Our Australia trip

Dinner time again, Marjo is making the bus and surroundings smell so nice that I have to occupy my fingers and mind with something else or I’ll start drooling. You wonder, are we spending too much time with the dogs?

Since we wrote about Dotti, it’s only fair that Nossi gets a post too. Marjo already starts to look worried, but I won’t write one about her, or…..will I? Mmmm, that warrants some further thought. Naah, better not. The dogs can’t respond where I’m not sure I will survive Marjo’s witty replies. But I digress.

Nossi is a special creature. I always wonder if he’s just a cross breed of Whippet and Staffy or if there was in reality a threesome with a cat involved. Why, I hear you ask?

Well he loves to lie in the sun and stretch out like a cat does. Secondly he loves jumping on the bed and then prefers to crawl under the doona, head and all and can sleep there for ours. Thinking about it, who can survive so long without fresh air. Perhaps the third party in his conception wasn’t a cat but a gold fish. That could explain his zoomies when he goes in circles around and around.

His memory is not like a gold fish though. Every time the bus rattles over a railway crossing or a metal bridge he’s up in arms, starts panting and walking back and forward. It takes quite some time before he’s calmed down and after such an incident he can be frantic for days.

Nossi is clearly no drug addict, as the slightest anxiety suppressant drug has a strong effect on him and makes him drowsy for more than a day. So we stop using them and just let him be. With cattle grids we slow down to crawling pace so that there’s no noise and just the bus rocks a little…. 27 times (9 bars front wheel, 9 for the back wheels and 9 for the trailer). He also hates dirt roads, especially the ones with corrugations.

All the noise, rattles and hums that are part of life in the bus don’t make him the happiest dog around. So every morning when we travel he already walks in a big circle around the bus and when it’s time to leave it takes a bit of coaxing before he climbs on board. Every stop he’s the first to get out too, whether it’s through the side door or over / behind me through the driver’s door.

We love him to bits though. He can have the nicest looks when you say “dinner” and when Marjo and I walk in different directions he runs from one to the other to try and bring us back together. Also his little bark of excitement when he sees another dog and how he goes Dotti a little friend nudge direct after he returns from a long walk.

Nossi is a great travel companion, we wouldn’t have wanted to travel without him or Dotti.

We wish you a Merry Christmas and a very happy New Year.

Love from

Marjo
Axel
Nossi
Dotti

Ok, sometimes we have a little time to do nothing but navel gaze. For instance when it rains and we don’t want to run outside for a free shower or when Marjo makes dinner. Then it’s time to reflect, to let the mind wander, not hindered by work stress demanding brain time and other trivial matters.

So what comes to mind then, I hear you ask. Well for one: after feeding the dogs dinner at around 5 pm (you should know they start ganging up from around 4 pm and make innocent tracks close to our chairs or sit and look smug) Nossi is lost love and wants to go inside the bus and sleep, preferably on our bed and if possible under the doona but Dotti, Dotti is a mystery. She does her own thing for a while and then comes and sits really close. Pretty similar as she does before they get dinner and has that intense stare.

After this intro, I will enlighten you now with one of my thoughts when I navel gaze: “what does Dotti wants when she stares like that?”

Oh, here I should say that the after-dinner stare is not unique. She also does it quite often when we drive along and she lies in the passenger footwell; somewhere Marjo’s feet are too. She can lie content looking out the little footwell window, or she can lie as if being very uncomfortable against the window washer liquid container, or…..she can do the stare. And again the question is: “what does she want when she stares like that?”

Because this has been going on for quite a while now, I’ve tried several things with mixed results:
– asking “what do you want”, is answered by silence unless asked several times and with some intensity is answered with “Woef” which doesn’t bring us any closer
– saying “go ahead, do whatever you want” only makes her shuffle closer and when said several times and with some intensity is answered with “Woef” again
– giving a treat such as dried roo meat (from a package for Pete sake, I suggested to Marjo that we have seen enough roo karkasses to fill our trailer and more) always works; that is, until she finished it and the staring starts again.

I have thought that perhaps she is getting old and she has conveniently forgotten about dinner and I mistake her stare to be a post-dinner stare where it’s actually a pre-dinner stare. But that would be at odds with her footwell stare. Or does it? She is always hungry.

Perhaps I’m just over thinking this and she’s looking at me filled with love. That must be it. It’s nice to be loved.