Car Safari
Wisconsin weather has range.
One day it’s golden: a 67-degree masterpiece with a light breeze and cartoonish white clouds. The next? Mosquitoes splattered on your face, air so humid your undies feel like a swimsuit, and the pavement is hot enough to fry an egg. Or a paw.
If I’m not on the water, I think summers in Wisconsin are gross.
And as the dogs get older, the definition of “too warm” keeps changing.
These days,the temperature cutoff hovers somewhere in the low 70s. Anything warmer starts to feel less like enrichment and more like a terrible life choice. This leaves early mornings as our best window for movement. As an early bird, this sounds totally doable, until you factor in three dogs with wildly different needs and speeds.
Things I never thought about while building our little fur family…
One thing we did prioritize early, though, was the car.
Jess and I love road trips. Well, I love road trips and he loves me. I love wandering. We love deciding at 7:30 AM that we should probably drive somewhere for something. Because of that, we worked really hard to make sure the dogs felt comfortable riding in the car.
Not just tolerant. Comfortable.
No panic. No pacing. No stress drool coating the windows. We wanted the car to feel predictable, safe, and honestly…kind of exciting.
That investment has paid off in ways I wasn’t expecting.
Because lately, our solution has been what I’ve started calling car safaris.
Twenty minutes. Sometimes ninety. Country roads. Farm animals. New neighborhoods. Gravel roads that probably lead nowhere. Windows down. Noses up.
The enrichment value is real. Every slow drive through a tiny Wisconsin town becomes a sensory experience. Fresh cut fields. Farm animals. Deer popping out of the forest.
It’s not a replacement for hiking.
But it is still adventure.
Sometimes we get stuck believing exercise has to look a certain way to “count.” A long hike. Big mileage. A tired dog at the end. I love this, too. But as the dogs age, or the weather shifts, or life simply changes, it’s doing something together that matters.
We adapt instead of forcing ourselves to recreate what we used to do.
Some of my favorite recent memories with the dogs have happened from the front seat of my Jeep, rolling down some random country road with everyone quietly take in the world .
