The Log Dog Blog

Tuesday, June 18, 2024

Road Trip to Connecticut

It's pretty well-established that I have a real soft spot for senior dogs. Six of our nine dogs have been seniors and they've been amazing, with the only downside being that we never have as much time with them as we'd like. The good news is that we make the most of the time we do have together and create as many happy memories as possible!

We took a quick road trip to Connecticut this past weekend to make some of those happy memories. The mascot for the University of Connecticut is a Husky named Jonathan, and since we wanted to visit my brother and SIL, who don't live far from Connecticut, we decided to go find the UConn statue of Jonathan and try to get a pic of Avalanche with it! It was fun to walk around the campus with him because he got a lot of attention. LOL!

mission accomplished!

acting aloof but secretly loving
all of the attention he was getting

After our stop at UConn, we drove to Rhode Island because we discovered there was another dog statue to see. Not a Husky, but Hachiko, an Akita known for his incredible loyalty. A 2009 movie was made about his life that starred Richard Gere (Hachi: A Dog's Tale), and it turns out that it was filmed in Rhode Island! When we visited Japan in 2017, we made a point of going to two of the Hachiko statues there, so when we learned of the statue in Rhode Island, we knew we had to find it! As an aside, if you haven't seen the movie, you should; it's quite the amazing story!

it was such a perfect day!

Rhode Island

the statue is in front of the train station
used for the movie location

Japan

Japan

Japan

Avalanche had his second stay in a people hotel and he was as just as perfectly behaved this time around! When I got into bed, he jumped up and curled up beside me - which might not seem particularly noteworthy if you have dogs who do this all the time, but Avalanche does not sleep on our bed with us, despite our nightly begging. And I'm very much his spare human, so it was a huge deal to me!

I can't even express how happy I was!

On Sunday, we drove to New York to visit my brother and SIL, which was wonderful, and I also got to hang out with my canine nephew, Max, who is almost 15! I love him so much!

this was a PB&J donut and it was delicious!

I love this frosty face!

family is everything

Avalanche is a super great traveler - in the car, out of the car, at rest stops, when we're out and about, and at the hotel! He makes little adventures like this weekend road trip so easy because he's such a well-behaved dog. When we adopted him almost 18 months ago and he was already 11 years old, we didn't really know what we were signing up for...we'd never owned a Husky! All we did know was that we had love and a home to offer a shelter dog. What a precious gem he has turned out to be!

Happy Tails to you!

Sunday, June 16, 2024

Monthly Magic 2023-2024

We did it! A trip to WDW one weekend each month for the 11 months of the school year!

Given how easily something could have derailed these plans, I consider this a huge success! Two of the trips almost didn't happen - December, because I was really struggling emotionally and didn't want to go, and February, because Avalanche ended up having surgery and we didn't want to leave him while he was recovering.

Our previous annual passes expired in 2019 and we had plans to get them again when we returned to WDW, but then the pandemic happened and Disney stopped their annual pass sales. We went several times before sales resumed (May 2021, June 2021, January 2022, April 2022, and January 2023) and waited impatiently for the chance to be passholders again.

We were beyond super excited to finally buy annual passes when they became available in April 2023! In those in-between years, we often talked about our favorite things and what we missed most about not visiting.

So when we decided to take one trip per month for the 2023-2024 school year, we came up with a list of things we wanted to experience each month and decided to do/see/eat each of the things on our list every single month. If you know us, you are well aware of how much we love to complete a checklist...going to games in all of the NHL arenas, going to games in all of the MLB stadiums, visiting all 50 states, etc. So this list became our mission for each of our WDW trips!

We came up with 14 things and as you'll see from the photos below, we were successful with one exception (there was no carrot cake cookie at DHS in December because they had a holiday themed cookie instead)!

We also wanted to stay in different hotels for each of the trips and we accomplished this, even with three of the trips involving two different resorts (the first two of which were due to switching resorts out of necessity and the third of which was due to adding a day onto our trip) - meaning we stayed at 14 different resorts over the course of the 11 trips! One of the items on our monthly To Do list was to take a picture of the resort sign, but I had to settle for a carpet at Animal Kingdom Lodge, Wilderness Lodge, and Yacht Club because the signs were difficult to get to.

Enjoy the photos!

1) Airport / Plane Selfie