This is Girl Person. Listen. I know you are going to be disappointed for the next few day because you will be hearing from me and not Brickle and Digby. I get it! I appreciate that! And honestly, I don’t know how long it is going to take me to tell you what I need to tell you. It may take me a week. It may take me two. Some will understand, some won’t. I get that too.
We have always been honest and upfront with our fans. The good, the bad, the ugly. Brickle would like me to clarify that his handsome is always the same. No ugly there.
You may be wondering what in the world we have been doing for the past month and a half. You have seen our pictures on the beach, you know our routine has been different, and it’s true. We have been going through some changes.
That being said, I feel it is important to give you the total back story. If you have been our fan since we started in 2011, please allow us to bore you for a few minutes. There are probably some fans who may not know why we are even called 2 Traveling Dogs. But even those who have been with us since the beginning don’t know everything! You will now.
We started this blog in 2011 because we had decided to move from Florida to California. We thought it would be great to show people how to safely travel with dogs. Of course, the purpose of this page changed at the end of that year to rescue when we realized we had to do something good with our newfound fame. But why were we moving in the first place? That has a lot to do with our changes as of late.
I grew up on the same piece of land my entire life. My grandfather and his family including his aunt moved to Lutz, Florida in the early 1900’s for a better life. They purchased a big portion of land that housed us all from that time till present! Yes, my beloved grandparents lived there till they passed away, Granny just recently in December of last year. My mom and dad are still there. My aunt, my Country Cousin Person and yes, when I got married I also built my house there. We called it the compound because all of us were there. We took up an entire street!
So you can imagine the ties I have to this land. I was fortunate to have had the opportunity to grow up on the same land my grandfather and dad did. For us to try and move in 2011 was a decision that was the hardest of my life.
How could I sell my home, one in the middle of all of our family, behind the orange grove? What caused this decision then in 2011? Behind any decision, and especially one that many don’t understand, sometimes, it’s not so easy to explain! I had never, ever thought of leaving this land. I loved my grandparents who were still alive at the time, and of course I loved my parents and family. But Boy Person and I were tired. Tired of the same corporate jobs of insurance and banking. I was tired of being away from Brickle and Digby all the time at work. And I loved to travel. Boy Person and I did not have children and found that fulfilling ourselves meant traveling. Every trip was like a child to us with memories and adventure. Here I am in Switzerland.

We loved food and cooking and we had a crazy idea. After a trip to Sonoma and Napa, California, we decided we were going to do something crazy. We were going to make goat cheese. And we were going to do it in California! Right in wine country. Here is Digby and Boy Person in Healdsburg, California 2011. And we were going to start a blog…2 Traveling Dogs.

After a lot of heartache of telling our crazy plans to our family, we put our house up for sale. A house that we had built ourselves. A house we had spent years building. It was unbelievable. How in the world were we going to do this? Selling our home, disappointing our family and giving up our jobs to make…goat cheese?

After months of trying to sell our house in 2011 and 2012, the housing market collapsed. We couldn’t sell it. We still wanted to go. And we had itchy feet as my Pappy would say. We packed up our lives in a moving truck, thought we would sell the house, and just did it! Moved! We left. Brickle, Digby, me and Boy Person were on our way to California with no place to live and just a dream. Here was the very first story on us…
http://blog.gopenske.com/rental/starting-a-new-life-heading-west-in-the-yellow-penske-truck/
I loved California. I really did. But I missed my family more. I cried every day, every night. And thought I had made a mistake when after a year of being there, our house didn’t sell. Because our house didn’t sell, our dream of making goat cheese didn’t happen either. So long story short, we came back to Lutz, Florida a year later in 2012. I was happy to come back. I gave up too fast. Missing my family was too much for me. Even though my immediate family of Boy Person, Brickle and Digby were happy there I gave up. I got laid off from yet another banking job and I was tired. I wanted to come home. This was the blog I posted at that time….
http://www.2travelingdogs.com/2_Traveling_Dogs/Girl_Person_Corner/Entries/2012/3/16_Looking_on_the_Bright_Side.html
So here we went again. Another cross country trip. Back to our family, our home and our land. But making cheese in the hot, Florida climate was just not possible. What to do? Your Dog’s Diner was born. And we regrouped. We put everything we had into our new dog business, concentrated on animal rescue and tried to be happy. Tried to be happy. Tried so much. Our goal was to grow our treat business to make a good, simple living for our family and yes, move back to California after we tried to put our house up for sale in a year or so. Well, that year turned into three as we realized growing a business was much harder than we thought. And then….after growing our business finally after all those years, we thought the time was right. Was it time again make a change?
To Be Continued Tomorrow…
-Girl Person
P.S. This is Brickle. Girl Person is very long winded. Be patient.