A Funny Story to Share

A post on a forum I'm a part of reminded me of a story that at the time was like a horribly gone wrong sit-com. Now it's family lore and laughed at from time to time.

A few months before Hubby and I married we made a quick trip to northern Minnesota from Arkansas as Hubby was a groomsman in his cousin's wedding. We were living together and had a black lab mix dog that was roughly 9 months old (the original Winnie). Being quite broke we didn't have the cash to put the dog in a kennel and didn't really have someone to leave her with for the long weekend, so we loaded her up in the car. Now Winnie was a good dog but had one nasty habit of getting car sick. We knew this and had called the vet and gotten some tranquilizers to settle her down and hopefully prevent having a hyper lab-like pup bouncing around in the backseat of a Chrysler LeBaron for 19 hours. The trip up was pretty un-eventful. The dog behaved well and hid her milk-bones at every pottie break. She wasn't too interested in food but we took that as a good sign she wouldn't puke in the car. We get up north for the wedding festivities and Winnie hung out in Grandma's garage with occasional forays of freedom into the yard to do her business and get a little attention. The night before we left for home Hubby in all of his wisdom brought home some bones from his father's house putting the chewy pup in ecstasy all night in the garage. The next morning we arose early, drugged the dog, and loaded up. Somewhere around the 12 hour mark we decide to stop and eat at a Country Kitchen. When we stopped the dog was whining and pacing around but the area around the restaurant was just a big muddy pit so we figured we'd eat and then go find her a place to run for bit before hitting the road again. We go in and eat and we come out we see this rather large dog in the back window well where the convertible top of the car would normally fold down into and we knew something was up. It was very clear when we opened the doors. OMG (that really wasn't what we said) there was runny dog poo on every seat, under the seats, on the floorboards. EVERYWHERE. The dog had some serious bowel issues happening. We let her out into the mud, cause, hey mud is nice compared to this and watched the poor animal retch and squirt while we tried to figure out what to do. Mind you we are still a good 9 hours or more from home and both of us had to be at work first thing in the morning.

Luckily there was a Wal-Mart 1/2 mile down the road or so. Hubby walked and purchased rags, paper towels, carpet cleaner, garbage bags and some ugly old rugs that were on clearance we could sit on because our seats would be wet. We proceeded to scrub out the car in the back of the Country Kitchen with the occasional gag on our part. It was awful. I've cleaned up horrible poop messes by the kids and to this day nothing tops the doggie diarrhea in that car. We get the car somewhat to a minimal health hazard and climb in to sit our rears on ugly clearance rack rugs to get home. We managed to get home sometime in the middle of the night and fall into bed.

Needless to say morning came too early and I had to drive the poop-mobile to work the next morning for my 45 min commute. Pleasant. The windows stayed down all day at work as I watched the miasma escape from my office window. When I arrived home Hubby removed the bucket seats and we scrubbed and cleaned some more. Luckily it was spring so the windows were down often during the day and the odor finally dissipated somewhere three to four weeks later though it still had a tinge on the hottest days.

The moral of the story. When you dog is dancing to get out of a car let them out to do their business regardless to the mud situation. Mud is only dirt. Shit is shit.