Gaston turned ten yesterday, and today we booked his next transatlantic flights. In exactly a month, the three of us will fly from Seattle to New York, then continue to Malta for ten days. On the way home we will stay in New York for another week before flying back to Seattle, and a few weeks later he will be in California with us for Thanksgiving and Christmas. This is apparently retirement for a French bulldog.
His tenth birthday offered little evidence that he intends to slow down. We started around nine in the morning at a photography studio that specializes in dogs, where he spent an hour being dressed in different outfits and accepting an unreasonable number of treats in exchange for posing. From there we went to Lower Queen Anne, the Seattle neighborhood where he grew up, and stopped at his favourite coffee shop. We like to think he has fond memories of the place, although a more credible explanation is that there are usually croissant flakes on the floor.
We walked around the neighborhood for a while, then went to an outdoor restaurant overlooking Lake Washington, where a couple of friends joined us with presents for him. Later we moved closer to home, visited his favourite pet store, and went next door to a dog-friendly bar that is consequently populated mostly by people who have brought one. Gaston spent much of the evening being petted on a couch while we had a glass of wine with the same friends and he worked through another round of birthday treats. We finally got home around eight. After eleven hours out, the ten-year-old dog wanted to play.
This is worth establishing because, on paper, Gaston sounds considerably more fragile than he behaves. He has a bad back, a complicated collection of medication, four meals a day and enough medical history that travelling with him should probably seem like an obviously terrible idea. He also loves travelling more than almost anything else.
Hotels in particular produce a level of happiness that is difficult to explain. The first time we open the door to a new hotel room, he runs in, sniffs every corner and usually has a couple of zoomies before settling down. Outside, he wants to investigate every new smell, which can make an ordinary walk take approximately forever. In Italy, where people seem particularly enthusiastic about dogs, strangers regularly stop to admire him. “Che spettacolo,” someone will say, which is not a bad review for a small aging bulldog who has just arrived in town.
Gaston has now been to ten countries. This sounds as though we set out to produce an unusually well-travelled dog, but for the first five years of his life he had barely travelled at all. He was born in Toledo, Washington, in August 2016 and grew up in Seattle. His first trip abroad was a drive to Vancouver just before Christmas when he was still a baby. Then Covid arrived, and travel stopped for a while.
By November 2021 we finally felt comfortable travelling again. We had also just bought our house in West Seattle and had exactly one free weekend between moving in and leaving for a long trip to Europe. Most of our belongings were still packed in boxes in the garage, we had flights to Rome coming up, and there were several more sensible uses for that weekend. Instead, we decided Gaston needed a rehearsal.
We did not want his first flight to be six hours across three time zones, so we booked a short flight to Spokane. We flew out on Saturday morning, walked around town, did a few wine tastings and discovered that Gaston was completely untroubled by the entire process. The only significant problem was ours. Amid buying a house, moving, planning Europe and dealing with the remaining complications of Covid travel, we had somehow booked the return flight for five in the morning rather than five in the afternoon. Our weekend in Spokane ended much earlier than intended, and we were back in Seattle in time for coffee and breakfast. As dress rehearsals go, it was useful: Gaston had passed, while we had demonstrated that somebody should probably check the itinerary more carefully.
The real trip was rather more ambitious. My brother was travelling through Italy and neighbouring countries with his wife and their son. Frederika and I had been chosen as our nephew’s godparents, but Covid had delayed the baptism until we were finally able to travel. By the time we made it to Italy, he was already a year and a half old.
We rented a beautiful house in Albano Laziale, outside Rome, and held the baptism in Nemi, a small town overlooking the hills and Lake Nemi. My cousin and his wife have a B&B and restaurant there, so after the baptism and Mass we had lunch with the family.
The owner of the house in Albano Laziale happened, by extraordinary coincidence, to be a veterinarian. We had emailed before booking to make sure a dog was welcome, and he replied to tell us what he did for a living. This turned out to be extremely convenient because Gaston needed some additional medication and paperwork before the next stage of the trip. Even at the beginning, travelling with him seemed to involve a mixture of excessive planning and improbable luck.
We spent a day in Rome before leaving. We knew perfectly well that Gaston was not going to walk around the city all day, but there was no chance I was going to Rome with him and leaving without a photograph of Gaston in front of the Colosseum. The solution was my nephew’s stroller. For roughly half the day Gaston sat in the storage area underneath it, looking entirely comfortable with the arrangement, and for much of the other half we carried him. It was inconvenient, slightly ridiculous and completely worth it. We ate very well, had a lovely day and got the photograph.
Getting from Rome to Malta was less elegant. On that first trip we drove to Naples, an experience I have no desire to romanticize, dropped off the car and took an overnight ferry to Palermo. When we emerged the next morning the heavens opened. We had four pieces of luggage and a dog, which leaves very few hands available for umbrellas, and eventually found shelter in the reception area of a hotel with a poor excuse for a bar. The coffee was welcome; the roof was more important.
From Palermo we took a long and expensive taxi across Sicily to Pozzallo, where we were supposed to catch the ferry to Malta. It was too windy, so the ferry was cancelled and we unexpectedly acquired an extra day in Sicily. We almost enjoyed it.
Eventually we made it to Malta and stayed for more than a month, including Christmas and New Year with the family. Gaston loved everybody and everybody loved him, which is generally how these things go. I was particularly happy that my grandmother got to meet him. She does not travel and had once told me she was sad that she would never see him in person. Gaston approached the meeting with his usual strategy of trying to kiss her and persuading her to pet him, while she was genuinely delighted to finally have him there.
That trip also started another small Gaston chronology. We had bought an apartment in Mellieħa that was still being built, and on his first visit he came with us to see what was mostly a pile of rubble. The next time we went to Malta, we stayed in a fairly dirty Airbnb in Mġarr and brought him back to the apartment, which by then had tiles but was still not remotely habitable. On his third trip, we finally stayed in the finished place. Gaston has therefore inspected the apartment at every meaningful stage of construction, which is more oversight than he has provided on any of my software projects.
The route to Malta changed almost every time. On the way back from the first trip we rented a car in Pozzallo, crossed the Strait of Messina and drove all the way to Rome. The second time we rented a car at Rome airport, drove through Naples and Palermo and used the ferry again, then drove back through Sicily with my parents, stopping for a few days in Siracusa and elsewhere before ending in Rome. On the third trip we finally discovered a much nicer solution: an overnight train from Rome to Siracusa in a private cabin.
The train itself boards a ferry at Messina, where it is split into sections for the crossing. I found the whole operation fascinating, and it also gave us a chance to get out and walk Gaston. He slept for part of the journey. We did not, but this was still a considerable improvement over driving through Naples and Palermo. On the return journey we were able to fly from Sicily rather than making our way back to Rome, which felt almost suspiciously easy.
This September should be easier still. For the first time, we can fly directly between New York and Malta. After years of ferries, taxis, rental cars, sleeper trains and crossing the Strait of Messina with a dog, simply getting on one plane feels like cheating.
The Rome-to-Malta journeys were not even our most elaborate. For my brother-in-law’s wedding in Košice, we started in Paris and train-hopped our way to Slovakia and back, taking in Munich, Zakopane, Vienna and Zürich along the way. Paris required the obvious photograph with the Eiffel Tower.
In Munich he posed beside a litre of beer at a beer garden, a photograph that now sits on the homepage of this website. In Zakopane, Poland, Frederika and I wore ridiculous plastic ponchos in the rain while Gaston travelled in his stroller under a third one. In Košice, which has become another home for us, he attended the wedding wearing a dog tuxedo. Vienna became a large family stop with my parents, Frederika’s parents, my brother and my nephew. We stopped in Zürich for a day on the way back, where my main memory is potatoes and cheese. This was before I became interested in watches, which was probably fortunate.
For a long time, none of this meant Gaston had to travel with us. In fact, when he was younger we had an almost absurdly good alternative.
Becka, his dog sitter in West Seattle, has been part of his life since he was young. Before we lived in West Seattle ourselves, we would drive him there once a week even though the round trip could mean an hour in traffic. He loved going. He made friends, particularly Murdock, a slightly older dog who took Gaston under his wing. Murdock had an unexplained enthusiasm for cars, so Becka called him the chauffeur. Gaston, with the white patch on his chest that looks slightly like formalwear, was the butler.
Murdock and Gaston remained friends for years. Murdock sadly never made it to ten, but he remains part of the story of Gaston growing up. So does Becka. She has given us several wonderful paintings of Gaston over the years, and they are displayed throughout our house. Each one is attached to a different version of him and brings back memories of the life he had there.
The longest we ever left Gaston was for about a month when we went to Malta for my cousin’s wedding and my brother’s wedding. Becka had already planned a short vacation of her own during that period, and we were genuinely worried about what we would do for those few days. Her solution was to change her plans, stay at dog-friendly hotels and take Gaston with her. She, her husband and their adopted son Gaston went to Suncadia and Leavenworth. We received photographs of him in his stroller at Suncadia and, most memorably, floating down a river in Leavenworth on an inflatable tube.
Leaving Gaston with Becka was therefore never something we felt guilty about. Quite often we would be on holiday receiving evidence that the dog was having a more interesting time than we were. We trusted her completely, he adored being there, and if anything we were paying somebody to provide him with his own vacation while we went on ours.
What changed was Gaston. As he got older, his back became less reliable. A few times, a day or two after spending time playing with the other dogs, his back would seize badly enough that he was clearly in pain and would start vomiting. He aspirated during several of those episodes, and we believe this was part of how his aspiration pneumonia eventually became chronic. We tried adjusting rather than stopping. Becka would collect him just for walks and bring him home, but Gaston has never understood the concept of taking it easy when there are other dogs around. Put him in a house with ten dogs and he wants to jump, wrestle and play with them. It would be unreasonable to expect Becka to prevent him from being Gaston every second he was there. The irony is that by the time we moved to West Seattle and lived less than five minutes away from the place he had spent years visiting, he had become too fragile to enjoy it safely.
Our lives are easier than they might otherwise be because Frederika and I both work from home. Gaston is usually with us and comes with us most places when we go out. If we leave him behind, we cannot simply give him the run of the house. A couch or bed is an invitation to jump up and, more importantly, jump back down, so we have a gated area in the downstairs den with two beds, water and a camera. There is deliberately almost nothing there on which he can injure himself. We have essentially Gaston-proofed a room against Gaston. At night he sleeps in bed with us, usually on our pillows or between our legs. Where else would he sleep?
His day is organized around food and medication. He eats roughly at seven in the morning, between eleven and noon, between three and four, and again at seven in the evening. Some pills come with the morning meal, some around noon, some at seven, and others before bed. We used to leave him for eight or nine hours when we worked in offices. These days, four hours is about the longest we are comfortable being away, particularly during the day when another meal or medication is always approaching. At night, after his final meal and medication, we can sometimes leave him sleeping safely while we dress up and go somewhere for a good dinner or a few cocktails without a French bulldog.
This is one of the reasons Gaston now comes to lunches, wine tastings, beaches, bars and almost everything else. The alternative is not simply finding somebody who likes dogs. Whoever looks after him would need to manage the meals, the medication, his back, his breathing and the various ways he can hurt himself while enthusiastically behaving as though none of those things are wrong with him. More importantly, they would need to know him well enough to notice when something was slightly different. Travelling therefore did not become impossible when Gaston got old; it just became increasingly difficult to travel without him.
Flying is, strangely, one of the easier parts. We use Delta whenever we can because, after a lot of research and experience, it has worked well for us travelling with Gaston. On flights between the United States and Europe he travels in the cabin with us. The same arrangement does not apply to the flights we would need within Europe, which is one reason our journeys between Rome, Sicily and Malta became so elaborate.
Gaston himself could hardly make flying easier. He mostly sleeps on us for the entire flight. A couple of times we walk him toward the back of the cabin, and otherwise he attracts so little attention that people often do not realize there has been a dog on the plane until we are getting off.
Airports do something inexplicable to him. On an ordinary walk he is difficult. He stops when he wants, sniffs absolutely everything and considers our preferred direction merely a suggestion. The moment he enters an airport, he walks perfectly beside us, sometimes almost galloping along like a show dog. We do not know why. Perhaps he understands that airports lead to hotels.
He certainly understands suitcases. Open one on the floor and Gaston will eventually climb into it and lie down, whether or not we have already filled it with clothes. This is less useful than helping us pack but more persuasive as an expression of intent.
Medication becomes trickier when we change time zones. We cannot simply move everything by nine hours when we land, particularly his heart medication, so on longer trips we shift the schedule gradually, usually by about an hour at a time, until meals and pills happen at times that do not require us to wake at three every morning. On short trips there is not enough time to make the transition properly, so our alarms remain attached partly to Seattle even when the rest of us are somewhere in Europe.
We rarely leave him alone in hotels now. In the past, if we had to, the safest place was sometimes the bathroom because there was no bed or couch to jump from. These days it is easier to bring him with us, and fortunately this is exactly what he wants.
The paperwork, airline rules, medication schedules and planning are annoying, but after doing them enough times they have become part of travelling. We know they are coming and deal with them. The part that has never become routine is worrying about what would happen if Gaston became seriously ill somewhere far from home. In Seattle we know his doctors, know where to go and know the level of care available to him. Every trip carries the possibility that something could happen somewhere we do not have that familiarity or confidence. That worry travels with us too.
So far, Gaston seems less concerned. He has seen the Colosseum, crossed the Strait of Messina in cars and trains, attended weddings in a tuxedo, sheltered from Polish rain under his own poncho, met my grandmother in Malta, floated down a river in Leavenworth without us, and inspected our apartment in Mellieħa from rubble to completion. He has slept through transatlantic flights, posed beside a litre of beer in Munich and arrived in enough hotel rooms to know that each new door might contain twenty minutes of excellent sniffing.
There are easier ways to travel, and there was a time when we used them. We could leave Gaston with somebody he loved, go away for weeks and receive photographs proving that he was doing perfectly well without us. That option disappeared gradually as his body became older while his enthusiasm failed to receive the same information.
I am glad the two things happened in that order. By the time Gaston needed to come with us, we already knew that he could. More importantly, we knew that he wanted to.
Next month will be his fourth trip to Malta. He will see the family again and stay in the apartment he watched being built. Then we will take him back to New York for a week, where there will be new streets to sniff, people to charm and another hotel room to inspect. After that there is California, and whatever comes next.
For now, there is probably already a suitcase somewhere in the house that Gaston would like us to open.
