What was it that ‘him’, (or her), upstairs said about ‘him’, or her, down below – that s/he makes work for idle hands? Maybe so, all I can say is that the sooner this lockdown business comes to an end, the sooner I’ll be done with all this retirement foolishness.
It’s foolish in the sense of dreaming about this Colorado cabin I started to write about in my last retirement blog. I confidently believe that under normal circumstances we wouldn’t have had time to engage in all this idle speculation. None of this seemingly endless wondering would be happening. We’d be getting on with visiting different properties and all that those visits entailed.
So, you may be wondering, how on earth the Greenland of the title could possibly be relevant here? You don’t have a house there do you? Let me explain, assuming I can. If, last time I wrote about the challenges of the financial nature of this project, this week I’m covering another aspect of the same challenge – what to do with the doggies if we were to go over there for any protracted period of time (whatever that may be). This does not refer to a two-week break this autumn. We wouldn’t take them for that length of trip, just the big one, possibly next year. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
We’d love to take them with us on the long trip. But I’ve written before about flying with the dogs. The more I’ve read about the practicalities of this method, never mind the expense, the less it has appealed from their mental health point of view. 10 hours in 2 separate crates / cages, they can’t even be in a crate / case together. How will they cope with that kind of experience?
I moved on to thinking about taking a boat / ship / liner / cruise across the Atlantic. Would this be an option? Nope, they’re rare (only one shipping line does it), booked up and the dog/s have to stay either it its crate / cage or at least in a specific area of the deck with limited visiting hours. It is cheaper though and arguably less stressful for them. But no even though the picture above looks all very civilised.
I returned to the idea of flying but in stages. You probably didn’t realise that there was a half way point between the UK and the USA. That’s because you lack imagination. Actually that’s not true, although I have the imagination I do not, on closer examination, have a way of doing it.
Iceland was my first thought. No good because they quarantine any dogs either stopping or passing through for two weeks. Instead of 10 hours in a cage they get two weeks. Next idea off the rank, Greenland. Now you understand where Greenland comes in.
Just when I’d persuaded the long-suffering Mrs Summerhouse that Greenland might be fun and could be seen as part of the holiday, I read the literature more carefully and, although you can fly from Copenhagen (to where we could have driven) to Greenland, you can’t fly from Greenland to the USA except via Iceland which is like going backwards and did I mention their quarantine regulations? You can theoretically drive across the ice from Greenland to Canada but only if you’re a fully-equipped, Artic expedition and, having just watched The Terror, this did not appeal.
So you were right and I was wrong, there is no half way house between UK and USA with which we could have broken up the flight. Which brings us full circle to how we could leave them at home. We are currently in the process of considering ours and their options. Mrs SH is looking into this.
At this stage, and assuming we don’t change our minds again, there are a number of options which range from booking them into kennels for however long, to leaving them with a friend who has a farm (they are sheep dogs after all), to getting somebody to stay in our house and both house and dog sit, this might be a near neighbour or one of Mrs SH’s sisters. It’s a long list of possibilities not that we’ve checked any of them out. If we went down this road we certainly wouldn’t do the six months we were considering, more like one month. But whatever, making the decision is not going to be easy. And the big question is how much are we going to enjoy ourselves worrying about their happiness while we are away?
Just a quick final, for now, addition to this retirement blog. Last Saturday daughter and son-in-law came round for a meal and surprised us both, in a good way, by saying they would be interested in joining with us in this project. This may put a different perspective on the whole thing. We will see. That will do for a short Friday blog. Keep reading because already since writing this things have changed…