Tamarr Memorial Fund

Okay, today was strange.  For a few days, my mom has been collecting stuff.  Today she started putting it into the car.  She also put a bunch of clothes in the suitcase – the only time she’s done that before is when we moved, but this packing wasn’t like moving.  But I’m a Service Dog and used to change, so no big deal, she often puts a bunch of stuff in the car to take somewhere, right?  I followed her around as things seemed different.  She kept saying something about traveling and that she hasn’t been able to do this in many years.  I’m not sure what that means.  I’m just a little over a year old.  We drive around town all the time, so what’s the big deal?  We even moved from the apartment into the house where we now have a big yard.  (I love the yard, by the way, so I think the move was a good thing.)  But she kept talking about traveling like it was something different.  She says we won’t be home again for about two weeks.  I wonder where we will go and where we will stay and what we will do. 

So here’s our house as we drove away.  I hope we’ll see it again.  I like it there.

From the house we went to the bank and then to the library.  We go to the bank all the time, so no big deal.  We go to the library sometimes too, although today mom got a whole bunch of books on tape.  She usually only gets one or two books on paper, or just goes in to check on something.  I don’t really know what a book on tape is, but she says we can listen to them while we drive instead of her just reading them.  I didn’t know why we’d want to do that, we’re never in the car for more than 30 minutes and that’s only when she takes me to the chiropractor, Dr. Shanie Cahill, in Geneseo.

Then we drove down by the Mississippi river.  Boy is it choppy today.  The wind is blowing hard.  Here’s a couple pictures of the river.

We drove across the I-74 bridge.  We go across there all the time.  Sometimes we do stuff in Illinois too and that’s the way to go to see Dr. Cahill.  But here’s where things started to be different.  Instead of going on I-80, she turned and kept following I-74.  But I didn’t worry – well I fell asleep.  I sleep in the car all the time.  I always stay on the floor of the van behind mom.  Every once in a while I’d pop my head up and look around.  There wasn’t a lot to see, just farmland and a few trees.  Here’s some pictures from the drive:

In one of those pictures you can see my reflection even!  Mom says we were just driving across Illinois, so as you can see we didn’t find much interesting.  This is kinda fun though, I’m getting to see more of the world than I’ve seen since I was 8 weeks old and I barely remember that trip from my breeder’s home in Missouri to the Quad Cities.  Mom says I cried practically the whole time on that trip, can you believe that?  I even had Tamarr keeping me company that time.  Well no crying on this one, now I know to lie quietly in the car even though Tamarr is no longer with us.

So we drove for a little over three hours and stopped in a place my mom called Champaign, Illinois.  We stopped at the Applebee’s – it was actually in Savoy. Here she met for the first time a friend that she’s known for several years.  I’m not quite sure how that works, but she says it’s something about being a friend online.  He was really cool and they talked about all kinds of stuff.

We then drove around the University of Illinois campus.  She says it’s a lot different from where she studied at Brigham Young University.  She’s used to a campus you can walk around.  In fact she says there are no roads inside of campus at BYU, only around the outside of campus.  She wanted to visit the Computer Science Department where she had once considered going to graduate school.  But it was late in the day, she didn’t know where it was, and there probably wouldn’t have been anyone there anyway.  So we just drove around and looked around.  I forgot to take any pictures here.

Then we got back on the road again. We continued on to Danville, Illinois.  We stopped at a hotel and walked in.  The clerk said “We don’t take pets.”  Well I’m not a pet so that’s okay.  But they also didn’t have any rooms.  So we went over to the Sleep Inn and there we were able to get in.  They take pets too, but I haven’t seen any.

I got to stay for the first time in a hotel!  It is weird, we only have one room and I’m used to wandering the whole house when I want to.  But my mom was with me and I finally got my dinner!  Yay for food!

I’ll take a picture or two before we leave in the morning.  My mom says it’s a pretty typical “hotels by the freeway” area.  We aren’t actually going into Danville so I don’t even know what’s there.  Tomorrow we are continuing onward and going into Indiana.  Mom says that’s something like going from Iowa to Illinois.  We do that all the time, so it’s no big deal.

So here’s a map of our “travels” so far.

If this is what traveling is about, driving down the road and visiting a friend, I guess it’s okay.  But I hope we do something more interesting than just drive.  Mom says we will do more interesting stuff, but that we’ll cover about 2,000 miles so a lot of driving too.