Road trip Maya

Maya made her first road trip.

She's made various trip of an hour and a half when we've visited family and she likes car rides. So when Meche and the girls got it into their heads to dash to Boca Raton for spring break to visit some cousins, we decided to take Maya.

Maya was invited, anyway. Meche's cousin Henry has two dogs and said they would get along fine with Maya, which they did. They're both rescues, but Henry has had them for years and they're pretty mellow canines. Of course, Maya isn't, so most of the issues were hers: Destroying three screen windows the first time she was left alone, for example.

I wasn't all that keen on the trip but my options were to let them drive down themselves or go with them. As for Maya, she has been having problems with her leg most of this long, cold winter and it made sense for me to keep her under my care so as not to have a setback. She's been licking at her leg and paw and causing some nasty irritation. At one point it was infected because she broke the skin. It bothers her in the cold, especially with a pin running from her knee to her fused ankle. She’s leaving the leg alone right now so it looks nice and healed but she keeps at the paw. She has meds for inflammation and pain but I'll have to see how she does in the next few weeks with continued warmer weather in the North. Maya needed a tropical break as much as everyone else.

It certainly seemed on the ride down that everyone was indeed headed to Florida for break! And this wasn't even the infamous college spring break, as that is earlier in their semester. Minus the six years I lived in Peru, I have spent pretty much most of my life in the Northeast and this was a tough winter. Traffic from South Jersey all the way to Richmond was like one of nature's great migrations: wildebeests or monarch butterflies, or maybe lemmings. We left at 7 a.m. and didn't get to Savannah, where we had a hotel reservation, until 2 the following morning. That stretch was supposed to take about 14 hours, not 19, and those five hours were all lost before Richmond. Still, Maya did great.

In reality, everyone did great. It was a tiring ride down but once we were in Florida we had a great time. Maya got her first run on the beach and loved it. She completely avoided the water, though, unlike Henry’s chow-shepherd cross, which readily jumped into some crashing two- to three-foot waves to fetch a stick.

Maya also had multiple problems with the pool, from growling at the floating blowup pool toys to startling repeatedly at the bubbling of the filter to panicking when I decided to put her in to see if she might take to the pool like the chow. My bad. Maya is not a water dog. (She’ll walk in it, but not swim.) She did great off leash on neighborhood walks with our host's dogs, behaving almost as well as her companions, who regularly go for walks unleashed. She obeyed even when we encountered other dogs and I could tell she wanted to run ahead or across the road to make a new acquaintance. I had to emphasize the command "Come. No. Come!" a couple of times, but she didn't challenge me or get stubborn as she might sometimes when she just doesn’t want to be interrupted. Having dog mates helped keep her calm enough so she didn't bolt. I never have her off leash on the street at home and not sure if I'll try it, as the traffic isn't as mellow as it was in that part of Boca.

Maya was as good on the way back as she was on the way down, and even when we stopped in North Carolina for the night she crashed like everyone else. You’d have thought she’s taken a turn at the wheel.

Let's go, road dog.