Travels with Cooper

Several people have asked how Cooper is doing with all this traveling. The short answer is: he’s doing great.

Two of his favorite things in the world are car rides, and being sandwiched between the two of us, and this trip gives him endless amount of both. There is a large space between the driver and passenger seats, and that and the area behind the seats are carpeted in dog beds. He spends most of his time while we’re in motion wedged into that space, or sprawling across his bed with his head between our seats when he feels like spreading out. He also likes maneuver himself so that the privacy curtain is draped over him at night and will sometimes peek out from under it, reluctant to get up in the morning, earning him the nickname “Princess Petunia.”

He developed a trick early on of climbing into the drivers seat when we would leave him in the RV, which wasn’t a problem until he started leaning on the horn. We now put a yoga mat on the seat to keep him off of it, which causes him to climb onto the passenger seat instead. Also fine, except that he would rest his chin on the door ledge and trigger the automatic locks. We found a bottle cap to tape over it to keep him from unlocking the door, so now I’m unable to lock or unlock the doors from my seat.

Cooper’s always been a water dog, unable to resist walking straight into any ocean, lake, or stream he happens across, but we’ve also discovered that he’s a sand dune dog. While he got plenty of beach time all down the coast, the real joy he gets from running down a sand dune didn’t surface until Coral Pink Sand Dunes in Utah. Since then he’s also raced up and down the dunes at White Sands in New Mexico and Great Sand Dune in Colorado. There have been a couple of tumbles and one outright face plant when he leaped straight into the side of a dune at White Sands, but he gets right back up and tears off again.

That's a 12-year-old dog, y'all!

P.S. I can't tell if the video will play, so if it doesn't, I'll try to fix it later.