Hopefully you caught the movie reference because otherwise it’s a really lame post title. My dogs have been taking car rides since they were very young. Ares came from Shepherdsville, KY which is about an hour and a half from where we live. Chris drove and I held him while he cried for the first 5 minutes and then fell asleep. He went a lot of places those first couple months of his life because everybody wanted to meet the little guy and of course we had vet visits. It was hard at first because he would try to crawl all over my lap when I was driving and it was just me and him in the car. Eventually he learned to stay in the passenger’s seat so that helped a lot but he never really was bad. He didn’t have accidents or cry or get sick like I had heard with other dogs.
And then Chaos came into the picture. He got sick in the car the day Chris picked him up so we were afraid he was going to be one that would always get car sick. Luckily that was the first and only time. I guess he was just nervous. He didn’t cry but when I had both him and Ares in the car they both would be trying to get in my lap and I finally had to exile them to the back seat for safety reasons. They tried to fight it at first. Ares would be a brat and put his paws up on the console and try to slowly inch his way forward. But they both eventually did give up and just stay in the backseat.
Last summer Chaos was on the dreadful steroid Prednisone for his allergies. The day their Aunt Kristina moved into her new house Chris and I helped in the morning and then I went home to check on the boys. Of course they were invited down to check out the new place so I took them potty and then loaded them up. We were about 10 minutes away from our destination when this terrible smell started filling up the car. I didn’t see anything in the review mirror but at the next stop light I turned around and found a lovely surprise Chaos had left on the seat. I couldn’t be mad because the steroids make it so that they have a very hard time holding their bladder and bowels. But it had started raining and let me tell you, that was the longest 10 minutes riding in a stink bomb car the rest of the way to the house. And I was praying that he wouldn’t also step in it. He didn’t but later I found out that he had gotten it all over his leash. Nice. The good thing was that I had a seat cover over the whole backseat so we just had to take that out and wash it. My nose wasn’t so lucky. The stench was stuck in there for quite a while. Or at least it seemed that way. But I am happy to say that’s the only accident we’ve had so far.
We don’t have seat belts or seat harnesses for the dogs. I know they make them but I don’t know anybody who has them. I wouldn’t even know how to choose which brand to use and I’ve read a lot of reviews that make them sound very confusing to use. I’d also be worried about the fit. Ares is usually a standard size, but we tend to have problems with Chaos because of his chest. Maybe I’ll start up that search again for this summer.
Usually the boys will just settle in and lay down for the car ride. Sometimes they will sleep on the way back from our trip but on the way there they sometimes get excited and want to check out the scenery along the way. They put their paws up on the door to look out at the window, and this is how Ares discovered that the windows go up and down. And that he can control them. At first it was an accident I’m sure and then he figured out putting his paws in a certain place made the window go down. And then probably zeroed in on that little magic black button. I can’t remember how many times I’d look back and see the window halfway down and those heads sticking out, ears and tongues blowing in the wind. I thought I had accidentally done it without thinking about the dogs. It didn’t occur to me that my dogs were smarter than me so it took a little while to figure out they were actually do it themselves. Now when we take car rides with the dogs the child safety has to be on the windows. Ares gets upset about this and I can’t seem to make him understand it’s for his own good. He pouts for a minute and then gives up. One day he will thank me.
The thing that still amazes me is that they always seems to know when we are almost to where we’re going. The first time I noticed Ares getting really excited before we pulled into my parents’ neighborhood I thought wow, he’s only been here once and he remembers. I can drive somewhere 5 times with directions and still not remember when I’m almost there. But I am sort of direction challenged. Anyway, I started noticing that both boys will start getting excited when we’ve almost arrived somewhere, even if it’s somewhere they’ve never been or somewhere none of us have ever been. I’ve heard that dogs do not actually have psychic superpowers but instead are just reading our body language. It just seems strange to me that I would show them signals that we are almost to a place we’ve never been when I don’t even know we’re almost there, but maybe I just like to think my dogs have superpowers.
What do you experience when riding in cars with dogs?
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