakota, where I was given a key for a room that already had someone in it. I opened the door and saw the TV on and the person's feet sticking off the end of the bed. I stood there for a few seconds debating whether or not to say anything, because s/he hadn't heard the door open. I opted not to roll the dice, and I got the hell out of there, but I think the person heard the door shut and came out into the hallway. I didn't look back. The guy at the desk gave me a free breakfast coupon that I didn't use, because I don't care that much for eggs. Once in a room that wasn't previously occupied, after opening the door slowly and calling out, "Anyone in here?" I slept pretty well, or at least well enough that I didn't get out of there until lunchtime. And then there was last night...
My GPS lied to me yesterday and told me I'd be in Chicago by 10PM. What the irritating little lady neglected to mention was that while she could tell me where I was in the US at any given time and how to get wherever I wanted to go, suggest restaurants to me, find gas stations and hospitals for me, she couldn't manage to tell me what time it was in the place where I was actually located at any given time or what time it would be at my destination when I arrived. So the arrival time I was looking at was in Pacific time, which, guess what -- is not really of any use to me when I'm trying to get to Chicago and have some pizza before I go to bed. I kept thinking, I don't remember Madison being ten minutes from Chicago...' and it's not. It's about 150 miles -- 2 hours with no traffic. But not realizing that my GPS was so good at some things and so bad at others, I called the Super 8 booking line and asked for a room in the Chicago area along the I-94 corridor. The woman on the other end asked me which location I wanted to stay at, and I said, "You're the one with the map." Seriously, if I wanted to look through the Super 8 book I wouldn't be calling. So she suggested three places and asked me which one I wanted to book, and I asked for prices, because again, she's the one with all the information, and that's why I called. Downtown was $120, but the one by O'Hare was around $60, so I booked it. When I got to Madison I called and canceled, and not wanting to have a similar telephone experience, I got out the Super 8 book and looked for Madison locations. The one I chose had the "Pride of Super 8" designation, and free HBO and Wi-Fi, so I called and asked if I needed a reservation. I was told I didn't, so I headed over, passing two other Super 8s on the way.
When I got there, I saw a guy with a weird gut, pointy man boobs, and fanny pack rushing across the parking lot to get into the lobby ahead of me, so I made sure that didn't happen. As I made my reservation, he got inpatient and started asking about the rooms -- he wanted a double room, but he didn't want to pay for a double room, so he was trying to finagle a single room with a fold-out couch. I'm serious -- he asked for a fold-out couch, and when the girl told him there wasn't one, he got really upset, like fold-out couches were standard in other motels. I've stayed in hundreds of hotels and motels, and I can't say I've ever seen a fold-out couch in any of them, but this guy had an idea and he wasn't letting go of it. As I left, he was trying to explain that he and his son weren't accustomed to sleeping in the same bed. Then get accustomed to paying an extra $20, jackass.
In the middle of the night I was awoken by a woman ranting in the hallway about something to do with disrespect and 'what she's been through', and I considered yelling at her to shut up, but then she was quiet and I fell back asleep. I was awoken again by the same woman, and considered going to the door and telling her to shut up face to face, but I quickly drifted off again. The third time she woke me up I decided to go into the hall and punch her in the face, but I was too tired and fell asleep again before I was able to fully measure the pros and cons of such an action. So what will tonight bring? I shudder to imagine it, but at least I'm not sleeping in my truck at a rest stop where I can't put the windows down because of the insects swarming outside. I'll leave you with a picture I took with my phone in the hallway of the place I stayed last night:
It was that kind of place.
I'm heading to the east coast on rescues, and I've been 'tweeting' from the road, but I took a few pictures yesterday and wanted to get them online. They're not good pictures, and as bad as they are, they seem especially bad after working with Amber Chenoweth to take pictures of the Sanctuary dogs, but they do document the trip, so here:
I was driving on US-2 south of Glacier National Park and noticed a herd of mountain goats sleeping on the hillside above the highway. Just after that was a parking lot for people to use while they looked at a mineral lick that the goats used on the other side of the river. Everyone was crowded around the railing, and I assumed there must be more goats, and maybe they were closer, but it turned out that people were clamoring to see a single goat on a hillside about three times as far away as the ones I'd just seen. And since they were part of a guided tour, they couldn't go up to the highway to look at the larger herd. Suckers.
In eastern Montana I shot this out of my window while I drove. It's inspirational.
I made my way across Montana and into North Dakota, where I finally got tired of driving on secondary highways where I had to slow down to 25 MPH every 20 miles to go through some rundown farm town, so I cut down to I-94, but on the way my GPS showed that I was passing some kind of park (green thing on the GPS). I thought to myself that it would be cool if it was Theodore Roosevelt National Park, one of the only national parks in the west that I've been wanting to see but haven't had a chance to visit yet, but it looked too small on the map. Then I saw the entrance sign, and it was Theodore Roosevelt, so I jammed on the brakes and went in.
I'm sure Theodore Roosevelt has a lot to offer, but for me it's mainly interesting because of its bison. I'm kind of a bison fan, and there are a few places in the Dakotas where you can see herds that, while contained within the parks by fencing, are surviving in a wild state, vulnerable to predators and the elements. It was getting dark as I drive into the park, and I thought I might not see any bison, but about 15 miles in, I drove into a herd of them.
This bull was as tall as me -- the pretty obvious dominant male of the herd, although .
the 'leader' of a bison herd is a cow. Big as this guy was, he was tiny compared to how large bison used to get before the US government tried to wipe them out in an effort to starve the Plains Indians. This guy weighed about a ton, but a large bull 200 years ago might have weighed 3,000 pounds.
Here he is again with some calves in the shot.
This one was getting a bit frisky with me, and sent me scuttling around the side of my truck for safety a few times. I'm pretty cautious around these guys; I never left the side of my truck and tried to keep 'some truck' between me and them at all times. None of them took any threatening postures or anything, I just try to be safe.
On the way out I came across this longhorn bull and his herd -- compared to the bison I'd just seen they looked tiny. This guy was kind of a character, jumping and kicking when my truck got close.
More to come in the next few days; I'm leaving North Dakota this morning.
