You Can’t Rescue A Dachshund With A Prius

I have no idea what the woman who runs the Dachshund rescue assumed about us when she decided that we were the right home for Rocco.  All the questions she asked of us were, appropriately, about our fitness as “doggie owners”.  She certainly never asked about the fitness of our vehicle to travel to the rescue site and we certainly never thought to ask if a Mars Rover would be necessary to get there.

She knew by our address that we lived in the city and we knew she lived in the country, but we didn’t really give it a second thought.  I should have started to wonder when she sent the final okay and told us we needed to use her directions to get there.  This was true, she said, because GPS wouldn’t work, and that there was no cell service near the rescue. Perhaps I didn’t give it a thought because there is no cell service in the building where I work – in the middle of the city.  Or it might have been that we were still just focusing on the things we needed to do to get ready for the dog  - at the house.  I don’t know, but in retrospect we should have thought to ask more about where we were going.

Just for the record, when people tell me “your GPS won’t help you here”, I believe them.  My experience with digital cartography has been frustrating at best and it seems as though the people mapping most areas have likely never interfaced with an actual car.  Thus, we took her at her word and used the directions she sent.  However, my brain didn’t really trip to the fact that we were taking a trip to the wilderness.

And wild it was.  Maybe she knew instinctively that we could take care of ourselves or maybe it was some kind of a test.  An unspoken gauntlet to examine our worthiness as wiener dog rescuers; perhaps a type of merit badge examination for empty-nest, city-dwelling dog lovers.  It’s hard to say.  At any rate, her directions started about a half-mile out of the last city we came to.  We turned off the highway and so began an odyssey worthy of a Humvee!  After the first road, all the rest were - by turns - mud, gravel or a combination of both.  One three-mile stretch was clearly designed as a suspension test for secret military vehicles.  It is clearly impossible to rescue a wiener dog in a Prius, a regular sedan, or any kind of vehicle driven by reasonable rational adults.

Fortunately, I drive a Jeep!