Would you believe, yesterday morning, because of James going home my mistress actually expected me to go for a walk before 9 ‘o clock in the morning. We got half way along the bridleway, it was cold and misty and I just thought ‘blow it’ so I stopped. My mistress carried on walking for a bit before she realised I wasn’t with her. Then she turned round and called me to join her and I just said ‘Look, it’s Sunday morning, I wanted a lie in.’ Fortunately she said she hadn’t been too fussed about getting up either, so we turned round and went home. Another minor victory to the dog! Following on from that it turned out to be quite a day. James was getting to fly back to England all on his own, it was so exciting and he was so grown-up doing all that. The exciting bit for me was that my mistress said as I had been so good in the restaurant I could go and wave him off. So I am now proud to say I have been to Schiphol airport near Amsterdam. I can’t actually pronounce it properly but I have at least been there. There is so much to tell you diary, my paws may get tired if I try and do it all in one go.
We stopped at a service station for lunch on the way there. I wanted to go to KFC but James said he wanted to go to Burger King and the mistress said she had brought dog food for me anyway. She really is a killjoy at times. The first piece of excitement was getting inside and encountering stairs. Now, I have already told you I am only just learning how to do stairs and am struggling to master the ones at home as they are slippery and fairly narrow but here I was in the service station with several flights of stairs separating me from begging for a bit of burger. I took a deep breath and carefully followed my mistress. As it turned out these were not slippery and were quite wide, so I found I could do them just fine. Then there was another flight that were narrower but I found if I criss-crossed right to left and back again I could do these too. We had to go over a bridge with lots of restaurant bits and loads of people. Despite my best endeavours to nip the ankle of a bloke in the queue at the checkout my mistress managed to pull me back just in time and we got to the other side without incident. This is where I discovered the truth of the old adage ‘what goes up must come down’ and in this case it was me! Suddenly I found myself faced with several flights of stairs that seemed to go in the opposite direction to the ones I was used to. I gingerly followed my mistress and caught my breath when we got to a little landing, then did the next bit and eventually got to the bottom. After all that what do you think my reward was when we got to Burger King? Do you think I got the bacon double cheeseburger and large fries I asked the master for? Do you think he even brought me back a Coke to drink? No. The mistress gave me a dog biscuit and a pat on the head and one of the waitresses offered me a bowl of water. To say I was disappointed would be a massive understatement. What I hadn’t bargained for was that having walked up and down all those stairs to get to Burger King, only to have to sit and watch, I then had to walk all the way back to the car. This time the master suggested I try the escalator. What kind of nutcase steps onto something that is constantly trying to move away from them? Not this one that’s for sure. So the mistress took me back over all the stairs and I started to find I was getting the hang of it. When I found I really was being taken straight back to the car and they weren’t even going to buy me so much as a bar of chocolate well that was it! So I got my own back by leaving a large pile on the service station floor. The mistress was mortified. The master was oblivious, until of course she called him back to take me out so that she could clear up. I felt pretty bad about it, given how upset she was but she really does need to learn that I like burgers too! Well that’s as much as my little paws can type for one day so I will have to tell you the rest tomorrow.