great family fun in new mexico

Here’s a bit of advice for all you out there that might have dogs and kids…DO NOT ATTEMPT TO TRAVEL WITH BOTH!!!! IT IS NOT A VACATION, IT IS WORK!!!
Here are a few highlights from our recent trip:

1) The poop stains in the toilet of the first place we stayed. Not only were they in the bowl, but a little bit on the seat as well. Seeing this made me a little less worried about the fact that we might be leaving dog hair on the couch. Plus the place was way too small to have a baby and dogs, especially when you factor in the space hogging playpen that needed to be set up in the bedroom for Sara to sleep in. This left no room to really walk in the bedroom, just a little corridor of space between the foot of the bed and the wall where the dogs were corralled so Sara could crawl around in the living area. However, the view from the back porch wasn't too bad.

2) Having to drive back 3 and a half hours to the hospital. What do you do with dogs in this situation? Put them in a kennel. A crappy little fenced in area on a concrete floor. Not really fun for them I am sure.

3) While we were in the ER for four hours waiting for my ovarian cyst diagnosis I was playing with Sara on the bed. She was laying flat on her back and I was making her laugh a lot. I guess she must have built up a lot of saliva from all the laughing, because she started choking, for real. Her face got all red, she wasn’t making any noise. It was very scary. We whacked her on the back a little and it stopped. I guess in the middle of an ER in a big city is the best place for her to be choking, but we would rather that she not choke.

4) Sara fell asleep a few times right around the time that we wanted to eat dinner. So we couldn’t really go out to a restaurant. We were in a town that currently doesn’t have a grocery store because the roof caved in with all the snow last winter. So we ended up ordering pizza from the little fast food place two doors down. It was the second worst pizza I have ever had in my life. The worst was in Mexico. We couldn’t even eat it. It ended up in the trash. Another night I ended up eating cereal and tuna salad in a can from the dollar store. Fine dining at its best!

5) When we went to pick up the dogs from the kennel, we discovered that they picked up some little friends while in the kennel: TICKS! So when we arrived at the disgusting Motel 6 in Albuquerque Iffy hopped in the shower with the dogs and gave them a bath with some flea and tick shampoo. It didn’t really do the trick however, and when we got home we had to use some more toxic stuff on them, which is always nice to have around the house when you have a little one. I also can not fully describe the feeling of dread that I felt walking into that motel room. It was still rather early in the day. About 3:30 or so. The floor was gross, so Sara was NOT going to be crawling around on it. I felt like, “how the hell are we going to kill the rest of the day?” Being in a big city, normally we would have hit up some stores that we don’t often get the opportunity to go to, but with the dogs in the middle of the summer, that was out of the question, can’t leave them in the room, and can’t leave them in the car. We did hit up a Pakistani grocery store though, picked up 80 pounds of rice, so we should be set for a while.

6) After leaving Albuquerque we stayed one more night with our friend Doug in Capitan before heading in the general direction of home. On the way we stayed a night in Cloudcroft NM in a little cottage with a kitchen. This was probably the best place we stayed, however the weather was CRAPPY. Hurricane Dolly was causing thunderstorms and flash flooding in the area. Ruidoso NM just a bit south of Capitan and north of Cloudcroft was declared a disaster area. We drove through there after leaving Doug, and it was amazing to see the tiny little creek where the dogs had been splashing around just a week earlier, was now a raging torrential river that took out bridges, stranded campers and even killed one person. Driving down to Cloudcroft looked a lot like being in Oregon in October. It was misty, foggy, wet and cold. Not what you would expect from New Mexico in late July. So even though we had booked three nights there, we only stayed one. By this point we were done with our “relaxing” vacation. We decided it was time to go home and finally stop working so hard.

Overall, the trip was a wash. I guess we did succeed in maybe finding a place for future vacations, which was the intent. But for me the bigger more important purpose of the trip was to spend some time together as a family, just kick back and relax, and that most certainly did not happen the way we wanted it to.

The things I learned from this vacation are;
~ I am DONE traveling with dogs, unless we have a place to go to where they will be
fenced in and can be left behind (like our own cabin)
~ I HATE motels.
~ I HATE eating on the road; once again this goes back to the dogs. If you have dogs
in the car in the summer in the southwest, you can’t really go in and sit down
anywhere, so you end up with crappy drive-thru way too often.

Here’s hoping the next trip will be better, whenever that may be.

Joanne

p.s Here's some cute Sara pictures