Next up in our interview series is Maya & Olmec who are traveling with their parents Brianna & Ian of Vangabonds.com. They’ve been on the road for almost two years now and have tons of fabulous advice for traveling dogs. They travel slow, just like mom and dad say we’ll be doing, so we feel we can learn a lot from their experiences.
We are Maya and Olmec, 7-year-old sister and brother. Our mom was a blue heeler (Australian cattle dog), our dad was an English pointer, and our human parents are Ian and Brianna Kietzman.
- Tell us a little bit about where you have traveled with your family. Have you traveled internationally? Within the US?
We were born in Kansas and moved to North Carolina when we were just a year old. We loved the long drive in the car to our new home and enjoyed getting to go on trips to the beach, so when our humans decided that they were going to drive the Americas, we were thrilled to hop in the backseat and go along for the ride!
2. What is your favorite place to travel? Do you like hiking the mountains? Running on the beach?
Though we’re siblings, we have very different personalities. Maya is a beach girl, and Olmec is a mountain man. Wherever we go, we both love hiking and all of the new smells.
3. When you’re traveling do you camp? Stay at hotels? Rent houses?
Sometimes we camp or stay in hotels, but most of the time our family rents apartments for a month at a time in the places that we are traveling. Having us along means that our humans have fewer options for lodging, but so far they haven’t had much trouble at all finding nice, pet-friendly apartments or houses throughout the Americas. Also, our kennels come with us to each of our new homes, which give us a sense of normalcy when it’s time to sleep.
4. Do you have a hard time finding good quality food and water on the road?
Not really. Our humans were worried when we left that Maya wouldn’t handle changing food brands very well, but it hasn’t been a problem at all. Only one month did they buy a cheaper brand of food than they should have, and boy did they pay for it with the smells we made! Sufficient options are usually available though and not too difficult to find. For water, we usually drink whatever our humans drink. If their source is expensive, sometimes they will boil tap water for us instead.
5. Have you had any problems with other dogs, either playing at dog parks, or street dogs when traveling?
Maya doesn”t play very nicely with other dogs, so we usually just keep to ourselves. In some of the cities we’ve visited, there are many territorial street dogs. This was never a big problem, but it was somewhat uncomfortable for our humans.
6. What don’t you like about traveling? A different bed? Strange water?
We tend to think that we are pretty happy travelers. Olmec didn’t feel that well when we went through the curving roads of mountains, and Maya sometimes gets bothered by new sounds in a city, but otherwise, we get really excited on travel days and are usually wearing a smile and a wagging tail!
