Now that the dust has settled on Raider’s and my 2025 obedience trial season, it’s time to review a critical element that can make or break the success of any team.
Packing for the weekend.
If your non-dog-showing human partner has ever looked at the pile of bags sitting by the back door on a Friday afternoon and said, “You’re just leaving for the weekend, right?”, you understand.
If the show site was within a two-hour radius, I used to be that handler who got up at the hour of stupid on Saturday and drove there from home to avoid hotel expenses. I would drive home again at the end of the day, fall into bed and get up the next morning to do it all again. Driving back and forth to shows eliminated the need for packing clothes, toiletries and other survival gear like four pair of shoes, five jackets, my laptop and forty-seven feet of charging cables. I told myself I was saving money, which was ridiculous, because people who do dog sports save money by living on ramen noodles and not buying their husband Christmas gifts. Sorry, honey. Love ya, but entry fees.
As the years and the odometer clicked by, I did the math and realized I was not, in fact, saving anything. Fuel costs, plus wear and tear on my vehicle as I racked up the highway miles, ate up the imagined savings earned by avoiding hotels and restaurant meals.
Plus, as I—ahem—matured, I discovered I really disliked driving in the dark. Dark driving is rife with annoying things like deer. And other drivers.
With the decision to abandon my long haul, road warrior lifestyle and embrace the “get a good night’s sleep within twenty minutes of the show site” approach, came the need to become an efficient packer. Sure, I’d hotel’d it enough over the years to have a good grip on the basics, but I was not necessarily good at it.
There is a fine art to assembling all of the stuff you need for a weekend on the road and packing it neatly into your car. And by luggage, I mean everything from that screen-printed canvas bag from a national specialty twenty years ago to the wheeled carry-on with its fancy 360 degree spinning wheels and titanium handle that could withstand being flung around by gorillas in a remake of the 1970s Samsonite commercials. (Yes, I’m that old. We’ve discussed that. Move on.)
Like everything else that comes with the glamorous dog handler lifestyle, packing is a minefield of overthinking. I admire the people who can throw a toothbrush and a change of underwear in a backpack and be away from home for three days without looking like a refugee. If I tried that, the only thing I’d pull off is the bridge troll look.
I've created a master packing list to ensure I don't forget anything vital. The essential categories break down as follows.
The dogs’ training gear bag: leashes, collars, dumbbell, backup dumbbell, toys, treats, brush, training journal, obedience regs, weekend judging program, etc. Basically, all the essentials you need at the trial. If you forget your toothbrush, you can go to Walmart and get another one. If you forget your custom-sized, hand-crafted, maple and cherry wood dumbbell, you’re screwed. The gear bag is the first thing that goes in the car.
The people bag: human clothing and toiletries. Regardless of the season, deciding what to take for a weekend means consulting multiple forecasts, tea leaves and a crystal ball. I end up packing more clothes than I need but hey, I like to be prepared. Husband points out I am prepared to not come home for two weeks. He likes his little jokes.
The dogs’ motel bag: dog food, food and water bowls, sheet(s) to cover the bed and/or furniture, entertainment items (toy, bully sticks, bully stick holder), poop bags, extra poop bags and anything that didn't fit in the people bag.
The food bag: snacks. Self-explanatory. Long trip? Lots of snacks. Short trip? Same amount of snacks. Possibility of getting caught in a blizzard on I-80? All the snacks. Don’t take chances.
The cooler: more snacks. And pop.
It should end there, but it doesn’t.
If you’re showing in Utility, you’ll have an article bag(s) and/or extra articles. Extra dumbbell. Extra gloves. A full set of portable jumps, forty feet of ring gate and stanchions, platforms, props and the entire freaking kitchen sink for practice at the motel when the weather is cooperative.
Now let’s talk about coats. Rain coat. Warm coat. Nanook of the North coat. Jacket for a chilly show site. Don’t forget gloves, scarves and hats. In an emergency, you could use your dog's Utility gloves. Make sure the set contains both a left and right hand. This will not work if you show a chihuahua. If the weather is atrocious and your dog is an itty-bitty or extremely short-coated, you will need dog coats as well.
Plus shoes. Everyday shoes. Trial shoes. Slippers for the motel room. Rain boots in the summer. Snow boots in the winter. My personal best for a winter show weekend was four pair of footwear to cover all conditions. Don’t judge. I can be cranky enough without adding cold, wet feet to the mix.
Back in the day, I traveled with a dear, dear friend who could not pack lightly to save her life. Actually, she did pack lightly. None of her bags weighed much at all. But there were A. Lot. Of. Them. I was never sure exactly how many of them there were because aside from her gear bag and people bag, the extras were Walmart bags and they all looked alike. Pretty sure she did that on purpose so I couldn’t get a firm count and give her a hard time.
We jokingly called them her subsidiary bags. In the tradition of Walmart bags (at least back in the days before self-checkout) they each seemed to contain only two or three items. Nowadays, the best thing about self-checkout is that I can cram a single bag with as much as possible because I am not making four trips to carry sixteen bags into the house when I get home.
But I digress.
Once, my subsidiary-bag friend, another friend and I and our dogs loaded up a Chevy Blazer (Blazers were a lot bigger back then) for a show weekend. In the interests of not having to rent a U-Haul for all our crap, we agreed to limit our luggage to one gear bag, one people bag and one small cooler per person, plus the necessary crates and chairs. True to form, Subsidiary Bag Friend showed up with a multitude of extras. There was a great deal of eye rolling, but down the road we went. I think we made her hold them all on her lap.
Another friend joined us on a weekend excursion and brought her clothes on hangers in a garment bag. She’s a breed handler, too, so we forgave her the reluctance to take chances with wrinkles. That didn’t stop us from teasing her mercilessly about her “ball gowns.” To this day, every time I put clothes in a garment bag, I think of the ball gown weekend.
When I was showing Phoenix, the Farmer made a last-minute decision to go to the ABMC national with me. At the time, I was driving a Chevy Equinox, which was a cute little SUV that fit one woman, one Malinois, one Aussie, and all our stuff quite nicely. Squeezing in another human, his luggage, and a second folding chair was do-able but . . . snug. Then Phoenix won a lovely embroidered chair for High Combined. I seriously thought I might have to find someone to bring the thing home for me.
Then I remembered a good friend and master vehicle packer’s advice: “You can always go up to the roof.” I wedged that ten-inch-wide folded chair into a nine-inch-wide space atop the crates and we were good to go. Never mind I needed a crowbar to get it out of the car when we got home.
These days, when I leave for a trial, my car is packed using a “last in/first out” approach. I’m OCD enough to put everything that goes into the hotel in one area and all the trial gear in another. Nothing rattles. Nothing tips over. I could slam on the brakes and there would be no massive load-shift, mostly because everything is wedged in so tightly it can’t move.
By the time I leave the show site on Sunday afternoon, my car looks like I drove past a garage sale with the windows down and people threw stuff into it at random. I’m just happy I can get the doors closed.
Is it wrong that one of my goals for the new year is to master truly efficient packing? I’ll let you know how that goes.
IN OTHER NEWS
The final countdown for “How to Live with a Ghost” is officially on! Release date on Amazon is Monday, Dec. 15. Don’t know what to give that reader in your life? Feel like buying yourself a holiday gift after shopping for everyone else? Currently, you can only pre-order the Kindle version, but the hard copy option should show on the release date. Bless all you Kindle folks who have pre-ordered. Here’s the link.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0G2KRCN38
As always, I invite you to follow me at my author’s page at https://www.facebook.com/melinda.wichmann.author.
No comments:
Post a Comment