On Traveling with a Dog

This is one of my all-time favorite Izzy stories.

Almost 2 years after leaving Baltimore, I convinced Shelly, another member of my Ithaca caregiving crew, to take me on a mini break down there to visit friends. My friend Peter lived outside of Baltimore and invited us to stay in his accessible mother-in-law suite, and he made the deal even sweeter when he told me I could bring Izzy. Predictably, Shelly, Izzy and I left Ithaca two hours after we intended to, and I quickly realized we were not going to arrive at our intended destination until after 10 o’clock at night. Under normal, even perhaps highly trafficked circumstances, the drive from my house in Ithaca to Baltimore city is 5 – 5 ½ hours max. With Shelly driving, however, the same exact drive (even without traffic) took almost seven. I blame it on her slightly abnormal obsession with McDonald’s unsweetened iced tea which necessitates we stop almost hourly to pee. At 9 o’clock, still north of Baltimore and more than an hour away from Peter’s, Shelly and I aborted the mission and elected to find a hotel room for the night. The only problem was my beast.

Izzy, Shelly, and me on the Inner Harbor

Luckily for us we had her therapy vest in the car, and it would only be for one night. We pulled into a Hampton Inn a mere 15 minutes north of Baltimore city, got an accessible room with a roll in shower and the three of us retired for the night. Izzy was a picture of perfection, she ate her dinner in the room, went out for a nice walk before bed, did not bark or whine when strangers walked by and snuggled up with me in the queen-sized bed all night. The next day we coordinated plans to meet my friend Lena for a trip to Whole Foods and a nostalgic walk along the waterfront in Baltimore. As we walked/wheeled, she convinced us to find a hotel within walking distance of downtown rather than trek to Peter’s house in Silver Spring. Considering everything Shelly and I planned to do was downtown – including our later dinner plans – we were easily convinced. After the previous days’ interminable drive from Ithaca, another 45 minutes seemed daunting. Especially given Shelly’s obsession with iced tea, and the traffic on I-95. I called Peter and told him we’d see him at dinner and used the (presumably now obsolete) Hotels Tonight app to find an inexpensive hotel room in the Inner Harbor. 

We told Lena we’d see her later and headed a few blocks away to the hotel. Izzy, adorned in her therapy vest, got settled into yet another hotel room and Shelly and I did our best to make her feel comfortable before we left. She ate her dinner, we left her water bowl in plain view, and she had access to two queen size beds of her choice. Relatively certain she was tired after our walk anyway, Shelly and I headed out to meet my friends for dinner. Our reservations were at 6 o’clock at a restaurant about 10 blocks away from the hotel. As Shelly and I left the lobby I said to the concierge, “I’ve never left my therapy dog behind in a hotel room, and sometimes she gets anxious without me, so please call my number if there are any problems.”

Shelly and I got into the van and headed to City Café. The traffic was horrendous. 20 minutes after leaving the hotel, we’d barely made it five blocks. And then the inevitable: my phone rang, it was an unknown Baltimore number. Shit. Without functioning hands, I was no help, and Shelly had to reach over and grab my phone in order to answer it while navigating rush-hour traffic. The man on the other end of the phone sounded frazzled: “Ma’am, I’m sorry to tell you but it seems your therapy dog is causing problems on the eighth floor. There have been some complaints about the noise coming from your room. Can you please come back?” Naturally we were on a one-way street going north, so by the time we’d turned around and fought through thick traffic heading back to the hotel, we were already late for our intended dinner reservations. I stayed in the car while Shelly ran in to grab the beast. Moments later she was back in the car with Izzy in tow.

Me: Where is her leash?
Shelly: I didn’t grab it, she was already out of the hotel room when I got to the eighth floor.
Me: What are you talking about?
Shelly: She greeted me as soon as the elevator door opened, so I did not even go to the room. Someone must have gotten her out before I got there.
Me: Shelly, that makes no sense. Why would the hotel staff let a dog out of the room to wander around the hotel without a person?
Shelly: I don’t know, it did not make sense to me either.

Then it dawned on me: the door to the hotel room was a lever. My crazy dog had let herself out of the room. I called Peter with my predicament and explained that we’d be late, and that my dog had broken out of our hotel room and would be joining us at dinner. Shelly and I crawled our way up Charles Street back towards our original destination and eventually arrived a mere 20 minutes late. Unable to find parking, I called Peter again and begged for his assistance. I was anxious to see all of my old teacher friends and felt like a proper asshole for being late. Meanwhile, Shelly’s hair was about to fall out of her head after driving through Baltimore traffic, and trying to parallel park on crowded one-way streets was beyond what either of us could handle. Peter traipsed out of the restaurant as Shelly unloaded me from the van, and I implored – as Shelly passed off the keys – “Can you please put Izzy’s vest on and bring her in after you park? I think it’s still too hot for her to sit in the van.”

Shelly and I went into the restaurant, completely forgetting that Izzy didn't have a leash in the van. Once I introduced Shelly to my favorite friends from Baltimore, all of whom had been sitting at the table for at least 30 minutes, I awkwardly parked my chair under the edge of the long table and turned around just as Peter walked in with Izzy. He had removed his belt and looped it through her collar, and had buckled her therapy dog vest around her midriff rather than around her chest, so as she walked it wiggled down towards her hind end and resembled a diaper. Meanwhile, unaccustomed to being in restaurants or surrounded by so many friendly people, Izzy was ebullient; her eyes squinted as if she were smiling, she tilted her nose in the air to smell all the delicious food and she wiggled with excitement. I could almost hear her say, “See what good things happen when I escape from hotel rooms?”

We ate dinner, shared dessert and made general merriment until the post-meal surprise: tickets to see Peter Bradley Adams at a local venue, one of my favorite singer-songwriters. The concert was scheduled for 8 o’clock, so we needed to head out as quickly as possible. The only problem? Izzy. What was I going to do with my dog during a two-hour concert? Mercifully, one of my friends at dinner was not accompanying us to the concert, and he volunteered to dog sit for the rest of the evening. (Probably something he will never do again.)

The concert was incredible. Shelly describes Peter Bradley Adams as a “closed mouth singer” but his voice resonates with me, and beyond that, I just felt so loved and so grateful to everyone who made the entire evening possible. And despite the fact that my therapy dog escaped from a hotel room, made us late to dinner, and ruined any chance of my friend Matt having a relaxing evening with his wife due to Izzy's irrational anxiety about spending time with strangers, I will always look back on that night as one of my top 10 favorite memories. It certainly would have been more seamless without Izzy, but it would not have been as memorable. For any of us.