Hello from Morpheus!!

Ita, Debbie and Jim Onboard Morpheus

Hello from Ita, the Sailor Dog!

Hello!  My name is Ita!  Ita means “little one” in Spanish, and it rhymes with pita, as in pita bread.  Your teacher has asked me to create a blog so that you can follow me and my people on our sailing adventure in the Mediterranean Sea.  I have included a photo of myself with one of my favorite books, “The Sailor Dog”, by Margaret Wise Brown.

I think you may first like to know a little about me and my people.  Jim, my master, Debbie, my mistress, and I started sailing on September 10^th, 2010 from San Francisco, CA.   That is an easy day to remember because it was 10/10/10!  We went out under the Golden Gate Bridge and turned left, and have been on the move ever since.  We have a 50 foot sail boat named Morpheus that has been our home for the last 3 years.  Morpheus is named after the Greek god of dreams.  I love living on a 50 foot sail boat.  That means Jim and Debbie can never get more than 50 feet away from me, and that makes me very happy.

As you may be able to tell from my photo, I am a chocolate colored Miniature Long Haired Dachshund and I weigh about 10 pounds.  I have very short but strong legs, which means I have a very low center of gravity.  That comes in very handy on the boat because it means that I don’t lose my balance very easily when the boat is rocking around in a rough sea.  It also means that I can’t jump up on the counters or places that I could fall off of and hurt myself.  When it gets too rough, Debbie puts me in my safe plastic kennel, and I just curl up and go to sleep.  I am pretty small, which means that I can go almost everywhere with Debbie.  She just puts me in her big purse, and I curl up and go to sleep.  No one ever sees me!

So far, Jim, Debbie and I have traveled about 16,000 miles.  We went from San Francisco through the Panama Canal, to the Cayman Islands, Roatan, Cuba, Key West, Florida and then spent the summer of 2011 in Newport, RI.  In the fall of 2011 we left the United States and went to Bermuda, the Virgin Islands and a bunch of the islands in the Caribbean for the winter of 2011-12, then Back to Newport for the summer of 2012.  We again spent the winter of 2012-13 in the Caribbean, and then in April, 2013, Jim sailed the boat across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe and the Mediterranean with some of his friends.  Debbie and I got to fly across the Atlantic because it can be a very long and rough crossing.

Lots of people ask Debbie what the most difficult part of traveling with a pet on board is, and she always answered, “The paper work!”  I always answered, “The shots!”  Every country in Northern and Central America and the Caribbean have different requirements of what kind of shots I need to have before they will let me come into their country.  Debbie had to do a lot of research on the internet before we went to each country in Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, and I had to go see the vet before each country to get a new Health Certificate.  We are in the European Union or EU now.  Most of the countries in Europe all got together a few years ago and made a common decision as to what shots pets need.  I have my very own EU Pet Passport, so it’s really easy to travel around now.  I had to clear into the EU only once in Lisbon, Portugal, and now I get to travel all over Europe without seeing a vet.  And, no more shots for a while!

Well, I think that’s a pretty good introduction for now.  My Next post will be about Spain and Barcelona!

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Ita!