We drove (yes we're nuts!) to Washington state and back from Massachusetts in the Summer of 2006!  (this narrative was written by Katrin for publication in the North East Flat Coated Retriever Club Newsletter it seems to work here also)

Lisa and I began planning this trip after our shorter 10 day drive to and from NADAC Championships in Oct 2005.  We figured, if we could co-habitat in a car for that long, what was anther 11 days (for 21 in total)?  The whole premise behind it was the fact that I needed to get in an agility judging clinic for my every 2 year renewal, yet I am still not old enough to rent a car so flying to a clinic alone was out of the question.  Idaho is NADAC head quarters, therefore a judging clinic, and seeing how it was only another 6 hours to Washington and the Pacific Ocean and how cool it would be to say you drove from one end of the country to the other, we decided to do it!

We began our trek on Wed August 2^nd after I finished teaching my evening classes and got in a good night’s worth of driving making it all the way to Pennsylvania.  I should say, I have insomnia, so the thought of driving till 1am wasn’t all that unfathomable and that’s pretty much what we did.  We got up the next morning, discovered that I cannot drive in the morning, but Lisa can, so set up the formula of Lisa driving 9am-4pm and me 4pm till 12 or 1am.  It was long, but it worked.  That Thursday we made it through to Illinois, just outside of Chicago.  Did you know that there are absolutely no tourist traps in PA, OH, ID or IL on Route 80?  We were so ready to stop and there was NOTHING!

Friday and Saturday were tourist trap days though J  We hit South Dakota!  So you drive through IL, WI, MN and have these nice hills and the Wisconsin Dells and the 1,000 lakes in Minnesota and so on, then you hit South Dakota.  And there is flat.  You can see straight ahead for miles and miles and miles.  Until you see a bill board proclaiming the “1880 Town” or the “Buffalo Ranch” and since by then you are so sick of nothing, you have to stop!  It’s the perfect ploy and probably the only reason anyone ever stops in South Dakota. 

Friday night we got to Pierre, South Dakota.  Which, if you didn’t know, is the capital of South Dakota and about as big as Foxboro (where I live in MA).  There is 1 main street, 2 hotels, a few restaurants and that’s about it.  You drive from Route 90 along a perfectly straight and flat highway for 30 miles to get to Pierre and then you practically drive through it in about 5 minutes.  But the hotel person was very nice and ignored the fact that we had 4 dogs and weren’t supposed to (thanks AAA for getting us a supposedly ‘dog friendly’ hotel!).  Actually that happened quite a bit on the trip, I think only 1 hotel actually ‘allowed’ dogs, the rest just looked the other way.  Matter of fact, when someone backed into my truck in a hotel parking lot and we got a 8am wake up call from the front desk to tell me so and Clara started barking because the phone rang and I was sure it was a call to tell us to ‘get out!’, they didn’t say a word.  We were very very lucky!! 

Saturday we stopped quite a bit and had a good time going places.  We drove through the Badlands, which were absolutely phenomenal!  They were gorgeous.  Mother Nature is amazing. 

Then we went to Mount Rushmore which was completely non awe-inspiring.  After the Badlands, Mount Rushmore was piddly. 

And then we were into Montana, which really is “Big Sky Country.”  That state too was amazing with scenery!  Most scenic things are lost on me, I just don’t ‘get it’.  But this trip I ‘got it’.  The western part of this country is just so beautiful.

One thing we learned though is, if you are going to stop in Montana for the night, pre-book your hotel room.  We drove through the entire state and could not find one hotel with any rooms left!  We figured, hey it was Montana, it’s a big state, over 600 miles to get through it, there has to be a room, no reason to pre-book.  We were dead wrong.  So after I took over driving at 4pm that Saturday, I just didn’t stop driving.  We did the Continental Divide through the Rocky Mountains at 3am on Sunday morning.  I will NEVER do that again as long as I live!  Way too scary.  And come to find out later, when someone said ‘didn’t you see a moose?’ that moose like to walk out on the roads in the mountains and then you hit one, total your car and possibly yourself.  Very nerve wrecking to think about it.

At 3pm on that Sunday, after 4 and a half days of driving and over 3,200 miles, we arrived at Sandee Cassidy and Chris Butler’s (Regal & Niche’s breeders) in Snohomish, WA.  And we were not ready to kill each other amazingly enough!  The dogs were completely going out of their minds by then and Niche, who is a bit off the walls to begin with, was going completely out of his skin.  We had tried very hard to find a place to run them at least once a day after dinner, but it wasn’t for very long and not nearly enough of what they needed.  But they were very good in the truck, didn’t destroy anything.  James decided he liked to bark at motor cycles and considering it was Sturgis Weekend, which we didn’t know anything about until we hit Sturgis and the bikes were all over the place, he was very happy.

And now starts the ‘doggie’ part of the trip! 

One of the themes on this trip was “Clara Across America” as Clara was in her crate in the extended cab and easily accessible where as my boys were in the back of the truck (under the cap, on their platform), so was prime for photo opportunities.  So now we have photos of Clara, Lisa and me, just about every where.  And many photos through blurry, dog slimed windows (which we forgot to clean when we started the trip, very silly thing to forget).

At Sandee and Chris’ it was great to see them again and for them to see the boys.  Sandee hadn’t seen Regal since he was 9 months old at the 1999 Specialty in RI and he is now 8yrs and hadn’t seen Niche since he was 8 weeks old and left her house to come to mine, and he is now 2yrs. 

Sandee is also a Miniature Horse breeder, and had some foals, so we got to play with the horses too!  And we have photos of Clara with a baby Miniature Horse whose head is about as big as hers. 

After visiting for the night, we drove to the Pacific Ocean about 1.5hrs away.  In order for Lisa, who had never been to the Pacific, to get her feet wet and take another photo of Clara, we illegally parked as there was no way I was paying $5 for 5 minutes!  We were on a tight budget!

Then we were off to Idaho and NADAC for 10 days.  We decided to camp at NADAC, so Monday was spent setting up shop and unpacking the truck.  Somehow or other we had managed to fit everything we needed in that truck, didn’t forget anything.  We found a nice lake for the dogs to swim in, where we ended up taking them every day and where I think they all got giardia- yuck!  The rest of the week was my judging clinic, so Lisa got to have her ‘vacation’ while I worked, and the weekend was a trial, which was great fun.  Learned lots of new things.  But the best dog part of this trip was the week after, at the Foundations Clinic!  The clinic was Tue/Wed/Thur but we were only able to go on Tue and Wed as we had to be in Chicago for Friday night so I could judge that weekend.  I took Niche and Lisa took Clara to the clinic and we learned a ton!  Sharon Nelson and Becky Woodruff are phenomenal instructors and dog people.  Their wealth of knowledge is amazing. 

Most of what we learned was about building a solid working relationship with your dog, which I have applied a lot of to James (who you may remember is my service dog and rescue which had real issues with ‘come’) since then and it has worked in ways I could only dream of.  He can actually go to the house and car and be in the yard off leash now and not go anywhere and come when I call him when majorly distracted.  We even got a jumpers Q (his hardest class because of focus) with a 2^nd place at a trial in Oct!  We are actually ‘connecting’ now on the agility field.  We also learned about ‘gate training’ which is using PVC and mesh ‘gates’ to work on contacts, distance, directionals, discrimination, jumping skills etc.  I decided to take what I had learned in Idaho and bring it to my agility classes and have now completely revamped my agility program because of the way that this new stuff gets people and dogs to interact.  It is just way too cool!

After the very educational and exciting time in Idaho, we drove at break neck speeds on Thursday and Friday to get to Chicago in time for me to judge an agility trial at 8am Saturday morning.  We got there in plenty of time and had a great time.  I was judging for Annette Narrell’s group, and she is a flat-coat person as well.  We stayed and extra night in Chicago and went to see Navy Pier on Monday, which is dog friendly.   They say Chicago is the most dog friendly city in the country and I believe it!  Though driving through it without a GPS would not be a pleasant experience I think.

We then took our time getting home, stopping in Pittsburgh to visit a few friends of mine there and finally making it home in time for me to go judge again on Staten Island.

All in all it was an amazing trip, and I can now say that I’ve driven from one side of the country to the other.  Lisa and I are still talking and even planning our next big trip- to New Mexico and back in 2009!  The dogs were terrific the whole trip and, minus the giardia, made it through with flying colors.  21 days, 14 states, 4 dogs, 2 people, 1 truck, 17 rolls of film and a million memories.  A trip to last a life time!

Lisa searched long and hard to find a photo op with Clara and a TeePee