“Do You Take Pets?”

I bought a book on pet-friendly travel, which included a lengthy list of U.S. hotels and motels that accepted pets. I set out to learn what our options were, even though it was way too early to make any reservations. Not only did we not yet know how we would travel, but we also didn’t know our route. To complete the trifecta, even if we did decide on a route, we hadn’t yet figured out how far we could travel each day, so we wouldn’t know where to plan to stop.

To say we were at square one would be to give us way too much credit.

So at that point I was just trying to gauge how hotels would react to our request. I decided to be honest, not because that’s my natural instinct or because I thought there was any kind of moral imperative in play here.

Rather, my fear was that if I lied, we’d show up at a hotel and of course be unable to sneak the dogs in undetected, and we’d get turned away. And the only way we wouldn’t be detected was if the proprietor was in a coma. A very deep, kept-alive-by-machines coma.

So the first place I called was a motel outside of Salt Lake City. A woman cheerily told me that they were very dog-friendly, even providing water dishes and biscuits. Of course, a refundable cleaning deposit was required; fifty dollars for a dog under thirty pounds, and seventy-five dollars for one larger than that.

I hadn’t done the math, but I was pretty sure that we would be traveling with well over a ton of dog, so the cleaning deposit would probably be the GDP of a third-world country.

I told her the whole story, not because I wanted to stay in that hotel, but more to get her reaction and advice. She thought it was pretty much the funniest thing she had ever heard, but when she stopped laughing, she admitted that there was no way her manager would ever agree to it.

She wouldn’t even have the nerve to ask him, and she doubted there was a hotel manager on the planet who would go for it. Other than that, she was really encouraging.

So at that point, three months before the trip, we had no way to travel, not enough people to travel with, and no places to stay or eat along the way.

Things were really cooking.

Emmit Luther and his wife, Deb, own a bunch of Taco Bells in Georgia and live on a farm outside Atlanta. Emmit is something of a character: a big, burly, very funny guy who would happily give you the shirt off his back, though it would almost always be an SEC football jersey.

We knew the Luthers through Debbie’s job at Taco Bell, and we had spent time with them at football games and had vacationed with them once. We considered them good friends, and when they heard about our predicament, they demonstrated that we were right to make that judgment.

Deb would have to be in the office, but Emmit wanted to go on the trip. I should just let him know when to be in California, and he was in.

Not only was he in, but he was perfect. He told me that when he was younger, he drove an eighteen-wheeler cross-country for a living. Because I’m an analytical guy, I figured that an eighteen-wheeler must be a vehicle with eighteen wheels. If we wound up using vehicles of some sort, I doubted they’d have more wheels than that, so it would likely be a piece of cake for Emmit.

He was also an animal lover, and on the lunacy scale lived a life that ranked right up there with Debbie’s and mine. He and Deb had a house- and farmful of various animals, including many dogs and goats.

Emmit would fit in on the trip very, very well.

*   *   *

One of my favorite places to do book signings is Houston. I generally do them as a benefit for Golden Beginnings rescue group, in conjunction with a terrific mystery bookstore called Murder By The Book.

As rescue groups go, Golden Beginnings is as good as there is. We’ve actually gotten two goldens from them, very old dogs that were hard to place. One was a sweet, smallish dog named Buddy, and the other was a one-eared dog they called Van Gogh. They were fantastic dogs, and though neither lived very long after we got them, we were lucky to have them in our home.

I had gotten friendly with two of the women in the group, Joanie Patrick and Robin Miller, and I invited them to dinner the night before the signing. Robin brought along her husband, Randy, whom I had not previously met.

The conversation got around to our trip to Maine, which was no surprise, since every conversation I had with everyone was about that. When Randy heard about it, he didn’t hesitate; he wanted to be a part of the trip.

Randy would bring a great deal to the party. He and Robin were dedicated rescue people who had a special soft spot for senior and special-needs dogs. As a retired airline executive with an expertise in airline overhaul and maintenance, he knew how to fix stuff. That would perfectly complement me, since I knew how to break stuff. Like Emmit, Randy also had considerable cross-country driving experience.

I learned later that Randy has a real protective instinct. He felt his presence and expertise could actually help ensure the safety of everyone on the trip, human and dog, and that alone was enough to get him to sign on.

The bonus part of this was that both Emmit and Randy were “real” men. They even had toolsheds at home. Until that point, our group had consisted of Cyndi, Debbie, and me, which meant we were suffering from a “real man” deficit.

But all of a sudden we had two. And if you included me, we still had two.

Among the things we didn’t have was a date for the trip to begin. We had bought a house in Maine that was lived in only during the summers, and we were both renovating and winterizing it. A number of construction issues were coming up, and the target date kept getting pushed back.

May became June, and June became July. I told our contractors that we weren’t in a huge hurry, but that once we set on a date, then that had to be the date. Once we put the trip into motion, there was no reset button to press.

Of course, while we weren’t rushing them, the move had to be accomplished no later than October. We couldn’t take a chance on hitting a snowstorm on the way; we might never be heard from again.

They finally had a date that they were comfortable with … September 10. We told Cyndi, Randy, and Emmit, and they were fine with it. Cyndi had a friend, Mary Lynn Dundas, who wanted to go along as well, so with Debbie and me, we had six people. No way that would be enough, but we were making progress.