Feed The Dog

As I explained earlier, we barely had enough room for ourselves and our luggage on vacation, so traveling with a dog was definitely out of the question. Hotels weren't as pet-friendly then as they are now, so Cinnamon and Toby ended up with a dog-sitter (usually the Royal Grandparents) or at the kennel. But when it comes time to move, you have to move the dog with you.

With Cinnamon, we made room in the back of the Toyota Camry and hoped she would behave. She did, although she panted a lot. Of course, with a dog you have to make more rest stops, which include food and water breaks. We developed a workable system in the summer of 1989, when we were shuttling between Kansas City and St. Louis in the process of moving. Cinnamon would eventually lay down on her L.L. Bean dog bed, but that puppy could get hungry.

We realized that in August of 1989, after we had just moved into an apartment in St. Louis while we waited for the builders to finish our new house. Mom, Michael and I needed to go back to Kansas City to continue the process, and Cinnamon was along for the ride. She was getting to eat Purina Dog Chow -- much more tolerable for her than that Science Diet garbage -- but she had a taste for something else during the trip. Somehow, she pawed her way into a loaf of bread we had just picked up in St. Louis, got it open, and gobbled it up without anybody knowing. When the Queen Mother reached in the trunk for the bag, she noticed an empty bread wrapper. That dog had devoured every crumb.

Mom took it in surprising stride. "It's okay," she said, amazed more than anything else as she explained it to Grandma. "I'll just go to the Hy-Vee." White supermarket bread is cheap.

With Toby, we got a little more adventurous. During the big move west in 2000, he got to munch on In-N-Out burgers. When we all went there, we usually picked up an extra cheeseburger, which the Queen Mother would break up and feed to him. I don't know if it was good for him, but dogs will eat a lot of things that aren't good for them. Thankfully, they never tried to chew up the car, or make a few errant bathroom breaks.