there will never be a right time
what traveling with my dog meant to me
The heavy door slammed behind us.
My shoulders instinctively relaxed, sending my swollen tote bag thudding onto the aggressively millennial terrazzo linoleum floor. My nostrils flared as I caught a whiff of cleaning product. There was a damp spot on the floor that was still drying from housekeeping service. The window was left cracked open, filling the room with the sound of cars whooshing down Sunset.
I bent down and met Maggi’s shiny black eyes through the mesh of her carrier. Once unzipped, she burst out, trotted around the room—careful to avoid the damp spot—did a full body shake, huffed, and stood expectantly by my feet. I plucked her off the ground, gave her a quick paw wipe, and plopped down on the bed. The mattress immediately sank from my weight. Hotel beds are always too soft for my liking (except for the ones in Asia); I’ve never understood why Americans described “sleeping on a cloud” as the pinnacle of comfort. Clouds don’t look like they give you any back support.
Maggi was resting in Sphinx pose with her arms crossed. I stared at her, and she shot back a whale eye. I hugged her tiny form with both my arms and said, “this is our home for the next week. I hope you like it.”
Maggi is my 8 year old rescue toy poodle.
The shelter named her Maggie. We didn’t want her to go through the confusion of learning a new name, given that she’d already had such a hard life and all. So we kept it, but dropped the e, so it’s spelled like the seasoning.
She has the personality of a very prim and dignified old lady. The week we brought her home, my partner and I excitedly bought a giant bag of toys and treats for her to try. Every salmon chip and broth biscuit was rejected. She would stare at a squeaky toy, then glance up at me as if to ask, “what do you expect me to do with that?” So everything was returned or donated to the shelter.
The first (and only) time we hired a poodle trainer, a silvery-haired woman named Maurene, she told us “poodles are usually very goofy, but Maggi is like a little old lady.” Once in a blue moon, Maggi will grace us with a singular act of cartoonish doggie mischief—as if momentarily possessed by the spirit of a golden retriever with no traumatic history—and never do it again.
One year, it was stealing a crisp $100 bill from a drawer (mind you, there were smaller denominations of currency available) and bringing it to her bed as nesting material. She nearly got away with it too. The moment we locked eyes and saw what was happening, she opened her mouth, dropped the $100 bill, and scuttled away from the scene of the crime.
I’ve always wanted to bring her on a trip to LA with me, but it never felt like the “right time.” She is a creature of habit and a picky eater, so it’s easier to keep her in her home routine.
But she’s also a velcro dog who would live inside my skin if she could, and every time I’d go on a trip to LA, I would miss her soooo much when I saw girls with their purse dogs at cafes and restaurant patios. Her #1 hobby is sleeping in the sun, so I figured she would take a liking to the toasty climate.
She is also turning nine this fall, and has gone through a slew of health issues that have made me very aware of her mortality, and how there really is never a “right time” for anything logistically complex. You just have to decide you are going to do it.
So when the opportunity presented itself this month, I decided she was coming to LA with me for a week. It would be her first flight, her first hotel stay, her first time away from the Bay Area, really.
I researched and ordered the most ergonomic carrier tote in anticipation of hauling her everywhere with me, because at 8 lbs, she’s not quite small enough to be a purse dog. I booked our flights on a dog-friendly airline, made a reservation at a dog-friendly hotel, and laid out two suitcases—the big gray one for me, the little cobalt one for her. Initially, we were going to share the one big gray suitcase to keep things less cumbersome.
But between the 3” Prada platform shoes I had to bring and the mega ziploc of prescription kibble, it was already looking like a tight fit. The sooner I accepted that we were going to be two high maintenance ladies traveling together, the sooner I could just do what was needed to finish packing.
So she got her own little cobalt suitcase.
It was astounding how much stuff she needed. Or rather, the stuff I felt I needed for peace of mind: backup kibble, backup pumpkin puree, an emergency doggie first aid kit, a raincoat for the one day of rain in the forecast, her donut bed—because she is the kind of dog that would rather sleep on the hard cold ground than in a weird-smelling hotel-issued dog bed. And her purple wool beret, because it basically weighs nothing and brings joy to the entire world.
In the days leading up to the trip, I felt extremely anxious. Traveling with her was an unknown.
What if she got scared during takeoff and puked and I’d have to hold her ears back and the person next to us was not a dog person and shot us dagger eyes at us? What if she hated being away from home and I had to live with the guilt of seeing her sad, bored eyes? What if the LA bacteria upset her fragile gut biome and she got sick and I had to bring her to urgent care? I wrote down all my anxiety thoughts in a journal, drew a line down the middle of the page, and wrote a new column: “everything that could go right.”
The trip was both easier and harder than I had expected.
The flight was a breeze. Everything went on without a hitch. Mostly because what you are actually paying for with JSX is the convenience—no crowds, no lines, just a quiet low-stimulus environment for you and your dog. We arrived 30 minutes before takeoff. Once boarded, we sat across from a fluffy spotted dog named Olive, who sat quietly on her mom’s lap. I hoped Maggi could smell Olive’s canine presence and understand that being inside a sealed tin tube 30,000 feet in the sky was a perfectly safe and normal place for a dog.
She slept the entire flight, and barely shifted during takeoff or landing. I was relieved. The window seat next to me was empty, so I, trying to bond over a cute memory, plucked her out of her carrier and tried to show her that we were above the clouds. She had zero interest. So back in the carrier she went.
Which brings us to arriving at the hotel room.
Forming a routine away from home was the hardest part. Nothing went “wrong” during the trip. In fact, from a bird’s eye view, it went as smoothly as it could have gone. I know this sounds so obvious, but traveling with a dog is a lot of responsibility.
I prepared a mental checklist: remember to bring my keycard when I take her out to pee, remember to call a Lyft Pet and not a regular Lyft, remember to plan my outings around her feeding schedule, remember to double check whether a restaurant has dog-friendly seating.
But to actually live it was something else. Planned coffee meetings and social plans with friends quickly went out the window because I underestimated how much time and energy dog-rearing on the road would require. My shoulder got really sore and stiff from carrying her around stores, so I scaled back my ambitious vintage shopping plans.
My daily schedule started and ended with Maggi’s walks and feeding. I exhaled with relief every time her stools came out firm. Another day marked SAFE from anxiety diarrhea!!!! This probably sounds crazy to non-pet people, but when I ran out of her chicken topper, I would go to Erewhon next door, buy a pack of chicken breast tenders, cut it up into tiny pieces and boil it at my sister’s apartment while we watched two episodes of XO Kitty, and then pack it in an insulated L.L. Bean lunchbox until we could store it in the hotel refrigerator.
And then there were the tender moments I wish we could have stayed in forever.
Like the first day, when I brought Maggi to the hotel pool area, and she took an immediate liking to the sun-drenched lounge chairs. The outline of her fuzzy brown body popped against the yellow stripes. She got to do her favorite thing—sleep in the sun—only getting up to drink cold water from her portable bowl. I was thrilled by the mere fact that we were in Los Angeles together. We were really doing it.
There was also that day my sister and I got matcha lattes and went to Barnsdall Park. It was a random weekday, so parking was easy and we snagged a perfect spot to lay our picnic blanket. We laid down and Maggi sat between us, gazing down at the city. The first time I ever went to Barnsdall was in 2017, when a few of my friends and I decided to picnic on the Fourth of July and stay late to watch fireworks. One of my friends made baguette sandwiches with tarragon butter, and I got lost around the Hollyhock House looking for the bathroom. Nearly a decade later, here I am with my dog. I was acting like one of those parents whose kid gets into their alma mater for college, and when they visit campus for freshman move-in week, the parent can’t stop going on and on about “this was where I did XYZ.”
At Barnsdall, we laid under the blooming purple jacaranda trees and patted Maggi’s tummy as she lay on her side contentedly. She even met a friend there—a tiny brown toy poodle named Chocolate who was half her size and twice her age. Chocolate’s mom was also Asian woman so there was an instant familiarity between us. We ran into Chocolate again outside our hotel the next day.
After a week, Maggi seemed to get into the rhythm of life in LA. She befriended the valet guy, a smiley man named Carlos who would ask her que pasa! every morning as she sniffed and marked the sidewalk succulents. Her trots were starting to look more confident, the way they did at home, and she knew how to lead me back into the hotel entrance. I told her “this is your Eloise at the Plaza era.”
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about my grandma, who passed away last year. There was a conversation I had with my mom about her a long, long time ago. I don’t remember if it was before or after my grandma’s cancer diagnosis, but my mom said that she really wanted to bring her on a cruise, just the two of them. It was unsaid but understood that it was a bucket list trip, something to experience while she was still physically capable of it.
But my grandma’s health circumstances changed fast, and the cruise trip never happened. The window had closed. I don’t know if my mom dwells on this, but I do. It was the first time I truly saw that something had been “too late.”
Until Maggi came into my life, my dread towards mortality had always come from seeing my parents and grandparents get older. I didn’t grow up with pets, so I didn’t know how much I could love an animal. I didn’t know how sad and scared I would feel the first time the vet said she had to get bad teeth extracted, or when they “found something” on her ultrasound, or the day we waited for a call from the surgeon to tell us know the gallbladder removal went.
She is eight now, and I feel a sinking pit in my stomach every time I think about the fact that her time on this earth is significantly shorter than mine. For a long time, I refused to accept her signs of aging because it made me too sad. The redness in her fur hasn’t faded, it’s just the lighting today…I don’t think that’s a new sunspot, she’s probably always had it…
The decision to bring her on this trip with me was, in a way, an act of acceptance. That we don’t have all the time in world, that her fur has faded and sunspots multiplied, that she is getting older. The truth I didn’t want to face was that there probably wasn’t going to be a better or easier time to take this trip together.
Because of the kind of dog she is, I wouldn’t say that she had an absolute blast or anything like that. I think she thought it was interesting, curious. A new place with different smells. I do know that she felt loved and cared for the whole time.
On the flight home to Oakland, we sat behind Kristen Bell, who saw Maggi and cooed, “so cute, so cute” in her unmistakable cartoonish Anna voice from Frozen. If Maggi were a human girl, this would have been akin to meeting a real life Disney Princess or Santa Claus.
But she is a dog, so she does not give a fuck about celebrities. She just stared at Ms. Bell with the white crescent of her whale eye.
xo viv
Thanks for being here. You can find me on IG and TT. My wardrobe recs are saved here—unless it’s vintage, of course ;) I may earn a small commission from purchases made through affiliate links.
Some dog-friendly travel tips that made things easier:
*None of this is sponsored, and I paid for the trip myself.
Flying on JSX gave me the biggest peace of mind. The plane itself is small and not particularly fancy, but their process makes door-to-door travel extremely efficient and low-stress. You don’t have to follow the TSA liquid rules, you don’t have to worry about lost luggage, you can have your well-behaved pet sit on your lap during cruising altitude. I have a general referral code that gets you $100 off your first flight: 2R1V0B
The Cleverpup Transit Tote ($130) was a lifesaver. We used the size M. Maggi loves the teddy bed insert, it’s firm and supportive unlike most carriers. The straps are pretty ergonomic and I love the thoughtfulness in the zipper design—it’s hard to explain, but it “expands” towards the front so that you minimize the risk of zipping the fur on their head! Definitely designed by a pet lover.
Dog-friendly hotels I had bookmarked: Sunset Tower, Cara Hotel and Silverlake Pool and Inn. I ended up going with Silverlake Inn because Sunset Tower was too far from the places I’d be spending most of my time, and I read too many online reviews mentioning that Cara’s courtyard hosts a lot of parties and weddings and can get extremely loud at night. The staff was super accommodating to pets.
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As a toy poodle parent, this—the mini LL Bean suitcase, cutting up expensive health food chicken, contemplating dog aging and death—made me genuinely emotional.
Dogs are the best and the hardest thing since we don’t get nearly enough time with them. I’m so glad you had a good trip with Maggi, she’s precious. The senior dog rescue I volunteer at always gives me hope - I’ve walked so many elderly dogs over the years that have great energy and lots of joy, even with health issues. Wishing Maggi eight more happy years ✨