This weekend my niece turned 5. And you can’t turn 5 without all the presents.

You just can’t!

So the pups and I headed out for a road trip yesterday morning for the 2.5 hour drive to my parents house.

I have a nice big car for my little monsters, and one of those cargo gates in my car, to keep those monsters in their area, and we have taken many a road trip (including one all the way cross country) with this set up without any issues.

Everything with this road trip started out in much the same way. But about an hour into our trip, things started to go in a different direction.

All of a sudden, my boy Pavi, starts pacing around in the back, whining and basically freaking out.

Strange. He sometimes gets a little antsy on a long ride, but not like this.

I try to talk to him from behind the wheel and get him to calm down, but he doesn’t, and now he’s trying to climb over the grate barrier into the back seat. Meanwhile, I’m trying to talk, then coax, then adamantly insist that he knock it off and stay in the back, all while hurtling down the highway at 75 mph.

Needless to say, none of that works, and within a few minutes, Pavi is halfway over the barrier, but since he is literally a monster, he can’t get the rest of the way over and is now stuck half in the back and half in the backseat, and now is truly frustrated.

I decide I have no choice but to get off the highway at the next exit, find a place to park and get him unstuck.

I pull into the back of a motel parking lot, get out of the drivers seat and open the back door to figure out how best to unstick my dog.

I decide the best route is to try to get him fully into the back seat -which is full of presents, dog gear and all our stuff, btw, and is making it even harder for him to find solid footing to squeeze through the small gap between the ceiling and the cargo barrier. I put his leash on him and proceed to try to assist him up and over.

I just start gently tugging and trying to coax him over, when something odd catches my eye.

Why does Pavi suddenly seem to have an extra appendage trying to make the trip over the barrier?

It takes me only a couple of seconds to realize that, indeed, my buddy’s “wee Willy winkey” is in fact tangled in the barrier grate.

Precisely at the same moment that he starts to howl in discomfort.

Now I have no idea how this appendage came to be tangled in the gate, or why the pen was even out of the case at this moment, but I don’t have much time to consider that, because full blown panic is starting to set in for Mr. Magoo, and he is wriggling something fierce to get himself out of this situation which is only going to end very, very badly.

So I do the only thing I can do.

I reach in and untangle the family jewels just before Pavi makes the final push into the back seat and out the door.

We spend a few minutes walking around outside, mainly to lower both of our blood pressure’s, but also because I still don’t know what set this all off in the first place, so I’m expecting expulsion of some sort of bodily fluids on top of all that fun, but nope. He seems fine now.

So we head to the back of the car to load up and get back on the road.

As soon as I open the back, it is evident what set off this series of events.

One of my two monsters has vomited all over the blanket I have covering the cargo space, and Pavi is adamant he is not going to spend the rest of the road trip riding in those conditions.

I decide, after all this drama, him riding shotgun for the rest of the trip is not the worst that can happen, so I open the passenger door and he happily climbs in.

I climb back in behind the wheel, and look over to set some ground rules about where his turf stops and my starts, only to notice that poor “Little Pavi” is now resembling our famous east coast red hot dogs, swollen to the size of a kielbasa.

That can’t be good.

I’m neither male, nor a veterinarian, but I know enough that this could be bad enough to warrant medical attention if it stays this way or gets worse.

And it’s Saturday, when all normal vets are closed, and I’m an hour from home and an hour and a half from my parents, and no idea where there might be any emergency vets on that route.

I make a call to my dad and my sister, they do some quick Google work and send me the info for a couple emergency vets along the way, and I decide since the big guy doesn’t seem to be in any obvious distress at the moment, we’d keep going and hopefully make it to one of the emergency vets before we had a full blown emergency.

Luckily, after several minutes, Little Pavi returned to normal size and returned himself to his shell, Big Pavi had calmed down and didn’t seem to be in pain, and a larger crisis seemed to have been avoided.

And lucky for Pavi, there were no plans to put those Family Jewels to use at any time in the future, so all’s well that ends well, as they say.