Your journey will be much lighter and easier if you don’t carry your past with you!

So said some unknown scribe.  Well I have to say the move from Arizona to Oregon seemed to have quite a bit of ‘past’ travelling with us!  But we made it!

Before I mention a few highlights of the last twelve days, first let me say a very big ‘thank you’ to Martin Lack for his fabulous role in looking after things while we were engaged in the moving process.  Indeed, Martin’s involvement was so valuable that it made sense to retain his status as author on Learning from Dogs.  I hope Martin shares posts with you all on a regular basis.

So to the recap.

As many of you saw, Neil Kelly sent us on our way to Oregon with that wonderful cartoon on the 23rd. October. The previous day had seen a transformation of belongings everywhere …

…. to an eerily empty home.

The journey up to Merlin, Oregon of 1,176 miles over three days was a blur of hours and hours of driving, walking dogs around strange Motels evenings and mornings and keeping fingers and toes crossed that something didn’t go wrong!

Luckily fate was on our side and a little before 11am on Thursday, 25th October, our mini-convoy of a U-Haul truck towing Jean’s Dodge laden with one group of dogs and our Jeep with other dogs on board, towing a trailer with our five cats inside, pulled up outside the local store in Merlin, some three miles from our new home, so we could purchase basic necessities for the next 24 hours.

Then at precisely eleven minutes past eleven a.m. we turned into our drive,

closely followed by the truck.

Nature was on hand to greet us as we nosed up to the edge of the paddock; a mother deer and her two babes. A treasured moment.

The rest of the day was absorbed with the unloading of all our belongings and making arrangements for bedding both humans and animals down, for the first night in Oregon.

Then the morning of Friday, 26th gave us a taste of what Autumn mornings here were like – stunning.

So there we are!  It’s going to be weeks before we are properly settled in but there’s no question that we have ended up in a beautiful part of the world.

oooOOOooo

Now some thoughts regarding this Blog.  The list of jobs and tasks that are ahead of us as we turn a house that has been empty for some years into a fully functioning home is ‘interesting’!  Inevitably I will have to cut back a little on the 2 to 3 hours a day I used to spend writing for Learning from Dogs when back in Arizona.  I am fully committed to publishing something every day but for a while I will lean more heavily than usual on finding material previously published elsewhere.  Please let me have your feedback, good or bad!

Finally, the move made it impossible for me to reply individually to a number of readers who decided to subscribe, as I like to do.

So a blanket thank you to all who in the last 10 days decided to follow Learning from Dogs.

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