Travelling with dogs – and grief

How I wrote Dog Days Out in the throes of very raw grief after losing my mum

Three weeks after I signed the contract for my latest book, Dog Days Out, my mum died. It wasn’t exactly unexpected — she had been diagnosed with terminal cancer in late 2021. We were preparing for the worst for months. And when it happened, it really was the worst. It was expected, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a shock. The pure pain of losing the person who has made your life the joy that it is for 30-something years is incomparable. The absolute cavern left behind after such an immense loss is unbearable.

My mum died on 30 July 2022. I took the month of August to sit with the impact of the last year, and then work — which I had neglected for so many months — beckoned. That contract I’d signed before her death all of a sudden became real again, and I had to get to writing. Arty and I set off in September for month-long tour of Northumberland, Edinburgh, Yorkshire, Staffordshire, Hertfordshire, Wiltshire and the Isle of Wight, encompassing several Dogfests and numerous nights in hotels to review for Dog Days Out.

Between September 2022 and June 2023, we travelled thousands of miles, spent hundreds of nights in hotels, cottages and glampsites, and made it all the way to the northernmost point in the UK up in Shetland. Occasionally friends and family joined us, but for the most part it was just me and Arty on the road. And so it was on these trips and during the research for Dog Days Out that I did a hefty amount of grieving.

Grief didn’t rear its head in all the moments I expected it to. Of course there quiet evenings beside log fires where I yearned for her company — my mum was always my first plus-one when travelling for work, and she’d have loved these adventures. But rather, it found me on the winding roads of the Brecon Beacons. We’d spent a few miserable nights there together in 2021 while I was researching my first book, Dog-Friendly Weekends, lashed by rain and wind and holed up in motorhome that was frankly far too large for me to be driving alone. As I drove that same route alone this time, I found myself sobbing uncontrollably, consumed by the loss and reality of a world without her in it.

Grief took over my body whenever I saw a beautiful view or had a white-sand beach all to myself. I’d take a photo, and immediately go to WhatsApp to send it to my mum. She was my point-person, the one I’d send my travel updates to when I was on the road for work. Now, my updates and beach snaps and selfies were untethered. There was nowhere for them to go. Today they still linger on my phone, largely unsent or unshared except the few that made it into Dog Days Out or onto my Instagram grid.

Now, when I hold Dog Days Out in my hands — a product of immeasurable grief, pain and some of the hardest writing days I’ve endured — I can’t fully appreciate the strength it must have taken for me to complete it. I feel almost removed from the person that wrote it. I don’t remember what it was like to be her, perhaps because I am now, thanks to the progress of my grief, a different person entirely. Just as I was then a different person to the woman who existed before the death of her 58-year-old mum.

There are over 60,000 words in that book and a scattering of my own photographs, all of which were realised in the darkest time of my life. But there’s nothing dark about them. Instead, they convey the sense of optimism travel can provide. The joy of discovery. The comfort of travelling with your canine companion. And it’s fair to say that writing this book gave me all of that. I researched and wrote it while I was in pain, sure. But this book gave me a positive to focus on during deeply troubling days. It offered escape — not from the grief, but from the everyday life that was so devastatingly changed in wake of that loss. It gave me time to sit and think and cry and smile with my mum in my heart and mind. And it gave me a future when all else felt terribly uncertain.

I am still grieving today. It never ends but it changes. It becomes part of the new life you build back up after a bereavement. But thankfully, I am also still writing. I am now researching and penning Book Number Three (stay tuned for the European dog guide in 2026), and I’ve just signed the contract for my fourth, with a fifth on the cards, too. Here’s to hoping the strength and will passed down to me by my stoic mother will help make these next books just as joyful as Dog Days Out.

From me and Arty in our hotel room in Berlin, happy travels dog people x