Racing Trains

Driving along 80W, we were racing trains for what seemed like hours. I was bored with it; none of them offered much competition in the speed department, and whenever I tried to get a good gander at the graffiti they wore, I found myself drifting into oncoming traffic. But Lu was licking the Nebraska wind and barking playfully at the Union Pacific, and I felt like if I slowed to sixty I would lose his respect. So I did my best to make it look like a struggle... keeping up with those trains. We came upon what must be the country's largest train depot and decided to have lunch there. We cut lunch short, though, because there were so many rusty spikish things about and I wasn't positive Lu was up to date in with the rabies juice; I started having these visions of him getting Cujo up in that piece.
These last two days I've grown to love him more than ever before. He stays within an even smaller radius when we're on the road, which oftentimes means I'm driving with this seventy-pound furry cinnamon roll on my lap. And when we stop somewhere he's on his best behavior, waiting outside the restaurant or gas station patiently (though still terrifying small children and minorities). The few times we've stopped at bigger shopping centers, we've played this game we call "Delayed Entrance." I go in first and he gives me a two-minute head start before coming in to find me. If he can find me before he gets thrown out, he gets to select any single item in the food or hair care aisle and I have to purchase it for him. If he doesn't find me, then he has to lick his own gents for a twenty-minute stretch. Our record is fourteen minutes in a Home Depot, and even when they got him that time, they didn't really wanna kick him out because he was so polite and awesome looking. We disqualified one round that took place in a Walmart in Cleveland because he got spooked by something he saw in the Home Entertainment area (probably a movie starring Eddy Murphy as four different fat people) and bolted from the store before pandemonium could even begin to set in. Come to think of it, out of the four times that we've played Delayed Entrance he's never actually found me; I think because there are so many different smelling people to sift through, so many snacks to try, and because he's constantly having to run from security.