London Is Next
Martin "Visti"
Larsen is from Virum, a suburb of Copenhagen Danmark, had been living
with me for over a year while he attended Arkansas Tech University. During the last semester he was here, he
worked for a local Veterinarian. He
became close friends with her and her family.
He loved going up to their farm and riding horses, driving the tractor,
doing general farm labor and riding the four-wheelers around the farm.
One of the animals he
really fell in love with was their miniature Dachshund Ruby. He wanted a dog
just like her. And for Christmas
1999, they found a breeder in the Fayetteville area that had a puppy. When she was old enough, they took
Martin up for some "shopping". After
the shopping, they took a side-trip out in the country and presented Martin with
a baby "Ruby". She was
promptly named "Ruby Duce".
When Martin decided to
return to Denmark, Ruby was not old enough to travel and there was some
resistance from his parents to an additional dog in the house. So, I ended up with yet another reminder
of previous roommates.
After a few days, Martin
sent me an e-mail. He wanted me to
ship Ruby to Denmark. I checked and
found it was going to cost $900 to ship this 4-pound puppy one way. I remembered that my round trip ticket,
with an extra leg was slightly over $800. So,
I called my travel agent to check on a quick ticket to Copenhagen. To my surprise, it was only $690. We already knew that it was going to
cost $110 to take Ruby. So, if I
took Ruby, it would be $100 less than shipping. So, I split the cost with Martin and it was a done deal.
I left Russellville around
2:00pm on a Thursday for a 6:00pm flight to Memphis, Amsterdam and Copenhagen. We arrived in Copenhagen about 3:15pm on
Friday. Ruby was a great traveler. She was able to get out of the carrier
several times on the overseas portion of the flight. I would take her to the back galley and
feed her on the floor by the exit door. We were already on the last row, aisle seat anyway. After the first meal, I took her out of
the carrier and put her in the vacant seat next to me. I covered her with a blanked and there she slept for almost 6
hours of the 8-hour flight. The
only sound she made was a sharp, double-yipe when I closed the carrier on her
tail. Other than that, she whined a
couple of times on the first leg because she wanted out of the carrier.
I had a great, but cold,
day (Saturday). We went down to the
Pedestrian Mall (no cars) area of downtown Copenhagen. Many of the tourist sites were open as
were restaurants and souvenir shops.
I left Sunday morning about 10:30am for home. Arriving in Little Rock about 11:00pm Sunday night. With a quick night's sleep, I was back at my desk at 7:00am Monday morning. Many people just thought that they had misunderstood me when I said I would be back on Monday. They thought next Monday, not the following Monday.