“What we didn’t know about Kimbo is that he likes to have a light on at night...”

One of the cool things Best Friends does is let you take a dog on a sleepover, to let you get to know a dog better, or maybe just to let a dog get out for a night, with some nice one-on-one attention. I wanted to take one of the Siberian Huskies for a sleepover, but unfortunately the Huskies were either red collar dogs, or in the case of two of them, too shy and scared of people to allow on a sleepover. They asked if there were any other dogs we'd like to take, and we just asked them to give us anybody who needed a night out.

"Kimbo," they said, and radioed up to the lodges for somebody to bring Kimbo down for us. A few minutes later, we went outside to meet Kimbo, who was a mix of a whole lot of breeds, it was hard to tell what he was. He was very friendly though, and at 14 years old, fairly mellow. They gave us an overnight kit, which consisted of a blanket, some toys, some treats, some poop pickup bags and a water bowl, plus a sheet with instructions and some emergency numbers. We took Kimbo and got in the car, then we left Best Friends and drove back into Kanab, to our hotel.

We checked into the hotel and brought our bags and Kimbo's things up to the room, where we put his blanket out for him to lie down on. He was happy to be out and about, so after we got everything settled in the room, we decided to go find some dinner in town. We got Kimbo leashed up and we left, walking towards the center of town. It was clear that Kimbo loved to walk, and he happily sniffed bushes and trotted down the street with us.

We take Kimbo out for a walk in Kanab

We found a restaurant and got our food to go, and we sat down at an outdoor table to eat it. Kimbo lay down under the table and waited patiently for us to finish. When we were done, we walked back to the hotel. It had been a long day and we were tired, so we just relaxed on the bed for a while before going to sleep. Kimbo played with the toys a bit, and we gave him some treats.

What we didn't know about Kimbo is that he likes to have a light on at night (we found that out afterwards). So because it was dark in the room after we went to sleep, he would get anxious and begin to whine every couple hours. We didn't know why he was doing that at the time, so we just petted him and told him everything was okay. I took him outside to potty at around 2 AM, thinking that maybe he just needed to go out. He was happy to go out, and he marked some territory here and there, but he didn't really need to go from what I could tell. He was fine with going back up to the room afterwards also, but he still whined every now and then during the night.

The next morning he was happy that we were awake, and we took him out to walk a bit. We got some breakfast, gave Kimbo the rest of the treats, packed up our stuff and checked out of the hotel. We loaded our stuff and Kimbo into the car, and drove back to Best Friends. When we got to Dogtown we checked him back in, and then we got our volunteering assignments, once again starting out at New Friends and the lodges. Since we were heading up there anyway, we walked Kimbo back up to his run.

The caregiver put Kimbo back into his run, and we walked back towards the New Friends building. Kimbo ran alongside us inside his run until he got to end of the run. We continued to walk away, and he started barking and whining at us, trying to get us to come back. It was hard, having to leave him there. I felt pretty bad about it.

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