The only time we ever took a trip without Kylie was to go home and visit Hawaii (stupid quarantine kept her from being able to go). But of course she never saw the inside of a kennel.. she always stayed with friends, or they stayed with her.

On one such occasion, we went to the Aloha state and Kylie stayed with her godmom, Merrianne, and her best frien-emy Min. Merrianne was kind enough to send us a few emails with pictures of their adventures while we were away. Of course we were always thrilled to get these, but almost every time we would be shocked at what we saw..

Ok, well this one is shocking for obvious reasons, but as long as she’s having fun and she doesn’t look like that when we get home, then fine.

Clearly in this one she was having fun, however historically Kylie was borderline terrified of balloons, or at least highly suspicious. And ps, she wasn’t a big fan of bandanas either so at this point we were starting to get pretty suspicious ourselves.

Then came this one..

To which we said, “Alright.. who’s that dog, and what have you done with Kylie?!”

It was common knowledge that Kylie did not like other dogs in general, and Golden Retrievers in particular were to be avoided at all cost (see also, The Boston Incident).

We briefly considered booking an early flight home, clearly they were brain-washing our Kylie!! But again, it was clear she was having a good time. [Truth be told we were considering coming home early because Kylie was having too much fun with out us!]

We still talk about these pictures when we see them and contemplate why she would be such a different dog when she was not around us… hmmm. Still don’t know.

But we still miss her like crazy, and hope like crazy that she is having a good time without us now.

Happy Birthday, Beautiful Girl!

We’ve mentioned how much Kylie loved a road trip, it was absolutely our favorite family thing. But you may not be aware that she was quite the prolific little traveler.

The Travel Logs on Kyliedog.com is one of the most exciting parts of her website, where she shares all about her coast to coast excursions. From autumn in New England to sunny California, she visited natural wonders, historical landmarks, and roadside oddities, she loved nothing more than sniffing out new territory (and new hotel rooms).

There’s a pin on the map for every little point of interest along the way.. after all, life’s about the journey, and getting there is half the fun, and all that good stuff!

What was interesting is how often the people gathered at these popular tourist attractions acted like Kylie was the attraction. On Fremont Street in Las Vegas people just couldn’t get over the little dog in the backpack, “look at the dog!” “hey look, there’s a dog!” “omg, look how cute that dog is!” At a truck stop once she was cruising around in her sunglasses and somebody asked if they could take her picture!

We realized at some point that starting Kylie’s website and blog was one of the best things we ever did. It gave us incentive to go on trips and take lots of pictures, and to take absolutely every opportunity to make our life together a series of little adventures!

And it truly was.. we miss those adventures and Kylie’s spirit of adventure every day!

Traditionally as you may know, we were a hockey family. Kylie was a Devils fan, even more specifically she was a Martin Brodeur fan! 

But we are also an american family, so of course when it was super bowl sunday we would watch along with the rest of the country. Of course even the super spectacle couldn’t keep Kylie’s attention for the whole game.

But, one super bowl sunday we just happened to be in Boston with Kylie on one of our road trips, and the Patriots just happened to be playing.  And we just happened to tune in from our New England hotel room in time to hear the other team, not sure who it was, maybe the Rams, all be introduced individually as usual. Then the announcer said something like, and now, “choosing to be introduced As A TEAM.. the New England Patriots.” We thought that was pretty cool! So while we previously had no dog in that fight (ha, ha), we decided to root for the home team! (Of course now, nobody gets introduced as individuals because it would make them look like jerks I suppose. But we still know who started it..)

It was a pretty exciting game as we recall. At some point we girls were high-fiving an especially thrilling play and Kylie decided to get in on the action and started jumping up between us. So, while we rarely attempted to officially “teach” her anything because we wanted her to be a free spirit, we put up our palms and when she put her little paw up too we said, “High Five!” and “Yay, Kylie!” And that was all it took.. Kylie became a high-fiver! (yes we know, lots of dogs know how to high-five. but not lots of them teach themselves in a situation that is so apropos.)

So while Tom Brady was becoming the youngest quarterback to ever win a super bowl that day, Kylie was becoming a high-fiving fool. And while he was MVP in the big game, she was always and will always be our MVP!

So since then, whenever the Patriots make it to the super bowl, they’ve got our support, including today! Go Patriots! Go Kylie! (high-five implied)

[Note: As retired sports fans we have experienced the heartbreak, and the agony of defeat, that can come along with that. So if the Patriots don't win today, well we all just have to be good sports about it. Although admittedly, good sportsmanship was not Kylie's strong suit! ]

Back in the mid 90′s Kylie was possibly one of the first, or certainly among the first dogs to have a website. Looking back it was nothing to brag about, but she went a long way from there. Kyliedog.com became fairly ginormous, featuring her travel logs, her blog, interactive games and things, and even her very own News Network, KNN, reporting on important issues like Canine Discrimination and Squirrel Conspiracies! But the most famous / infamous part of Kylie’s website is the Psychic Puppy Network.

We were trying to think of something to make Kylie’s site unique, because by then lots of dogs were copy-catting Kylie and getting websites of their own. The Psychic Puppy Network was launched.. with The Great Kylini’s Magic Dog Biscuits, Past Life Regression, and online Tarot Card Readings, it became Kylie’s claim to fame.

I don’t remember what came first or in what order things took place but the Psychic Puppy Network started getting international acclaim. It was featured in a few newspapers across the country. It was a featured site on USA Today’s website, and on Seventeen magazine’s website. It received 4 out of 5 stars when reviewed by Access Magazine. Penn & Teller even linked to the Psychic Puppy Network from their website for quite awhile.

It was also a topic of conversation on several different radio stations in the US. In fact for weeks one radio station was calling “The Great Kylini” once a week (very early in the morning) for lucky numbers!

Then Kylie hit the big time.. TV, in both the US and Great Britain!In 1999 she was on the tele on London’s “So Graham Norton” show as part of a regular segment about wacky things on the internet. Then in 2000 Kylie did a LIVE interview via webcam for the TechTv (now the G4 network) program, “The Internet Tonight”!

Eventually, the excitement wore off and the internet moved on to dancing hamsters, and bulldogs who ride skateboards, and the like. And Kylie, well she was just Kylie.. unaffected by the love and adoration of the masses. She just loved her life and loved us, celebrity was inconsequential.

But for those of you who just thought Kylie was your typical, little white dog (though somewhat extra smart and sassy and cute), you should know she really was a super star – and not just to us!

It may seem a bit out of order to go from spring flowers to winter sports, but for the record it snowed on our spring flowers last night. Besides, Kylie was not one to stick to anybody’s rules about keeping things in order!

Kylie LOVED snow, and one of her favorite things to do in the snow… SLEDDING!

No, she didn’t go down on her own but as soon as we would sit down on the sled she was very happy to jump on your lap!

She was even happier at the bottom of the hill to jump off, shake, and head back up the hill.. it was almost like she was saying, “Let’s do it again!”

And whenever we were at a really populated sled hill, people were always amazed and amused, “look at the dog getting on the sled!” But Kylie always was a crowd-pleaser.

Of course sledding is exhausting work, sometimes on a sunny sledding day the sled itself became the perfect place for a nap. Or if we were sledding in the mountains, it would be a very quiet car ride because Kylie would be passed out all the way home!

We’ve mentioned how much Kylie loved a road trip, well she really enjoyed camping too – if you did it right. And the right way to go camping was at home!

Usually we set up camp in the temperature controled living room with all the necessities lots of pillows and blankets and of course junk food! We would hang out and play, things like simulated storm, or blair witch project, or most often her favorite, in other words, her most hated toys would launch an attack and then hover just out of reach hanging from the top of the tent where kylie would jump and jump on the futon mattress until she got them.  Of course then they would manage to pounce up on top of the tent and torment her. Kylie would launch herself, full force up onto the sides of the tent until they would tumble down to their own demise.

Naturally after all that the tent was a great place to take a nap. Napping however was the only sleeping that was to be done in the tent… when it was bed time, Kylie would climb out of the tent and go directly to bed, her regular bed. And no amount of coaxing would convince her that when you’re camping you’re supposed to sleep in the tent.. all night! She would look at me like I was some kind of weirdo, like “who in their right mind sleeps in the living room (or a couple times on the back patio) in a tent when there is a perfectly good bed in the BED-room? Geesh, dummies, play time is over!”

We have told people many times that Kylie was our ticket to a second childhood, but the fact is sometimes Kylie was just more mature than us – and not afraid to let us know it!

-

In all of Kylie’s travels, and she loved to travel, it was kind of a thing to stop at the state line signs and take her picture. Sometimes it was challenging with traffic rushing by and what not, but we usually did try to make sure we weren’t risking life and limb on the side of the road (we were bad parents, but not that bad).

So to really compliment her collection of state sign photos we decided to make a trek to four corners. We thought it would be cool for Kylie to be in four states at once, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. In retrospect, “cool” was probably an overestimation, it’s like the definition of the middle of nowhere down there! Anyway, we drove and drove and drove and drove, which was fine because with Kylie it was all about the journey. We finally got there and it was like she was on a mission. She walked straight up to the marker and all on her own she sat her little butt down right in the middle where the four corners meet. And even though she wasn’t a big fan of the whole picture taking process, she looked up at us, squinting in the ridiculous wind, and it was like she was saying, “ok, this is what we drove all this way for, go ahead and take my picture!” we just laughed.

All together Kylie visited 25 states I think, plus DC, and oh yeah.. Canada, twice! That’s quite a lot for one little dog!

Before we had our CRV we borrowed one from some friends to drive up into the mountains. Kylie rode in the backseat of course, and she made herself at home on a child’s car seat. She loved it!! She loved the elevation, inside and out of the car, and especially in the car seat where she could get even higher and look down into the other cars – or at least be eye level with them. In Colorado almost everybody drives an suv and apparently she didn’t like the view from the little honda hatchback so much.

It was then that we decided to buy a CRV for ourselves – well, more accurately for Kylie! But we told her that we absolutely refused to put a child safety seat in the back!  Fortunately we found something better.. a booster seat! It was made specifically for dogs, it provided a comfortable raised seat, storage space under the seat, and you could even take it out of the car and unfold it to make a bed in the hotel room or wherever. It’s pretty cool – and it was possibly Kylie’s favorite place to be!

Her favorite place to snooze during a long road trip..

Her favorite place to stand guard, or rather sit and guard her CRV…

Definitely the best place to look down at people in tiny little cars..

and no question, the best place ever to just cruise and be cool!

But Kylie is always cool!

Once in New Jersey we decided to go on a trek to Amish Country because, well, why not. It’s not a long drive -unless you make a wrong turn and end up in Delaware (oops!), good thing we were pretty much always in it for the journey, not the destination!

So when we finally got there, we were tooling around seeing what there is to see, but Kylie was really not happy with what there was to see. There were two things that got Kylie really riled up when she was riding in the car, one was pedestrians. You see Kylie loved going places in the car, it didn’t matter where she just liked to go! So she couldn’t understand why everybody else didn’t ride around in the car too, it seemed suspicious to her that anybody would choose to be on foot, or riding in a horse drawn buggy for that matter. Which brings us to the other thing… horses (and cows too). And what do they have more than anything of in Amish Country? Pedestrians & horses!

She was barking her head off the whole time!

Then we had stopped to do some shopping, and touristy type touring and we were at a stand where they were selling homemade candies and goodies and root beer of all things. And there was a cute little Amish girl working there, maybe ten years old, and of course she was instantly captivated by Kylie. So she came out and knelt down to say hello and Kylie who was hot & tired and already on high alert because of all the horses and such started barking like crazy at the little girl in black & white and scared her silly! Poor little girl didn’t know what hit her, we felt terrible so we bought a big jug of root beer and didn’t let Kylie have any even though root beer is her favorite.

That was, needless to say, our only trip to Amish Country!

This time of year our favorite family outing was a trip to Breckenridge for the International Snow Sculpting Competition. Kylie loves snow, so the amazing sculptures were just a bonus!

There were always plenty of other dogs around but Kylie, especially in her backpack always attracted attention. One of the things we miss the most is being around little miss congeniality and the life of the party! But really, we just miss everything about her.