Camping is the Cure

You might have noticed I’ve been absent from the blog for over a month. I was hoping Storm would fill in more than just the one week in early May, but he claims he’s been too busy helping Rosa with her weight-loss program, Gidget with her frisky-old-mare program, and Nevada with his food-sharing program. It does sound busy, although I’m not sure what all these programs are. I’ll let him fill you in next time I can get him to write.

I tried Hank too, since he hasn’t written anything since last year, but he claims he’s far too occupied with his new barn-mate, Mariah. I’ve met her. She’s cute. So I can understand him being distracted. Although from what I heard, the distraction wasn’t due to love at first sight. But again, I’ll let him tell that story.

Deep sand is hard going in my condition, so I did the smart thing.

One reader was concerned that something had happened to me. Well, it did. I got old. And, for me, old age isn’t just a slowing down, but a breaking down it seems.

Although coming home wasn’t without some challenges (read The Hazards of Home), I was on a GI-tract positive roll since mid-January which meant I was more energetic, stronger, and had put some weight on after my months of poor digestion. And then T’s attempt at a food addition went awry, which was followed by some poor scavenging decisions on my part, and multiplied by a previous food addition turning on me, which was heaped on by the pet food company changing at least one batch of the duck & potato (D&P) formula I was eating. Come on! Give a guy a break!

Getting a break of a different kind our first night in camp. That tall grass just kept tripping me!

And then I got one … a break, that is. Despite my guts being in frequent turmoil, T and Nollind packed up the remaining cans from of an old flat of D&P food and carted me off to Little Fish Lake Provincial Park for a few days of camping.

We’re on our way! Grocery stop in Strathmore.

Now you might think that taking an ailing dog camping wasn’t a great idea, but consider it from a canine perspective…when camping, my people have nothing to do but hang out with me. Right?! Nobody goes to Calgary to teach sailing lessons, nobody goes outside to hang out with horses, nobody sits staring at their computers for hours on end, and when we’re in the trailer, the peeps are never more than seventeen feet away. It’s all me, all the time. Dog-a-palooza! We go for walks, we hang by the fire, we cuddle on the bed, we have meals together. And this particular camping trip was made even better when G & S joined us on day two, making for even more attention.

A chilly first evening in camp…but together.

The combination of old-batch D&P and trailer time was just what the doctor ordered. I felt great. On our last night, we did a long walk up the hill above the lake and I didn’t even need a rest. I got a tiny glimpse of how I felt back in March and April when I was passing my chariot on the trail.

Evening walk along the hill. That’s camp way in the background.

With my good-old-reliable food now not so reliable, and increasingly hard to find, T is cooking for me. Which is great, except that my system had an initial reaction to the increased fat and protein in the diet. She’s adjusted the quantities of things and we’re hoping for an improvement. I sure love the taste, have been licking my bowl clean enough to put back in the cupboard, so I’m hoping we can land on a recipe that works. Oh, how I miss my iron-stomach days.

We also tracked down eleven cans of a different batch of D&P. It looks the same as the old stuff, so toes crossed.

Can’t wait to get me some more of this camping cure.

I hear we’re headed camping again in just over a week. I am looking forward to that. In the meantime, I’ll just have to share my people with the boats and horses and computers.

The Hazards of Home

As I mentioned in my last post two weeks ago, I was pretty excited to be home on the 2^nd of April. The farm! My happy place. But things have changed, as things are inclined to do. Or maybe it’s that I’ve changed?

The back twenty hasn’t changed much. Yay!

The first and most problematic is the flooring. Sid is 300 square feet and almost all carpeted, all but a small patch of vinyl in the entry/kitchen and part of that is covered with a throw rug. The house is 1100 square feet, plus another 1100 in the basement, and all hardwood, vinyl or painted concrete flooring.

Carpeting is an old dog’s best friend. As we age, the pads on our paws just aren’t as grippy, and so our ability to manage walking on a slick surface is diminished. Add to that a spinal affliction that has impacted the strength and stability of my backend, and you have a dog struggling to maintain an upright position, or get up from a lying down position. It sucks.

Safely navigating Sid’s strip of vinyl floor once again.

The solutions are two-fold. The first is rugs. Lots of rugs. There’s always been a rubber-backed doormat by each door and a Guatemalan throw rug in the living room. But now there is a runner from the bedroom doorway to my bed, three mats in the kitchen, carpeting on the stairs to the porch and on the landing, another Guatemalan rug in T’s office, and a series of small rugs taking me from T’s office, through the living room and dining room to the kitchen. It’s like a gypsy tent in our house these days, but it’s helping me get around.

The second solution is socks with grip. I hate socks, even more than I hate boots. At least boots stay in place. Socks like to slide down or spin, making a bad situation even worse. I’ll admit they do provide grip when they’re where they’re supposed to be, but I still hate them. I’d rather slip and slide, thanks.

Can someone please take these off?

There is a third solution to the slippery-paw problem, and it’s something the peeps have been doing for a long time now, keeping the hair in my paws trimmed short so that I’m walking on pads rather than fur. And T sometimes adds a moisturizer, which also helps a little.

Nollind added extra grip, which works until the sock slides down or turns grippy side up.

The second hazard of home, as much as I hate to admit it, is the wide selection of snacks. So many tasty things can be found around the farm, and I just can’t resist. And now that I’ve been diagnosed with IBD (inflammatory bowel disease), anything outside my approved menu has the potential to cause digestive chaos.

For example, there are mushrooms that grow wild on the edges of the crop fields, and they are the tastiest things in the spring when they’re all shriveled up. I also think they have medicinal properties, as many mushrooms do, cancer fighting and the like. But now when I eat them, which I did a few days ago on a walk to the west, I’m back in the land of rumbling insides and loss of appetite. Not my happy place.

On the lookout for mushrooms.

The random-food hazard has a big impact on my day-to-day because it means T doesn’t take me along to the barn for horse chores, since I’ll inevitably eat things I shouldn’t. And I used to love going along as her chore dog. I’d like to say I have self-control and can promise not to eat anything, but that’s just not true, and I don’t want to lie to T.

The third hazard, and this one is temporary, is snow and ice. During a spring snowstorm on Tuesday, I went out on the deck, which is typically nice grippy wood, and skated my way to the snow-covered grass. And the day after the storm, I got stuck in snow banks three times between the house and the barn. It happened to Logan in 2018 when we came home from the desert to a bunch of snow, but I never thought it would happen to me.

I did just fine in the shallow stuff.

The final hazard (of those I’ve discovered so far) is stairs. Sid has two stairs into the bedroom and three stairs at the main door (plus a ramp for me). The farm house has three stairs off the upper deck, two stairs from the kitchen into the porch, and a bunch of stairs into the basement. I’m managing the downs better than the ups and I get carried to and from the basement, but there’s now a baby gate at the top to make sure I don’t go down anything without supervision or accidentally. Sigh.

Seriously? A baby gate?

I have to admit, I’m missing life in Sid, the safety and simplicity of it, and where my people were always close. I could lie in my bed (or at the top of the stairs) and neither of my peeps would be more than ten feet away. Here at home, there are multiple rooms and they are often in different ones, leaving me to move between the two, or choose some midway point. Again…sigh.

Chilling … Sid style.

But, there have been off-leash prairie walks, a couple of turns around the Kinsmen Lake in Strathmore, and today we’re off on a little road trip to explore a provincial park and collect another companion for our barn cat Hank. He’ll probably tell you all about that in the coming weeks. And Storm is champing at the bit to tell you what’s happening in his world so you’ll likely hear from him soon as well.

So, until next time, this is Chico, slip sliding away.

Final Days on the Road

Another RV snowbird trip, my sixth, has come to an end. And it finished on a definite high note.

When last I wrote, we’d just moved from the dispersed camping area near Valley of Fire north of Las Vegas, and that spot made fourteen and a half straight weeks of boondocking. The reason this is significant is that boondocking means water rationing, rocky campsites, monitoring battery levels, finding places to drop off garbage, and other such off-grid camping necessities. Don’t get me wrong, we all love being “out there” but the humans do miss the luxuries of home after a time, like non-military-style showers, and we usually break up the winter with short stints in RV parks or campgrounds.

Looking down into the gorge from up top. Nope. I didn’t hike those stairs.

Nevada state parks are all first come, first served, and when we reached Cathedral Gorge State Park at around eleven in the morning, the sites were all full, other than two tiny, van-sized spots we had no hope of getting into. After our second time around the loop, just to make sure, we crossed paths with the ranger coming in to do his rounds. A lucky break, as it turned out. He directed us to a large pull-through site that was one of two sites set up for disabled campers. Paved, level, garbage disposal right in camp, and showers just steps away (on a paved path) from the trailer. The peeps were pretty excited, especially when the ranger told us we could stay in the site as long as we wanted. And we did. A full week! (That’s our camp in the banner image.)

Happy campers.

I didn’t try the showers, but apparently they were well worth the one- or two-quarter cost. And the scenery and hiking were worth the nightly fee. I tend to be more of a scents than views guy, but Cathedral Gorge is a spectacular little corner of Nevada. And in addition to its cathedral-like spires and slot canyons, there are three very cool communities nearby and three more state parks, all of which we explored during our week in the area.

I’d noticed T was sometimes homesick after we left Lake Havasu, but that disappeared when we got to Cathedral Gorge. It breathed a whole new life into her and we were constantly out walking around the campground or exploring the caves and canyons. At least we were until … the WINDSTORM.

Happy travellers.

It was a windy winter in general, with at least one wind advisory in every place we stayed, and many other windy days that didn’t quite reach advisory strength. But the wind at Cathedral Gorge was on a whole new level, especially in the blowing dust category. Holy sandstorm! The canyon looks like it does because of all the sandstone cliffs, which means there’s a lot of loose sand everywhere, and it was everywhere, a bunch of it inside the trailer after two days.

See all that sand just waiting to be relocated?

But we endured and got in one more hike around Juniper Draw on our last day. Between the hill climbing at Valley of Fire dispersed and the many walks at Cathedral Gorge, I was feeling pretty fit by the end of the trip, so much so that I passed Nollind and my chariot at one point on the trail. If it hadn’t been sunny and warm, I probably wouldn’t have needed a ride at all and it’s a 5+ kilometre loop!

On your left!

We spent two nights in Cedar City getting Sid ready to store for the summer, and the temperatures at 5,800 feet were a bit of a shock to all of us. My ramp became a slide after some overnight rain! Last Fur-iday morning, we dropped Sid at a storage place north of Cedar City and were on our way, homeward bound. It was a good thing I’d gotten used to riding in the front seat because there was no room in the backseat for me. We were filled to the roof with everything that needed to travel home with us.

One final night around the fire at Cathedral Gorge SP.

After two days of driving and one night in a motel in Idaho Falls, we were across the Canada/US border and home. I didn’t leap out and zoom around as I’ve done on other arrivals home, but I was pretty excited in my old-dog way. There is truly no place like home, especially when you’ve spent some time wondering if you’re ever going to see it again, like I did when I was so ill back in December/January.

Hitting the road.

I am confused about one thing, though. How did our floors get so slippery while I was gone? Did someone polish them? But, more about that next time.