The Cadillac of Comfort

I’ve written before about Pot Roast’s love of the Great Canadian Road Trip. It doesn’t matter the destination. He’s happy to have the wind in his fur, his head out the window and a squishy bed offered in the back seat. He spends most of each trip sandwiched between my husband and I, his elbows on the centre console, wide-awake and happy as a clam.

We’ve made a lot of effort to make Roast an adaptable dog who is easy to travel with, but this isn’t always easy. It takes a lot of work to have a dog who won’t bark in a hotel room or shred furniture in a new place. For all his faults, Roast is great to travel with. So we’re excited for our upcoming trip north to take in the pretty fall leaves at a cabin. It’s going to be a long weekend of campfires and roasted marshmallows, sleeping bags and fire-cooked meals. Top it off with a canoe ride and we’re one happy family.

We’ve done some actual tent camping with Roast, and the experience left a lot to be desired. Roast is a dog of comfort. He likes squishy beds and warm blankets. So put him on the ground (albeit, in a luxurious dog bed on the ground), and he wonders what kind of horrific austerity measures have come into play. Want to try to sit by a campfire? Good luck! He’s having none of that. He needs to pace and whine and circle because, well, a nice metal frame protects the fire pit that prevents the heat from reaching him…hence his disdain. Once we let him on our lap and he felt the warmth, he went sound to sleep. Camping was suddenly allright.

Now, that said, having a 70-pound dog on your lap isn’t sustainable over any period of time. So we set out to buy a camp chair for our dog to raise him high enough to catch the heat. Of course, the chair had criteria. It had to be human height while also very wide in the seat so he could lounge a little. We ideally wanted it to be relatively padded so that he wouldn’t be readjusting himself every five seconds. I found the perfect one (on sale!), and only moderately balked at the price being more than five times our cheap models. Then for good measure, I bought a kid-sized sleeping bag to make the seat extra appealing.

Of course, I wanted to make sure Roast would be interested, so once home, I set up his swank little camp set and up he climbed. And there he stayed for the next five hours in the middle of the kitchen in complete and total comfort.

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