Kyla Duffy

You know how sometimes people have ideas that you find out about and think, “Dammit! Why didn’t I think of that?” Yeah, well, that’s how I feel about Airbnb. When I was planning my trip to San Diego, I was struggling because I wanted to bring Bill and Hillary, but I didn’t have any friends who could accommodate two dogs for a week, and I didn’t really want to stay at La Quinta. I looked on Craigslist to find short-term rentals and came across a bunch of people with rooms for rent listed on Airbnb, a website that allows people with regular homes to open their doors to strangers – bnb style. Everyone I wrote was very responsive, and the prices were at least 30% lower than hotels. Additionally, staying at people’s homes is my kind of travel – you just get such a better view of what life is like in a place when you stay with the people who live there.

Ultimately, I ended up choosing to rent a room for $45 a night from this delightful German woman named Tanja. She seemed very sweet, had a friendly dog, and spoke GERMAN! This was awesome for me, as I’ve been trying to reinvigorate my desire to learn German, a language I spoke fairly well in my teens.

Tanja’s house was exactly as it looked in the photos online. I would call it “clean Euro design meets San Diego palm trees.” Her dog, Sammy, an exuberant, barrel-chested mixed-breed, greeted us with excitement, and the dogs became instant pals. Tanja made us feel safe and at home from the second we stepped through her doorway and did all she could to accommodate us, even taking us on a scenic hike on her day off. It turned out she had an extra guest house in a converted garage, and the first night I stayed she had another renter come, too. His name was Matt, and he was a sail designer and professional boat racer. What an interesting guy! He had just come back from racing in Thailand, and we hit it off immediately based on our similar life situations: a driving desire to do the activity we love, and inability to do anything else, and a complete disregard for the strain our pursuits would put on our families…

Okay, that wasn’t fair, but one could easily see it that way. The fact is, for me, with trapeze, I just feel magnetically drawn to fly professionally for a while. Nothing else really interests me, and right now, when I’m back in Boulder, I feel depressed. I love my husband very much and am extremely grateful that he supports my wandering spirit, but I have to separate myself (physically) from him for a while to do this. He understands. If he wanted to become a commercial pilot, I would understand and support him. For my new friend Matt, things aren’t so cut and dry. He and his wife have an eight-year-old, and his wife took the kid to live in Missouri near her family recently. Matt, of course, can’t live in Missouri because A) Missouri sucks and B) he’s a sailor! My opinion is that his wife is being extremely unfair, but these matters are never as black and white as they seem.

One night Matt, Tanja, Hon (Tanja’s boyfriend), and I grilled shrimp and veggies over Tanja’s fire pit in her yard. We spent the evening drinking wine, trading stories, and laughing at the songify guys on Youtube. Tanja made the mistake of asking me to start the fire, which is never a good choice. As usual, I proved that the Girl Scouts curriculum of learning to sell cookies and raise money for the organization is not nearly as useful when it really counts as what the Boy Scouts teach.

After Matt moved out, a Mexican girl and her German boyfriend moved in. They were quiet and friendly, enjoying a vacation together before going back to their graduate studies at universities on opposite sides of the globe.

It was a good day. We had arrived in San Diego safely, the sun was shining, I had a few hours before I had to meet the woman who was renting me a room in her home for $45 a night (a steal for a safe place that accommodates two dog), and I was being welcomed into town by the sweet smell of donuts. Life was good, but for the dogs, it was about to get even better. It turns out that about a mile away from where I was parked was a place called Fiesta Island. My dogfriendly.com app told me it was a dog park, but it seemed too good to be true – it was huge and surrounded by ocean inlets. I thought, “There must be a catch.”

We drove over to Fiesta Island and were greeted by the most awesome dog park EVER. There was no catch – this place was just great. It was exactly what Boulder off-leash areas have failed miserably to be: a warm, fuzzy, accommodating place to go and enjoy dog happiness. You see, Boulder, in its quest to be extremely dog-friendly, has become dog-German. I don’t know a better way to put it. There are just rules upon rules, and even the best dog owners (oops – guardians – that’s what you have to call yourself in Boulder – another rule) feel as though they are perpetually in the wrong. In Boulder, you have to leash your dog whenever you approach a trail. You can’t have more than three dogs with you, and if you have three, one must be on leash. The two who are allowed off leash must be WEARING these big, dangly green tags that you must go online and pay $15 for. Supposedly your $15 guarantees that your dogs know to come when called. Uh, yeah. The dogs must stay on trail, even though many trails are bordered by the dog equivalent of “Wack-a-Mole”… prairie dog land! How could any dog resist? But resist they must, or their guardians could be fined up to $1,000. (If you ask me, guardians should receive $5 for each prairie dog they bring back. They’re frickin’ rodents that carry the plague, for God’s sake!) The ridiculous rules don’t just end with trails. At our dog park, the authorities  once removed all of the plastic chairs people had donated because, it turns out, plastic chairs are “dangerous.” Apparently, though, having a faulty gate that flings itself open at the slightest gust of wind is not dangerous, nor is having a drainage system that floods the small dog park whenever it rains.

I digress… The Fiesta Beach dog park is about a two-mile walk surrounded by water with infinite trails criss-crossing it’s interior space. There are shrubs on which to pee, pipes in which to peer, and waves in which to splash. The people are all very nice, and the dogs are friendly and playful. On the weekend, there may be 200 dogs there at a time, yet it still doesn’t seem that crowded. Bill and Hillary were in heaven!

I returned from training in Florida for two weeks to find snow falling from the sky. Of course, this is a typical occurrence during winter in Boulder, but what is not typical is for it to fall… and freeze. The snow fell and fell until there was two feet on the ground, and then, in an uncharacteristic move by Mother Nature, it stuck for days.

There is nothing worse then coming off a white sand beach in a bikini to this sort of torment. I had retired from snowboarding years earlier for many reasons, but one thing I never missed was the cold and snow. Additionally, I had just gotten over my “cucarachas,” as the Colombians call them – my fears about trapeze because I hadn’t done it for so long – and I didn’t want them back. I waited days: preparing to teach the upcoming semester of sales management, celebrating a nice Christmas with my family, and dogsitting two crazy Boston Terriers in addition to our own pair. I remained optimistic that the weather would break and we’d be able to fly, but it didn’t. When the snow finally began to melt, the winds began to roar. Have you ever tried to get a 13-pound dog to go out to pee in 50 mph winds?

Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I began making plans to go to Austin, TX to fly at a rig I had never visited (Trapeze Austin). The owner, Russell, was kind in inviting me down, but through our email communications, it seemed more like he thought I wanted a job than he realized I was coming to train. The reason I had chosen Austin over Escondido-based Trapeze High, where I knew the owner would be an awesome coach, was two-fold: I wanted to develop a relationship with the Austin folks (it’s always good to know people), and I thought the drive would be easier. However, after careful consideration, I started to get cold feet about Austin. I wasn’t sure how much I’d be able to train, I didn’t know the roads, and things just didn’t seem to be falling into place as nicely as I thought. Plus, if I drove out to California instead, I could stop in Vegas on the way home and help a friend put up his flying trapeze rig.

So, I changed my plans. This would be my first-ever solo road trip with two dogs, and I felt safer driving a path I was familiar with. As a youth, I had been a professional snowboarder. I was too young to rent cars wherever I went, so I usually just drove my own. A sense of nostalgia welled up inside me as I started planning the road trip, and my excitement grew to the point that I became restless. My plan was to leave on the 2nd so as to spend New Years with my husband, but I almost hopped in the car on the 31st. Thinking better of this, I kept to the plan and rolled out of town at about 7:30am on the 2nd.

The first stop, of course, was a short hike with the dogs to make sure everyone did “their business” and could settle in for the long drive. I must interject that I did a kick-ass job setting up the car. I flipped the seat down the day before and found that there was a bump between the back of the back seats and the floor of the trunk, so I put in a small memory foam dog bed to make things level. Beside it I put their crate. On top of that I layered to memory foam mattress toppers, a sleeping bag, and my favorite new blanket that my sister had bought me for Christmas. She was right – this blanket was the softest blanket I had ever touched, and I was happy to have it with me. To protect my bedding from doggy-mess, I covered it all up with their favorite blanket and two dog beds. The luggage went on the floor in front of the seats. Everything fit together like a good game of Tetris. We slept in the back at rest stops on the way to California, and it was super comfortable. I think it was more comfortable than the bed I slept in at the B-n-B I stayed at, but please don’t tell that to my host. She was very sweet. The dogs liked it, too, because it raised them up higher and made it easier for them to see out the window.

The drive was great. I had learn-to-speak-German mp3′s to keep me awake and audio books when I got all talked out. We stopped at a dog park in Grand Junction, where Bill found a corgi to hump and Hillary found some terriers to terrorize. We then moved along to St. George, Utah, where there was another dog park. The sun was setting, and the dogs were just leaving, but Bill and Hillary enjoyed running around anyway. Leaving St. George, I almost ended our trip way too early by poorly judging the speed of traffic and making a U-turn almost into a truck, but luckily they saw me and got out of the way. I felt stupid for at least the next 50 miles.

We drove past Vegas around 9pm – way too early to call it a night. By then, our total driving time was about 11 hours, and we had at least six to go until our destination. I pulled over in a truck stop about an hour outside of Vegas to catch some sleep but awoke three hours later feeling an urgency to keep driving. By 6am, I was parked outside a donut shop very close to where I would be staying in Mission Bay area San Diego. This would be a great place to rest because I could wake up to a delicious treat.