As some of you may know, Josh and I have built a dog trailer. Well, technically it’s still not quite finished yet as there are a few final touches to go, but you get the idea. I’ve been thinking about the concept for this trailer for over 10 years and it took meeting an exceptional man, who also happens to have some amazing engineering skills, to see it come to fruition. It goes without saying that this dog trailer has been a six-month labour of love. But man, she’s a beast!
Anyway, I will do a proper post on the dog trailer build once all the final touches have been made. Then I can fully unpack all the things we included in our build and why. But, for todays post, all you need to know is that we built this trailer and it had it’s maiden voyage a few weekends ago when we went away to the Waimate Championship Gundog Trial.
I Should Have Followed My Own Advice
As I’ve mentioned in a previous post on packing for field trials, it’s really important that you have all your gear with you when you’re trialling. The days can be long, the conditions can be everchanging, and being caught in the field without stuff is a real pain in the arse. So much so, that I even created a free resource called the Field Trial Gear Checklist to help take the guesswork out of what you need and whether you’ve packed it… Can you see where I’m going with this yet?
Before I go much further into the story, I want to make it clear that we do normally use the checklist. It has saved me countless times because, even when you do to trials regularly, there are inevitably items that slip under the radar, items that get used up and run out, or items that you’d swear were already in the car, but you just can’t bloody find them when you need them.
The problem was, this weekend was a bit different. We hadn’t travelled away, overnight, in a long time and we’d never taken the trailer anywhere before… I promise that’s not an excuse, just a bit of context for the drama that follows.
A Balls-Up of Epic Proportions…
We started packing for the Waimate Championship about a week before we planned to leave. We normally do this to give ourselves time to get things organised without it being a big panic on the day. We were planning to leave after work on the Friday, which also happened to be the last day of the school term (read: completely knackered and not very mentally capable). This meant that packing ahead of time was our effort to avoid making any mistakes… Well, that was the theory anyway.
During this week we also had a few last minute things that we needed to get sorted on the trailer before it’s first journey. This is the way that most projects go. You have a deadline in your head that seems so far in the distant future and before you know it, it’s less than 24 hours to go and there’s still a load of important stuff that needs doing.
So, Josh had the crucial final tasks of finishing the internal doors, weather-proofing the roof, and getting the trailer in for its warrant. You know, so that it was legal to have out on the road.
We were working down to the wire on time. Like, Josh was still putting the last of the internal doors in and sealing the roof on the Friday afternoon before we left. Hero!
To try and help us get away on time, I’d started putting things that we were taking in a pile in the garage. I put most of the items that I wanted to take in a pile beside the trailer but there were a few very important items that I put on the roof of the trailer… you know, to be helpful, so that they wouldn’t get missed… oops!
Friday rolled around all too quickly and the school day ended. I came home to find Josh packing up the last of the bits. He’d managed to get all the remaining trailer jobs done. Phew! It had been a busy day for us both. We were feeling pretty knackered and a bit stretched, but we were both excited to be getting away for the weekend with the dogs in tow. We did a quick check (or so we thought), rounded up the last of the items, admired how clean and shiny the new trailer looked, loaded up the dogs and we were off!
We had a lovely drive down from Christchurch. From home to our accommodation was a 175 km trip that took us approximately two and a half hours, give or take. We stopped in Timaru for some dinner and made it to camp where we were staying with our friends at about 8:30 pm. We let the dogs out for a stretch of their legs and then popped them back in the trailer so that we could enjoy a drink with everyone before feeding the dogs their dinners and heading to bed for an early night, ready for the weekends competition.
We went out to the truck to do the dinner rounds and the first clue that something was amiss was that I couldn’t find my headtorch. We haven’t got the lights on the trailer wired up to the battery yet, so I’d packed it, or so I thought. We made do without it and started assembling the various dog dinners.
The old girls and Zed are pretty straight forward, some biscuits and a bit of water to soak them in and they’re good to go. Hail’s dinner is a bit more complicated as she is on special biscuits and daily meds for her hypothyroidism and a still unknown stomach issue that almost finished her off in October of last year. I measured out her biscuits and went to add her meds… only there were no meds!
In these moments all you can do is sigh. I optimistically asked the all important question, “Hey Josh, where did Hail’s meds go?”, knowing full-well that I wasn’t going to like the answer.
A Painful Lesson to Learn the Hard Way
In the chaos of the day, and in an attempt to get everything ready, Hail’s meds had been moved from the roof of the trailer. How did this happen? Easy! I put them in a silly spot knowing that the roof was going to be worked on before we left. They got moved so that the roof could be completed, and then they got forgotten in the double-check before we left. Shit happens. You live and you learn.
One of our friends did try calling the local afterhours vet clinic, to see if we could get enough meds to get us through the weekend without needing to drive all the way home. Unfortunately, Hail’s meds are not a common one used in emergency situations and they weren’t sure they’d be able to get us any by the morning. As she’s on them twice a day, there was only one thing for it… we were going to have to make the drive home to collect them.
I’ll be the first to admit, the thought of a five hour, 350 km round-trip to collect dog medication, after already travelling for two and a half hours and having worked a full day, was not something that brought me great excitement. But, this is what we do for our dogs. I wasn’t prepared to risk her getting ill again as the cost on all fronts was not worth the risk.
We unhitched the trailer, left the dogs peacefully sleeping in their new accommodation and we hit the road in an attempt to make it back by morning. It was about 11 pm by the time we set off, so we were pushing it to think that we’d be back and in a state fit to trial but we had to try. We split up the driving, each taking turns to rest while the other took the wheel.
We laugh about it now, but I’ll confess, the first hour or so of the car ride home was a bit quiet. Much contemplating was done. There’s no point getting mad about these things, I also didn’t check to make sure we had them, so we were both at fault of failing to do a proper double check. We do chuckle that the meds are about the only thing we couldn’t afford to forget. Sod’s Law really.
We got back to Christchurch at about 1:30 am. We found the meds, and my headtorch in the boat… obviously put there for safe keeping. I have to admit, after the drive back I was relieved to find them as I had this awful thought that we might not have looked hard enough in the first place. That would have really been a kicker!
We made it back to camp at about 3:50 am. By that point, it was too late to give Hail her night meds but I was happy knowing she wouldn’t miss her morning ones as well. We tried to sneak back into the camp but when you’re camping with about 25 dogs that’s almost impossible. We crawled into our sleeping bags completely exhausted.
Dog trials normally start pretty early, so when the alarm went off at 6:30 am I wanted to vanish into the depths of my sleeping bag… but alas, that was not really an option. Dogs needed feeding, and now medicating, we needed breakfast, and we still needed to work out where the grounds were!
Despite being a completely exhausted wreck, the trialling actually went really well. Hail and I did some nice work and came away with some very respectable scores. Possibly a result of me being too tired to overthink anything in that state, although, not one I’m keen to experience again in a hurry.
The Take Home
The unplanned trip home was a complication that we definitely didn’t want or need at the time. But, it did teach us a valuable lesson. Gear checking is an absolute must when you’re travelling anywhere with dogs. The time its takes to recheck gear is nothing in comparison to the time spent doubling back if you’ve forgotten the vitals.
It also gave us plenty of time to discuss how we could prevent something like this from happening again. For us, we’ve decided that each dog will have their own ‘go-bag’. This is going to contain things like medications or supplements that they take, plus anything else that might be specific to each of our dogs. These won’t be big or complicated, they’ll be something simple like a pencil case, and it will likely live in the trailer so that we never get caught out.
We’re also going to laminate another copy of the Field Trial Gear Checklist (with an additional Overnight list) and stick it to the inside lid of the gear box on the trailer too. I’ll have a whiteboard marker stuck next to it too, so that I can cross items off as I’m packing for each trip.
Well, that’s that embarrassing story out of the way… Have you ever gone on a trip with your dog and forgotten something important? What was it and how did you prevent it from happening again? Please let us know in the comments so that we don’t feel like the only ones that this ridiculous stuff happens to!
Field Notes & Follies 
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