Well, it is 2:30 in the morning on the day I am going home. Yes, obviously I can’t sleep so here I am wrapping up the blog with my journey at the Seeing Eye.
During day 16 I checked out with the admissions staff. I paid the money I owed the school for supplies, and I also received my ID card, paperwork for traveling and a personal picture of Chief. They will send this to me in digital form in the next few days.
we went to the court house in the morning and worked on security review to simulate what we will do at the airport on Thursday morning. This went very smoothly.
After lunch we went on a trip near the water. Here we worked on parking lot work and worked along a waterfront to see how the dogs did. Chief was amazingly great at this and did not care too much about the water.
When we got back, we went straight to the vet for our review with them on Chief’s health record. We received all his medications, and they assisted in putting the tags we received on his collar. They didn’t have the equipment needed to do this correctly, so we took care of this once we returned to the house.
In the evening we had our lecture on dog interference. This is always a difficult lecture to hear but it is so vitally important.
On day seventeen we did this amazing route in the morning. My classmate that I paired up with many times and I worked our dogs on a 3.1-mile route in Madison, NJ. It was a very beautiful area, and the blocks were very long. It was a great route for the dogs and Chief had never been there before so it was awesome to see how he would do in an area that he never had seen before. There were plenty of grass lines to contend with, so his nose was quite active. This caused us to correct quite a bit, but it was also good to see how he would react to this.
After lunch the entire class went out for ice cream. I asked for a sugar free vanilla cone, and a small one at that! What I got instead was a super large cone, and I mean huge! It was very good!
We worked our way back to the school and I rested a bit from the day’s activities prior to taking the dogs out for park.
After dinner it was time to finalize packing activities. I showered for the next day, threw in my laundry and finished packing my remaining things except for my computer. Yes, this is the same device I am typing this on and after I finish this and check email it will get packed.
I made some phone calls to family and friends and then hung out with some classmates in the evening before returning to my room to get some rest. I went to bed around 10:00 and got up at about 2:20 or so. Yes, it is going to be a very long day, but this is OK, I would rather it be. It will be nice to sleep in my own bed this evening!
OK, well, this weekend I will write a bit more about us returning home and I will fill in everyone on how Chief does on the plane, the introduction to his new home, our first visit to work and our first routes in our neighborhood. The adventure is truly beginning!