The Learning Curve, Part 2
by Mark Threlfall
We planned to stay home that night because the people I worked for traditionally threw a party that evening for some of the exhibitors. They would stop for a bite to eat and then proceed to the next day’s show. We would make the trip in the morning, which meant getting up an hour earlier, but it was worth it to sleep in your own bed.
During the party I spoke to an exhibitor who had worked as a mechanic for years and related the problems we’d been having with the transmission. He suggested that instead of waiting until the morning to make the hour’s drive to the show, we leave that tonight and he’d follow the same route. That way, if we encountered any problems he’d be right behind us and would get us up and running again. He said we could stay in his trailer that evening on the show grounds.
This sounded like a reasonable solution. So, about an hour later, we took off in the motor home for the next day’s show. My friend said he would be about a half-hour behind us. The road from the kennel to the interstate had a long, steep hill that we had to climb. The motor home labored a bit going up this hill under the best of conditions. But, we made it and drove onto the show site without any problems at all. We arrived and set about exercising, feeding, etc.
By now, it was after 11:00 PM, and there was still no sign of my friend and our accommodations for the evening. We waited for some time and around midnight, with still no sign of my friend, decided that if we were going to get any sleep at all that night, we had to find a way to sleep in the motor home.
So what’s so tough about that, you might well ask. Well, in your average motor home we might have fared quite nicely. But this was a motor home with no real living facilities. It was more of a motor home shell with racks that held the crates and just a table with facing bench seats and a banquette seat on the opposite side of the aisle. It was 90% dogs and 10% people area.
But, it was getting late, we were really tired and still no sign of our promised trailer to sleep in. So we lowered the table that spanned the two facing seats and, by using mats that we would put in the crates, brought the level of the table up to that of the seat cushions. Normally, the back seat cushions would serve to do this, but they had been hinged to the frame so that they didn’t keep falling down.
So I and the other guy who worked for us shared this makeshift platform and the girl who worked with us took the banquette. Such a cozy little group…
It seemed just a few minutes later (but actually it was about 1:30 AM) that there was a knock on the door and I got up to answer it. There stood my friend, apologizing profusely and offering an excuse that one of the people at the party who was also driving a box truck had left just in front of him, and they ran into all sorts of problems climbing the big hill near the kennel. Now, this was a small road that was dicey when two cars passed, each going in the opposite direction. There was barely enough room to fit two cars side by side on the road. It seems the leader of this convoy got most of the way to the top of the hill and couldn’t make it to the crest. He had to back his truck and trailer all the way down the curving incline (about a mile’s distance) in the dead of might. This caused a huge traffic jam of rigs on the road with no way to turn around. It took everyone over two hours to sort it all out.
By the time he finished his story, I was exhausted. I told him wed just stay put and just take showers in the morning at his trailer, if that was OK. He agreed and apologized again and then left. I went back to bed.
It seemed I just had fallen back to sleep when the guy next to me must have zigged when I zagged and the table/bed fell off the little ledge on the wall. We both ended up in a heap of dog mats on the floor. He never woke up. I pushed him and told him we had to fix the table and he told me this was the most comfortable he had been all evening. I looked at my watch and it said 2:30. We had about two and a half hours before we had to get up. I rearranged a couple of the mats under me and tried to go back to sleep.
About a half-hour later, a piercing scream cut the night. It was blood-curdling. I sat straight up and looked around, just in time to hear another shriek. I jumped up and ran down the center aisle of the motor home to see what the problem was. It seems an Afghan Hound that was in the back bottom crate had caught his ear wrapper in the mesh of the crate. By the time I had arrived, it simply fell loose and everything was fine. Everything that is, except for our heart rates and nerves. We looked around at each other like caffeine addicts. At that moment, sleep was the farthest thing from our minds…
But sleep did overtake us, as we were exhausted from the previous day’s show. So as we drifted off to sleep, we thought that at least we could get a couple of hours of sleep (?) before we had to get up.
Did you know that flies wake up at 4:00 AM? Yes, it’s true. After all, it was mid-July and we were at an outdoor dog show, so yes, there were flies around. And at 4:00 AM, they leave their overnight perches and start flying. And landing. On people. Just as we’d drifted off, we became landing strips for what seemed like dozens of flies. They would land and give you that little crawly feeling and you would swat at them, only to have them take off, circle and land again.
This might have not proved too large an obstacle to sleep, but the movement of us swatting away flies captured the attention of a Miniature Pinscher in a top crate close to where we were attempting to sleep. He thought we were playing some kind of game. So, after a few minutes, he would stick his, er… posterior in the air, crouch down on his front legs and bark at us. We tried doing some of those whispered “shh!” noises, designed to get the little dog to knock it off without waking the rest of the dogs. But either we had succeeded in waking up the rest of the dogs or they figured that it was time to wake up anyway, because soon we heard the various rustlings, yawning and other noises that signaled any chance for sleep had passed us by. At 5:00 AM we stumbled outside to start our day, sans sleep or shower and set about exercising the dogs and getting ready for the show.
So you can’t sleep with a bunch of dogs.
Continued next month…
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