Planning the trip

Dear readers,

Now when Dottie decided to start with her heat the first thing we need to plan for is a trip to visit Oman. All our previous saluki litters’ sires were living within one hour drive from our home so it was easy to have a date with them whenever we wanted. This time we need to travel all the way to Italy. It is a trip of 1500 kms that will take us two days to complete. We will travel by car but will need to take a ferry from Denmark to Germany and we will also need to book hotels both half a way through our trip and on our destination. We also don’t want to spend more days away from home than what is necessary as none of my dogs like being away from the pack and as both David and I need to work. For all these reasons it would be good if we could calculate when the best time for us to get on the road is. 

So how do we do that?

To start with we look at Oonah’s (Dottie’s mother) heat and matings as these are often similar between mothers and daughters. So what does these tell us?

Oonah	1st litter	2nd litter
Heat start	2019-03-14	2022-04-14
The first mating	2019-03-24	2022-04-28
Number of days in heat prior to the first mating	10 days	14 days

There is not much data to base any conclusion on as we only have two litters to build our assumptions on, but we can see that the earliest Oonah accepted the male was 10 days into the heat and as we let her meet the male several times during the acceptance period we know that she was accepting the male for at least 3 days.             

Hopefully Dottie will follow the same pattern as her mum.

Another thing we can and will do is take a progesterone test to check when the ovulation is happening. Once ovulated, bitches start accepting males withing a day or so. We plan to take a progesterone test on Friday morning (2024-11-22) which we hope will be perfect as it will be on the 10^th day of the heat. If progesterone test shows that she had ovulation already we will start the trip as soon as we get the results. If the test shows that we can take things easy, we will start the trip on early Saturday morning. This will allow us to come to our destination at Sunday. Well there both David and I can work from the hotel during the day and we can meet Oman in the evening. We can also stay until next weekend so that we can travel back on early Saturday again. (But I really hope that we can travel home after just a few days.)