It all started on one cold rainy night in November, a night that changed our lives forever. As Bill and I were leaving, our monthly snow ski club meeting we saw a small wet dog wandering around the grounds of the community center. She was cold and scared and would not come to anyone who called her. We did not want to leave the poor wet dog behind so with the help of our friends we finally caught her and took her back home to our apartment.

At home, we dried her off and saw that she had a large wound on her belly. To us, it looked as though she had gotten caught in a wire fence because the area was partially healed. The following morning we took her to the vet to have them take care of her wound, and they said that she was probably 3 years old and that she had a litter of puppies sometime in her life.

Bill and I have only been married a year and the thought of a pet in our busy lives did not make any sense to us. We knew that the apartment building did not allow any pets, and we thought that the only thing that we could do was to try to find her owners. For several weeks we posted flyers at the community center where we found her, and asked the people in the neighborhood if anyone lost a small white and brown dog that looked like a small Brittany Spaniel. Without any I.D. tags, we decided that we would have to give her a name, and the only name that was perfect for her was "Lady," because she looked like Lady in "Lady and the Tramp." As the weeks passed by, we had no response to our ads, and so a decision had to be made. With our busy lifestyle of traveling, camping, snow and water skiing, and many other activities we knew that to keep her would not be fair to her.

During the time that we had her, she was so good in the apartment, she never barked and even with newspapers on the floor she would not use them, she would wait until we got home from work for her walk. She had many toys and what a joy to have her greet us when we got home from work.

Since we would not want to board her every time, we went somewhere we knew that we would have to find a good home for her. Since Bill and I worked at the same place, we asked around and found a family with two daughters who recently lost their pet. They were thrilled when we said that we found a dog, and it would be best for Lady to be in a good home with a yard, and children for her to play with.

We planned to give them "Lady" a week before Christmas, but as the weeks passed by we knew that we could not give her up, we were hooked, we had the companionship of a true pet, one that would last a lifetime. We told the family that we could not give her up because we had grown attached to her, and that one way or another we would make things work out, and she would be our "Copilot" forever!

A few months passed, and we knew that we would have to find a house for the "Three of us." We found a home and bought a ski boat, and a few years later bought our first RV, a 16-foot Lazy Daze mini-motor home. Since Lady was an older dog, she was not accustomed to riding in the station wagon or the RV, but in time she did settle down and enjoyed traveling with us, either by car, our RV, or on our small motorcycle or in the boat.

One funny thing that she did was to try to knock off Bill's hat as we were riding in the station wagon. To make our station wagon more comfortable for our trips, Bill took out the back seat of the station wagon and built a platform so that we could have a mattress in the back for our camping trips. I made curtains for the windows and off we would go camping, fishing, water skiing, and snow skiing. When Lady was sitting in the back of the station wagon on the mattress, she would pace back and forth from one side to the other, looking out of the window not wanting to miss a thing. As she was going from side to side she would knock off Bill's hat, we would all laugh, then pick up his hat and start all over again. All pets have their traits, and this was hers.

Before we bought our first RV, we would go snow skiing to Mammoth Mountain in California, sleeping in the station wagon to save money on lodging. Lady would always go with us, and we would bundle up in a warm sleeping bag put on our portable heater, and sleep in the station wagon. Then, we bought our first RV and that was wonderful, we would go with Lady by our side in our RV and had many adventures. We would spend a week or two in Aspen, Colorado parked at the foot of the ski lifts in downtown Aspen, or at Snowmass, Aspen Highlands, and Buttermilk Mountain. Every morning, we would walk her and then take the ski lift to the top of the mountain and ski the runs. We would come back down the hill for lunch and walk Lady again and spend some time with her and then back up the mountain. We did this for many years skiing at Vail, Park City, Snowbird, Alta, Deer Valley, Beaver Mountain, Sun Valley, Jackson Hole, Grand Targhee, Mammoth, and June Mountains, but today with the condos and more restrictions on RV parking this is not allowed.

Ah, the good old days! We said that we were glad that we had traveled and seen so many places back in the ‘60s, 70's, 80's, and 90's. Lady has traveled with us, from the Western States to Mexico and back. She was always a trooper, no matter what we did she always was by our side, whether it was backpacking the High Sierras in California, duck and pheasant hunting in the Sacramento Valley, boating on Lake Powell, or exploring Mexico.

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