Jamie Samoyed

Road Warriors

Doug Mahugh

Jan 13, 2021 • 2 min read

In their first few years together, Jamie and Alice took road trips around Washington, Oregon, California, Idaho, Nevada, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, South Dakota, North Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Nebraska, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas, as well as their homeland of British Columbia, Alberta, and the Northwest Territories. They also commuted to work at Microsoft 4 or 5 days per week for a full decade.

April 3, 2010: they day I traded in my little Ford Ranger on a Toyota Tacoma with a full-size back seat. Jamie was 4 months old.

When we got Alice a few months later, she fit right in. She liked riding shotgun and using the armrest.

When Jamie and Alice were 5 years old, Megan got a new car (a Fiat 500), and they were quick to adapt:

We put 241,000 miles on the white 2010 Tacoma before trading it in on a blue 2019 model. Jamie and Alice were in the truck for most of those miles.

Nancy missed out on all the long road trips. A Pandemic puppy, she came into our life in January 2020, helped us pick out a house in Butte in February, and moved to Montana in April, where we've been staying close to home ever since.

Nonetheless, Nancy has put in the longest road-trip days of all three dogs. She traveled the 1000+ miles between Butte and Berkeley in a single long day three times in the summer of 2020, picking up Megan's mother and bringing her back home a few weeks later. Jamie and Alice have had many 500-700 mile days on the road, but never 1000+ miles.

Nancy outside the Metals Bank building in Uptown Butte, riding in the back seat of Megan's new Toyota Rav4 hybrid on the day she bought it in June 2020.

We're looking forward to post-pandemic road trips, and have many ideas for where to go next.