This is the story of 2 Great Danes and a small trailer which now has bars on its windows and why it now has bars on the windows.
It all began on the outskirts of Great Sand Dunes National Park, a great park to take dogs by the way. The truck started making the telltale noise of a bad bearing. Do we return to the small town of Alamosa and hope they can fix or do we go to the larger city of Pueblo, Colorado? Additionally we need it in time for us to be back on the road and in Walden, Colorado by Friday. We opted for Pueblo. Pueblo has a Toyota dealership as well as a friend who could provide us with a place to park the trailer and transportation while the truck was getting repaired.
So the truck gets into the service station, diagnosed, and yes it is a bad bearing and it will take a couple days. The couple days estimate grew longer because they needed the parts from Colorado Springs, 30 minutes away and that was going to take 3 days. Seriously?! I’m pretty sure ground transport is done by vehicle not on foot. So our friend decided we could expedite this process by driving us up to Colorado Springs. The plan, we pick up the parts from that Toyota dealership and delivering them to the Pueblo one.
Mini-roadtrip
We loaded up in her car with her Airedale and left the girls (our Danes, Varel and K’Ehleyr) in the travel trailer, an R-Pod, with the windows open and the fan on. We would have preferred to use the AC but the house power couldn’t handle the extra demand. So we opted to go early in the morning before it got too hot and leave the windows open. The tent platform was closed, they learned how to get out that the first year we had the trailer.
Success, parts retrieved and delivered. Of course there were more delays because the one tool to mount the axel broke adding another day. They had to wait for a third party mechanic shop to open to use their tool but that another story that doesn’t need telling.
We pull up in the driveway and there are the girls behind the backyard chainlink fence happy to see us. Wait, something is wrong with this picture…we left the girls in the locked R-Pod. I go check and it is still locked. Then I notice the screen on the window is missing, the frame is a mangled mess, the rubber window seal is in pieces and there are some scratched on the side of the trailer.
If you were wondering if 100lb. and 130lb. Danes can get through a 9 inch window…they can!
Granted we always called Varel a Good Dane because she was small, usually 95-100 lbs. range, she broke 100 once. However, K’Ehleyr was an average female Dane of 130-135lbs. They both managed to escape through the window which is 9 inches wide! They removed the screen, opened the window the rest of the way and went on a walk-about of the neighborhood. Our friend eventually got more details from neighbors about their antics. They went to the front door trying to find us, then started roaming the other houses. They terrified a man who walks the neighborhood collecting recycling. Another neighbor decided the best thing was to open the backyard gate and let them in since he had seen them hanging around there. We are grateful they didn’t get hurt or cause any damage to anyone else’s property and we now have bars on our windows.
