The Salem Dog

Travel is the best education

I woke up this morning in a hotel room in Marion, North Carolina. When I looked out the window, I saw a woodchuck. It was huge, like the size of a pot-bellied pig. When my dad took me out for my morning walk, I was determined to track down the woodchuck or at least go comb the Sonic parking lot near the hotel to look for food. I spotted the woodchuck almost immediately and got about 170 yards from it before it bolted into the brush. I decided to wait it out .

After the big sit for the woodchuck, as you can imagine, I ended up in the car again. When are we going to get to wherever we are going? Dad thought I’d be excited to go to the highest point in the eastern United States. This place is called Mt. Mitchell. We drove on a really car-sicky road and we had one really cool view where you could see something besides clouds. I took it all in and enjoyed my brief respite from the backseat of a car.

We kept going up and suddenly these three mythical creatures emerged from the clouds and appeared on the road before us. I had seen something like them before on an episode of Grimm and I was scared to death. They were right outside of my window and showed no fear. One of them looked at me with pure evil and hatred in its eyes. My window was down and I was petrified with fear. A whimper escaped my jowls and then I thought I should bark to protect my dad and mom. My dad told me to calm down and said they were just deer but I know better. They were helgen-beasts and prey on mixed breed dogs. Shortly after this encounter, my parents drug me up a hill to not see anything because of the clouds. I was forced into a bunch of pictures and I worried about being ambushed by deer the entire time.

My parents found a Dunkin’ Donuts in Asheville, North Carolina and I was secretly encouraged by this development as I knew I’d at least get to stretch my legs in the parking lot and then get to stop again in 75 minutes when their bladders were full. I was shocked when our next stop was a Starbucks in Georgia. I have 2 words for my parents: “Get help.”

We made it into Alabama at stayed in a hotel in Jasper. It was friendly for dogs and some people really like that. I met 5 new friends who were staying with their parents in the room next to ours. They were talking to me through the walls for quite a while when we first got there. I couldn’t understand anything they were saying, but it sounded like, “Woof! Y’awl! Woof! Y’awl!” My dad said the place was a kennel disguised as a hotel.