Day 13

Hi,

We're back and today is "the" day but before we go down to get Ernie, I want to let you know that Blackjack, aka Galumph, aka the big black dog, aka my daughter's dog is very happily reunited with my daughter. We beat the hurricane, both on the way down and back, which was a God thing, I think. We left at 6:18 pm on Wednesday and arrived at 6:45 am on Thursday as we traveled I-95 all the way down. BJ made the trip very well and was thrilled to have his girl back.

To understand why all of this had to transpire the way it did, I need to set up some background. My daughter is the youngest of my three children. She is 18 and graduated from the community college last spring. She is starting her junior year this fall and decided she wanted to be in North Carolina because she loves the beach. Blackjack came to live with us when my middle son graduated from bootcamp. He is a Marine, as is his brother and both of the boys decided to enlist after their father returned from his deployment in Iraq. During my husband's deployment, my oldest was in Michigan in college, but my middle guy, my daughter and I became very close because we were all we had.

When my son left, my daughter was devastated! Noting this, my middle son's girlfriend, who had awoken one morning to find a litter of puppies and two older pups tied to her porch at the end of the summer, showed up one day with BJ. My daughter loved him and much pleading and begging ensued...we caved and ended up with this huge puppy who became everything to her.

When she moved to North Carolina, she did so with the intent of finding a place to live where she could have BJ. She got a full time job, found a beautiful house that she is renting with another wonderful young woman who is a student and is having a third move in shortly. There is one stippulation on the house-mate situation, and that is "must love dogs." All do and all do have. They also have a huge, fenced yard and a beautiful home with lots of room!

Anyway, this is why BJ had to remain "her" dog. The plan had always been to get him down to her, it was just a matter of when this was going to happen. We were planning for Christmas as my grandbaby's birthday is Christmas Eve and both of the boys are at Camp Lejeune, so we could have Christmas together, but Ernie is ready to come home now and we thought it best for all parties involved, because there has been a lot of coming and going here lately for everyone, including Ernie, to come to a stable family that isn't in the middle of moving all over the east coast.

So BJ is now stable with his girl and Ernie is about to get stable with us. It took a killer trip, but this is the way that we wanted it to happen. I'll update later to let you know how things go.

Happy wanderings!

The Writer ...and her dog, Ernie