Walmart parking lot it was still raining very hard. Mom said that the car-house may take our time away, that we may have to live like a couple of strays, but “dammit this trip was supposed to be for running and hiking and that’s what we were going to do, rain or shine!” She said it through her teeth, which usually means that life coaches should butt out and just play along.
Once we had run away from the lake for nearly a mile she said, “I don’t remember making this many turns when we came up from the van…” Uh oh… Then we saw a river. We definitely hadn’t seen a river before. “Mom, how are we going to find the lake again. How are we going to get back to the car-house?” I asked. “Well yesterday when we got lost, we went back in time for help. This time, we’ll go even further back in time… to when people could track animals and each other by their footprints. If we follow our footprints in this soft, wet sand, we can tell where we’ve been and find our way back to the lake.” This sounded silly, like a human trying to pretend that they were a dog following a scent… Only the rain had washed all the scent trails away. This plan would never work…
But it did work! Sometimes we had to look around a bit to find our old feet, but we did find them and they brought us back to the lake eventually so we could keep going around the circle. Finally, just when I thought we might have to run around the whole thing again, Mom recognized a signpost and soon after that we found the car-house, right where we’d left it. I didn’t want to tell Mom, but I can tell you guys… I was a little scared we were going to be at that ugly lake forever!
As soon as Mom gave me responsibility I ran off chanting, “goody goody bunny droppings!” Humans may track footprints with their eyes, but dogs track footprints with their noses and I could smell that this place was positively hopping with bunnies. I ran all around that place sniffing the air, leaping over bushes and sniffing in holes. I was an action hero, like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.
We had another miracle at the next bathroom, which turned out to be another museum-trail. This museum-trail had funny rocks that were shaped like cheese. There were scratches in the rocks that were apparently important to somebody, but I didn’t care about those. I just wanted to climb on the rocks and look out into the sky.
“Now don’t you feel silly? Sometimes you get so freaked out when there’s no danger. Do you think there MIGHT be other times when you do the same thing…?” I said, rolling my eyes.
-Oscar the Pooch
#Dogrunning #ponyexpress #roadtrip #Trailrunning #ponyexpresstrail #petroglyphs
