A week from today we’ll be on the tundra. The weather will be cool and dramatic. I’ll be wearing jeans and a wool sweater. I’m looking forward to the cosmic shift. The problem is, in order to be on the Alaskan tundra, you have to get to the Alaskan tundra.

This year’s itinerary might set a whole new standard for ridiculous. We leave D.C. at 9:15am next wednesday and arrive in LA at 11:46am (LA time). Two hours later, we fly to Portland, arriving there at 3:39pm. Then we settle in for a nice seven-hour layover before leaving Portland at 10:50pm. We arrive in Anchorage at 1:34am, where we will settle in for a nice 10-hour layover before leaving Anchorage at 11:15am. Less than an hour later, we arrive on the mosquito-plagued airstrip of King Salmon, where we will wait for an unspecified amount of time until our names are called for the bush plane charter to Coffee Point, a non-place that happens to be the location of the Behr family fishing compound.

And likely, the moment we land, we will slip into rubber pants and head to the beach to wrangle with the sockeye, come what may.

As you might imagine, the trip is hard on Iggy, who anxiously devolves into a panting, slobbering mess on the car ride from the Barn to the Superfresh. To aid her travels, we have sedated her in the past. This week, we’ve been trying out a number of milder sedatives to see if they might work.

Conclusion:

Benedryl was utterly ineffective.

And whatever we gave her yesterday just made her weird:

So it’s back to the hard stuff. Hopefully, she won’t remember a thing.

I’m jealous.