Winter Travel Wrap Up
While we were all happy to have Geoff back from his recent long excursion to Finland, no one was more pleased than Emerson, our beloved pup. Emerson is a service dog by profession, and he loves to go to work with Geoff. He has other humans at work who need his professional stress-relieving skills as well, and I’m not sure how they have survived this long without Emerson in Geoff’s office. However, on these long journeys, when Geoff travels with crazy gear or has complicated flight schedules, especially when he does not have much free time, Emerson remains home with the rest of the family. His quality of life is better here at home, even if he misses Geoff and the other people he shares a workspace with at Loon Mountain.
Don’t get me wrong; he loves us too. He is always there to relieve the day's worry, put Carver to bed every night, and snuggle Greta on the couch while she does her school reading. Sometimes she reads to him because he enjoys it. And my parents, AKA Gram and Pop, come visit him for a few hours at lunchtime to let him out to pee, give lots of scratches behind his ears, wake him up (or he might nap all day), and exercise his lab legs with a ball or toy in the yard. Then when I come home from school, we go for a nice walk, which is getting nicer as we get further along into April.
But Geoff was extra tired after this trip. He came home with the added baggage of a terrible urinary tract infection and without his actual baggage, including his mono-ski and ski bag. He also had to fly in and out of Boston, which is not nearly as easy for him as our more local airport, Manchester, is for him. And it’s a longer drive, which is harder on the body when one is extra fatigued. As much as I would love a night or two, or maybe even a week, alone in a hotel room with my book or TV all to myself, I could not travel like he does in the winter.
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The number of different hotel rooms and level of truly accessible or inaccessible accommodations, let alone the fear of losing luggage, stresses me out FOR him. He can’t just go out and purchase some of his travel gear, like his toilet seat for instance, easily. Luckily for him, he sleeps well pretty much anywhere he goes, mostly because he is generally “ON” the whole time he is out of his hotel room and moving around so that when gets into bed at night, he is sound asleep very quickly. Yet, I’ve always been amazed at his ability to regroup, re-energize and refocus when he comes home about what comes next.
Of course, I wish he would get better at utilizing the family calendar, as that is the kind of mom baggage I carry around with me regularly. While his travel is not over entirely, the winter travel just about is with one more trip out to Big Sky, Montana. Then the heavy equipment, like all of our skis and his mono-ski gets the summer wax and put away for the next season. We need to make room for bikes, balls and time for yard work and late afternoon sessions in the yard with Emerson. The days are getting longer again, even if the air still smells like snow and mud, too, of course.