Another thing that I’ve learned is incredibly important when planning for a trip away with pets, is to keep a reference list of vets, so that if anything was to happen to one of our guys, or one was to get sick, we wouldn’t need to panic unduly. It was a service we hoped we wouldn’t need, but unfortunately (as is so often the case) we did.

Three days into our journey (and only one day from our final destination) dear little Samson took a turn for the worse. He’d been traveling well so far, and seemed to be enjoying himself, but come the third day he didn’t want to get up, and when we took him outside, he vomited copiously into a flower bed. Now, while we’re at home, we’ll often wait to see how things play out. Because we work from home, we can keep the animals with us if they’re sick, and we can determine pretty quickly if we need to take them to the vet’s. However, when you’re traveling it’s a different story. For starters, traveling’s bound to make things worse, and after that there’s the problem of a vomiting dog and a car…Not a good combination!

This is where a list of local vet’s really comes into its own! Because we had our handy list, we could call the local vet (a friendly guy called Pete, it turns out) and were able to bring Samson into him right away. After being sick in the flower bed, the little guy had perked up considerably, but I didn’t want to take any chances! As I said, at home, I’d have left him be – here it was a different matter. Pete checked him over and announced him to be a generally healthy dog, but suggested that three days of travel may have upset him a little. We told him about Fifi’s travel sickness tablets. Pete didn’t think this would be the answer, but suspected a little extra gastric acidity (perhaps brought on by stress) and gave us an antacid. He also suggested Samson go without food for the next twelve hours at least. Poor Samson! He loves his food…perhaps too much! We also decided to wait an hour or two before starting off to see how Samson fared.

As it turned out, everything was well. The antacid seemed to settle the acidity in Samson’s system, and we had no problems the rest of the day. However, it was great to know that because we were properly prepared, if something serious had been wrong with Samson, we would have been able to deal with the problem easily, simply because we’d done our research beforehand.