Our plans were to leave Friday morning between 8 and 9am, and drive to Medford, OR, stay the night and then finish the trip on Saturday. We made incredibly good time (averaging 80 mph once we got across the Bay Bridge) and arrived in Ashland, OR a little before 2pm. J. said “why don’t we just go all the way home? There’s nothing for us to do here . . . and we could sleep in our own bed instead of a hotel bed.” I told him he was crazy, but right.

We spent an hour getting hot sandwiches (BBQ chicken with corn and cheese on ww from the very yummy Pangea), a coffee for me, and taking Sasha to the dog park for a long game of chuckit. When she was well and truly tired, we wiped her down, gave her water, and then went on our way — time spent: 70 minutes.

We figured we’d be getting home aroud midnight, based on past trips and the necessity to take Sasha for walks regularly. But in actuality, we pulled into our garage at 10:30pm. And we were stopping for bathroom breaks, dog walks, soda refills, and gas refills about ever 2 hours. Amazing.

Not by design or anything, but I ended up doing the whole drive It’s been a long time since I was behind the wheel for that long a time, and my joints were pretty achey the next day. But we had a lot of fun, had some good conversations, and laughed at the puppy frequently.

Every once in a while she’d sit up and put her head over the grate between the seats. And she’d just hang her head there, very clearly saying “Is this REALLY what we’re doing? REALLY? Are we there yet?” And then she’d heave a huge sigh and go lie down again. We were laughing, and incredibly grateful that she was so very very calm about the long drive. She never balked at ‘let’s go for a ride’ and was very good about giving us plenty of warning that it was time for her to take care of business. (That’s a euphemism.)

Best moment: we pulled off the freeway at our exit and started down the hill. Her head popped up, she jumped up and started sniffing the air very intently and eagerly. Then she started to get very excited — she knew we were home and she was delighted. Apparently we *had* down the right thing, and now the long drive was worthwhile.