Trip Tips from Tresa
Many of you have asked me for some travel tips from my recent two week trek out west with my pups. Here are some things that I have found to be useful and hope you will too.
Traveling with young pups, you always have to have backups of the standard things. Bowls, blankets, crate 
pads and leashes. Somehow we needed two of these things along the trip. I also had an easy accessed ex-pen for our quick stops at the rest areas. We could put the two pups inside the pen and have a bite to eat. The older dogs were content and well behaved under or near our table but the pups needed extra time to burn off some of that energy. They also needed extra chewy treats and I brought along the bully sticks, bully straps and steer bites – all great to keep puppies quiet and occupied while driving a long distance. My friend brought raw rib bones and those were a big, big hit! I got tags for the collars with my cell phone and my husband’s numbers both printed on there. In the odd chance I would not be able to have access to my cell phone (in case of an accident), I put my husbands number on there too since he would be at home back in Wisconsin. I did find out that I needed an extra collar when traveling with Woody. On the last day of the trial, I took him for a long walk up the sage-covered hillside and he was having a grand time romping and running all over. After the 40 minute play time was over, I reached to hook him up so I could return back to the van – hmmm, nothing to hook up to!?! I realized that searching through the brush was NOT going to help so he was loaded up without a collar. Luckily, Border Collies In Action had a booth at the trial and I stopped by there after I finished scribing for the day. They had a lovely leather collar for $10.00 that included an engraved brass name plate. So, in about 10 minutes, Woody was back in business with a new leather collar for his trip home!
I always travel with my essential oil diffuser (this link is to my favorite one) and the oils of Peace & Calming, Lavender and Purification. I’d crank up the diffuser when we got to the hotel and things smelled nice and we’d have a little more Peace & Calming with the crazy pups! I also had my spray bottle of Thieves cleaner for the occasional accidents in the room (or crate) and rolls of paper towels.
Many asked, how do you travel with raw food for dogs and be gone for a longer period of time. Well, I used Oma’s Pride raw food for dogs as the primary basis of food. I bought 2 pound packages since I had two dogs I’m feeding each day. The 2 pound packages fit nicely in my cooler and I could get about 8 of them in 
the smaller hotel size freezers. I loaded a typical 36 qt. cooler full of the packages and packed it solidly with ice. Then I used my plug in cooler, and loaded that too. This cooler has two ways to plug in: in your car cigarette lighter and, with an adapter, in a wall outlet in the hotel room. I was lucky that the weather was rather cool since this cooler keeps the food “40 degrees cooler than outside temps.” So it worked really well for us on the trip.
Occasionally, we went to the grocery store for some chicken legs/wings and other raw food goodies for the pups and that helped the food last longer on the trip.
And, where would we be with out our iPhone app, Dog Park Finder. I know that a lot of performance dog people really don’t like dog parks and generally, neither do I, but when you’re on the road with some wild 
puppies, you’ll make situations work! We could time our arrival at the dog parks to be in less busy times and could pick and choose from the good descriptions on the iPhone app – they were fairly accurate. This picture is of 3 of the pups at a dog park in Nebraska. They had this nice kiddie pool that we filled with fresh water for them to play in. There were no other dogs there in the whole 45 minutes we were at the park.
Lastly, you need to travel with a sense of humor. Many times we’d just shake our heads at the antics of the dogs. One very funny thing that happened was actually on the last night we stayed in a hotel. We were pushing to get home and finally stopped very late at a hotel in Iowa. It wasn’t the cleanest hotel but it accepted dogs and we were tired. We got settled in the room ate our dinner, fed the dogs and then took them out for a walk. 
There wasn’t a lot of grassy spots so we headed to the corner tree. The dogs just about pulled our arms off to get there – wow they must really have to go! The all stopped in front of a stock trailer and when we looked in side – SCORE!!!, it was loaded sheep. We all had a good laugh over that.
We had a great time and learned a lot about packing light, making the best of casual meals and enjoying the time with our best buddies, the border collies.
