It’s a mid-sized SUV with a built-in dog bed, a spill-resistant water bowl, a cargo-area fan and rubber floors you can hose clean. It gets 25 miles per gallon on the highway and has 75 feet of cargo space.
Jill rises to her elbows, deepening the arch of her back. “This car is made for us,” she says. We click deeper into the Dog Friendly Element’s web page. We view every photo from every angle. We download the fact sheet.
Jill is right. This car is made for our trip. But I’m thinking the reverse also holds true: Our trip is made for this car.
So, inspired by a book I read in college and PR savvy I gained during my recently vacated job, I carry my laptop into the office and write the following letter:
Dear Honda,
Fifty years ago, in the autumn as his life, American author John Steinbeck set out on a yearlong road trip to rediscover his own country. His only companion was his dog, a standard poodle named Charley, and they set forth from the New York coast in a truck specially outfitted for the journey. Steinbeck christened his vehicle “Rocinante” in honor of Don Quixote’s horse, and he painted those letters across the truck’s side in sixteenth-century Spanish script.
On January 1, 2010, my soon-to-be wife and I will embark on a journey similar to Steinbeck’s, only our mission, in our relative youth, will be to discover parts of our country that have so far eluded us. We, too, will travel for an entire year, and, like Steinbeck, we will bring along cherished canine companionship in the form of our two dogs, Jack and Isabel. We have everything we need for this epic journey — passion, insouciance and commitment. All we lack is our own Rocinante.
That brings me to the reason behind this letter. We are both loyal Honda owners, and we cannot imagine a more suitable vehicle for our journey that the Dog Friendly Element. We want to load up our mutts and put one to the test. For a year.
Some background about us: This road trip will constitute our honeymoon, but it will be a working one. I am a professional writer, and my fiancée is a professional photographer. Throughout our travels we will be crafting articles for magazines and websites, maintaining a blog dedicated to our journey, and updating followers (and soliciting destination ideas) via Twitter and Facebook.
After working more than a decade as a newspaper reporter and editor I have spent the past the three years in the media relations department of the Greater Phoenix Convention & Visitors Bureau. In the latter role I have learned much about the public-relations value of well-placed media content, and developed relationships with editors at national and international travel publications. My fiancée, meanwhile, has conceived and produced several freelance photography projects, including the national marketing campaign for one of Phoenix’s best-known resorts. We would not think of making this request were we not certain we could give a degree of editorial value and online exposure to the Dog Friendly Element that would far exceed Honda’s investment in our journey.
As you may know, Steinbeck’s cross-country journey with his dog 50 years ago resulted in the classic piece of nonfiction “Travels With Charley: In Search of America.” In that book he wrote, “A dog is a bond between strangers. Many conversations en route began with ‘What degree of dog is that?’ ” For a year, we will be traveling to places where dog owners congregate. National parks, state parks and dog parks. Dog-friendly campgrounds, hotels and resorts. I can only imagine that the paw-print emblem on the Dog Friendly Element would engender as much conversation among our like-minded travelers as the dogs themselves.
Steinbeck also writes in the early passages of “Travels With Charley” about how he came to select the truck he named Rocinante: He mailed a letter to the “head office of a great corporation which manufactures trucks” to specify the purpose and needs of his trip. So I guess we are following in his footsteps in more ways than one. Steinbeck got his Rocinante. We hope you will loan us one of our own. We cannot promise you an American literary classic at our journey’s end, but we can promise you that the Dog Friendly Element would be a full-fledged character in our story. (We also promise to not defile its paint job with sixteenth-century Spanish script … you know, unless you’re into that.)
Sincerely,
Scott Dunn and Jill Richards
—Scott