Magnus 🐻‍❄️ Refuses to Acknowledge Goats

🇲🇪 The Bay of Kotor at sunrise looks like someone Photoshopped a Norwegian fjord onto the Adriatic. Magnus 🐻‍❄️, our 45-kilo Samoyed, watches it from the back window of the Audi with the focused indifference of a cat dropped into an art museum.

We are three days into a road trip that started in Copenhagen, took the long way through Croatia, and now bends through the mountain road from Risan to Cetinje. The road has 25 hairpin turns. Magnus 🐻‍❄️ slides into Jay's hip on each one. Jay drives. I navigate. The dog supervises.

The math of taking a Samoyed across borders

Before the goats, a note on the paperwork. Magnus 🐻‍❄️ travels on a full EU pet passport, issued by our vet in Frederiksberg, with rabies vaccine on file and a microchip number we never have to read out at the border (we have tried, the border guards do not want it, they want the passport).

The Danish passport is blue, the size of a small notebook, and contains his photo from when he was nine weeks old. He looks, in the photo, like a marshmallow with strong opinions. He still does.

From Copenhagen to Kotor by car: 24 hours of driving across six countries, split over three days. Hamburg overnight. Salzburg overnight. The long descent through Slovenia and into Croatia. Magnus 🐻‍❄️ has been in the car for what he considers his entire adult life. He has filed this trip under temporary. He has filed everything outside Copenhagen under temporary.

The herd of goats on switchback 11

There is a herd of goats on switchback 11. They are loose. They are eating something off the gravel shoulder. Magnus 🐻‍❄️ looks at them once, in the way a French intellectual looks at someone wearing Crocs in public, and then turns his head away. Goats do not exist. Goats have not been invented. Magnus 🐻‍❄️ has decided.

(For context, this is a dog who barks for ninety seconds at a small leaf moving in the wrong direction.)

Jay slows the car. The goats part. One looks directly at Magnus 🐻‍❄️ through the back window. Magnus 🐻‍❄️ looks at the headrest. The goat shrugs, in the way only Balkan goats shrug, and returns to the gravel. We continue up the mountain.

The konoba above Njeguši

We stop at a konoba above the village of Njeguši for lunch. The waiter is a man named Marko whose grandfather started the place in 1962 and whose granddaughter, age eleven, runs the espresso machine on weekends. The menu is hand-painted. The Mangalitsa fillet is the size of a paperback and costs 14 euros.

Marko brings Magnus 🐻‍❄️ a bowl of cold water and a slice of pršut on a separate plate, which Magnus 🐻‍❄️ accepts with the dignity of a visiting head of state. The pršut is from a Mangalitsa pig raised three kilometers down the road. The dog has, in three minutes, eaten a slice of meat that travelled less than he did this morning.

Njeguši is a village of 27 permanent residents and three Mangalitsa farms. The cheese is also from here. Everything you eat at the konoba was, within a 10 kilometer radius, walking around last week. Marko tells us this not as a sales pitch but as a fact, the way you would tell someone the weather. There is no Instagram in his voice. There is also no internet at the konoba. Marko prefers it that way. The granddaughter does too, eventually, although she would not say so out loud.

The passport says seven countries, the dog says one

The EU pet passport says Magnus 🐻‍❄️ has been to seven countries this year. The actual count, if you ask him, is one. There is the apartment in Copenhagen, and there is everywhere else. He has filed everywhere else under temporary.

Jay does the math on the napkin. Denmark, Germany, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro. Plus a layover in Belgrade we do not count because we did not exit the airport. Magnus 🐻‍❄️ filed the airport under temporary too.

We finish on the patio. The sky is doing that thing the Adriatic does at 4pm, where it goes from cobalt to silver in twenty minutes. Marko brings the bill on a saucer with three figs and a shot of loza for me and Jay. Magnus 🐻‍❄️ takes a third nap of the day. The goats walk past the front gate. He does not look up.

The apartment in Kotor

That night, the apartment we have rented in Kotor has a balcony with a view of the bay. The bay is doing its bay things. Magnus 🐻‍❄️ stands at the railing and watches the cruise ship pull in. The cruise ship he will acknowledge. It is large enough to register.

The cruise ship is the MSC Magnifica. Magnus 🐻‍❄️ does not know this. He sees a building moving on water. He files this under investigate further. The next morning, when the cruise ship has departed, he stands at the railing again and looks at the empty water with what I can only describe as betrayal.

Notes for traveling with a large dog in the Balkans

The mountain roads are fine. The hotel staff are uniformly kind. The Italian-style restaurants will turn you away politely, the Yugoslav-style restaurants will bring the dog a plate. The Adriatic ferries take dogs but you have to book ahead. The vet in Tivat is a man named Dr. Vuković who speaks English and will look at your dog's paperwork without making you feel like you are taking up his afternoon (we used him for a quick check before crossing back into the EU).

The mosquitoes near Kotor are aggressive. Bring the spray. Magnus 🐻‍❄️ wears a Seresto collar. We also use a permethrin-treated bandana. He looks ridiculous. He does not care.

The driving back is two days. Magnus 🐻‍❄️ sleeps the whole way. We arrive in Copenhagen at midnight. He walks into the apartment, drinks half the water bowl, lies down on his usual spot by the kitchen radiator, and the seven countries cease to exist. He is back in his one country.

The goats are forgotten. The cruise ship is forgotten. The Mangalitsa pršut is forgotten. The radiator is the only place that has ever existed.

This is what travel feels like to a 45-kilo Samoyed. Everywhere is temporary. Home is the radiator. The Trip Ledger updates without him.