What's up y'all?
Thanks for joining the Travel Tales and Talk podcast with Derek and Makayla.
I'm Derek.
I'm Makayla.
Thanks for listening and enjoy the show.
What's up y'all?
We're going to talk about the time that I misplaced my beagle, Ranger, and somehow my
wife misplaced herself.
So if you don't know, I love to rabbit hunt and we have four beagles of course.
And one fine day we were out training.
I was letting Ranger and his brothers run, get some practice in, and Ranger goes missing.
And I let Makayla know these things and for some reason she couldn't sleep the night before
and early that morning she gets up and Makayla goes missing.
So honey, why am I in the woods in the middle of the night looking for you and my dog?
I wasn't missing.
I knew exactly where I was going.
I was going to go find my baby because you left him out there with the wilds in the middle
of the night.
I didn't mean to leave him out there.
I told you if you ever go hunting and one of the dogs go missing, you don't come home.
You stay out there until you find our dog.
It was getting dark.
It doesn't matter.
It was going to snow.
It doesn't matter.
You're going to leave me out in the woods?
You're not going to leave the dog out there alone.
And then he was a baby.
He was young.
He was about a year old.
And he was young and he was small.
And you don't know if coyotes could have got a hold of him.
You don't know.
You do not know.
Well baby, hunting dogs go missing all the time.
Well not ours.
And they're easily found.
Okay.
And I knew he would be there the next day.
Did you?
I did.
I knew he was going to be there.
That's why i took him.
Here's the scenario.
The day before I'm out training with Ranger Chase, Scout, and Chase.
And we're headed back to the truck and they jump a rabbit.
So they run this rabbit hard.
They ran this rabbit hard for like 45 minutes.
Then they finally stop.
He either went into a hole or he just got away.
And what happened was 10, 15, 20 minutes go by and no sound, there's nothing.
But another 10 minutes goes by, Chase comes back,
Tracker comes back, and then Scout comes back.
And you know Scout and Ranger never do anything alone.
They come back in tandem.
So I kinda knew something was wrong
when Scout came back with our Ranger.
And so I waited around for another 30 minutes.
Ranger didn't come back.
I even went out into the woods looking for Ranger,
calling his name, doing all the things we do
to get him to come in.
But you know how Ranger is, he's possessive.
So I think he jumped that rabbit.
And if he jumped that rabbit, he's not gonna let it go,
especially if he went in the hole,
he's gonna try to dig it out.
That's just the way he is.
So the sun begins to set and I called you.
I said, baby, I can't find Ranger.
And you were like, well, you better stay out there
until you find him.
I'm like, baby, it's dark, it's about to snow.
I'll find him in the morning.
He'll be here in the morning.
And you were like, no, you just stay there
until he comes back.
You want me to sleep in the woods?
I didn't care what you did
as long as you brought my dog home.
Okay, so basically this man comes home without my dog.
And I couldn't sleep, of course, it's like losing a child.
And then I wake up, it was about 3, 3, 4 o'clock
when I woke up.
And I told him, I need the location
to where you guys were hunting
because I'm gonna go out there and go find my dog.
What did I say then?
I said, baby, we'll go out tomorrow morning
when the sun comes up so we can see.
And so I got up, got dressed,
and I drove to the location that Derrick gave me,
which I should have known was some bogus.
It was not bogus.
It was some bogus old location.
Nope.
Because for some reason, my GPS took me to,
I don't know where I, to this day,
I don't know where I was,
but I ended up in somebody's backyard.
Took you to the boonies.
And they didn't have any streetlights,
so you know I was out there.
And it really, now that I think about it,
it kind of went left because I got stuck
in these people's backyard
and they lived in a swampy area.
So my, you know, I drive a Nissan Armada.
It's a big vehicle.
Right.
It's a heavy vehicle.
And I got stuck in their yard,
like off the road in their literal backyard.
In the early morning hours.
In the middle, like it was,
the sun hadn't even came up yet.
And I'm just spinning wheels, spinning wheels.
I'm kicking mud all over these folks' yard.
I know I done tore their backyard up.
You tore their yard up.
And I waited,
maybe about an hour outside on these folk backyard.
Before you called me.
I don't remember that.
I do remember I got,
I was brave enough to get out of my truck
and go knock on these people's door.
Why did you do that?
I don't know.
I don't know what it was.
Maybe I knocked to see if they can help me
get out their yard.
What would you do if somebody knocked on your door
at 5.30?
Well, by the time I knocked on their door,
the sun was coming up.
So it was about six, 37 o'clock.
Because one of their neighbors,
the kids started walking to school.
They going to catch the school bus.
And they were,
and I mean, now that I think about it,
this whole situation was ridiculous.
It was nuts.
And I called my insurance to get a tow truck.
I called Derek,
because we lived about an hour away.
You just should have waited until the sun came up.
Anyway, I was going to get my baby.
And so,
not a fit of rage,
but a fit of desperation.
I slammed on the gas pedal
and I eventually got my truck out these folk yard.
I apologize for tearing up their yard,
but hey, I had to get my baby.
So I got out and then I called Derek.
And baby, don't do that.
Let me finish telling my version.
You gonna have a turn to talk.
I got you.
I'm just saying, you called me like three or four times.
Come get me.
Okay, so I get out.
Derek, you gonna have a turn, my goodness.
And then I get the correct,
no, actually Derek makes it to my location
then I trail him to the right place.
Because, you know,
and we pull up.
Well, during this ride to the right location,
Derek gets a phone call.
Apparently another hunter has made it to the site
that Derek was at yesterday.
And he was like, hey, I found your dog.
And I put your dog in my truck bed.
You put him in the truck cab.
The truck cab.
Truck bed, truck cab.
No, the truck bed is open and remember it's cold,
it's freezing.
I wouldn't have put a strange dog in my truck cab.
Go ahead and you tell the story then, Derek.
No, I'm just saying, I'm giving you the facts.
You called me.
It's about five, 36 o'clock.
You called me a couple of times
because I didn't think it was real.
I thought I was dreaming.
I'm like, why are you calling me?
Aren't you downstairs?
And then I finally answered the phone.
You're like, come get me.
I'm like, where are you?
I'm trying to find Ranger and I'm stuck in the mud.
I was like, baby, there's no mud where he is.
It's a gravel road, half of it's paved.
Where are you?
I don't know.
I'm gonna send you my location.
And you send me the location.
I'm like, that's nowhere near where Ranger is.
And when I sent you the pen,
I pinned you exactly where I was sitting when I lost him.
I don't know how you got,
I don't know how the pen sent you to that location,
which was strange in the first place.
So it was almost like I don't trust the pens anymore
because you were way off.
And then once I got in the car,
I'm in the car like 10 minutes when dude calls me.
He said, hey, I found your dog.
I'm gonna put him in the truck.
I said, all right, I'm on the way.
I'm out there looking for my wife too.
So I'll be out there to find the location.
And then I pull up to find you
in some random neighborhood
that I didn't even know existed back there.
And I go through there a lot.
I just follow GPS.
Like I couldn't tell you how to get back to where you were.
And I traveled that way all the time.
I've never seen that neighborhood.
I'm like, how did you find this place?
GPS.
It was like Michael Scott, turn here.
Remember the, it's like that all over again.
Turn into a lake.
Yeah, yeah, but what's the crazy part about it is
he was exactly where he got lost.
So I was wondering maybe if I would have stayed
another hour, maybe would have came back.
Don't know.
Maybe.
And then he goes missing again.
Well, first of all, on their collars,
there's our contact information on there.
So that's how people know when they get lost.
We don't have the dog's names on there,
but we just have our names.
Not even our names, just our phone numbers, right?
I think our names on there.
I don't know, but Derek dropped some of his clothes
that he was wearing, he put it down.
So I'm pretty sure Ranger slept on the clothes
through the night.
That's the old hunting trick.
So if a dog goes missing, leave an article of clothing there
and they'll usually come back.
They'll track themselves back.
Which was great that he tracked himself back
because I thought he was gonna go
because where they train at, there's a massive neighborhood.
You know he loves people.
So I figured he was gonna go back there
to that neighborhood and just stay there.
But I guess he tracked his way back to where he got lost
and where we dropped him off at, which was great.
So Ranger goes missing again when we head to Tennessee.
So he's no stranger to getting lost.
But wait a minute, before we move to that one,
we forgot that London Rose was a devastate.
London Rose is our youngest one.
She was so upset that Ranger went missing
that she drew missing dogs.
She didn't get a picture.
She didn't get an actual picture of Ranger.
She drew dogs.
She drew a dog, a stick dog that reminded her of Ranger.
And she put on there a missing dog reward.
Who gonna pay this reward?
I've never seen a stick dog before.
And I was thinking like no one in the neighborhood
is gonna see him because he's like a county south of here.
Yeah, and she wants us to put the signs up
all over the house, I mean all over the neighborhood.
It was real cute.
It was hilarious.
And I felt bad because she cried herself to sleep.
Oh yeah, yeah she was, I think you cried too.
Oh my goodness.
You might have shed a tear too.
I for some reason I knew Ranger would be there.
I wasn't worried about Ranger.
Every time Ranger gets lost, I'm worried about him.
Yeah, that was actually Ranger's second time getting lost.
Now Ranger's first time getting lost
was when we were in Memphis.
On the family farm, yeah.
Yeah, on the family farm.
And somehow Ranger went missing.
And this time Derek went hunting with my father-in-law.
He did the same thing.
He jumped a rabbit, ran the rabbit really hard,
him and his brothers.
And I'm assuming that rabbit went to a hole
and he wanted to dig him out.
He would not come back.
All the other dogs came back.
This one, Nancy was around and Duke.
Okay, Derek is like shouting out these names.
His parents. His parents.
So our dogs, we got our dogs from our in-laws,
Derek's parents, and our dog's parents
were still in the property.
So their actual mom, their dad,
and their mom's brother, so their uncle,
our dog's uncle Duke was a beautiful beagle.
Woo, Duke is a beautiful beagle.
Beautiful dog.
So all of them, so it's seven dogs and all.
Yeah, seven.
Seven dogs and all.
All of them go hunting and Ranger's the only one
that didn't come back.
It didn't come back.
Didn't come back.
Why is this dog like that?
And so once again, now this time looking at my father-in-law.
Why?
And Derek.
I was like, have both of y'all come back
and y'all leave my dog.
Well, this is my father-in-law.
Well, he's okay over there on the property.
I'm like, but it's at night.
And we're talking about a farm with woods
and I'm thinking coyotes, wolf, bears.
You know, we ain't got bears down there,
but I'm still thinking bears, alligators, you name it.
I don't visualize them getting my dog.
A shark that can walk on land got my dog.
But the thing was, baby, there's a house,
there's a family house there.
I figured he would be on the porch.
Doesn't matter.
You left, this dog went running with his literal family.
Our dog left with not only his brothers,
but he had his mama and his daddy and his uncles.
He thinking he just having a whole family.
Family reunion.
Right, family fun run.
And then he look up, everybody gone but him.
Oh baby, he should be good now.
And then once again, he was the run of the litter.
He was the baby.
And it's like, y'all.
And then my father-in-law think I'm being ridiculous
because I'm like, I need y'all to go back and get my dog.
Baby.
I'm like, we not going back out there.
We going back the next day.
And so I actually went the very next day.
It was me, you, and my dad, right?
And we took Scout and we took Nancy, their mom.
And so we're out there calling.
Nurses call like when the dogs go missing,
you go, hiya, hiya, hiya, hiya.
You know, and that's how you call them to come back.
And I'm even out there, hiya, hiya, too, with them.
I'm like, we need to find my dog.
And we were out there.
We were out there for a couple of hours.
Yeah, we were out there four or five hours.
Derek says farm, but it's a massive property.
It's miles.
It's like acres and acres and acres.
It's 245.
It's a lot of acres.
So I'm sitting here walking.
Did I, I don't even know if I had on boots,
but mud up to my knees.
No mud up to your knees.
Cut it out.
It was a lot.
And then we can see deer tracks.
Just to give you an idea,
they out there with deer and everything.
And we walk up on people hunting as well.
Did you see my dog?
No, I didn't see your dog.
But I'm like, wait a minute.
Aren't they like on your property?
That was my cousin and his friend.
Oh yeah, okay.
So it was family farm.
He invited people over to hunt.
To hunt on the property.
So then I'm thinking, oh boy, what if they shoot me?
You know, I have all these thoughts.
What if they shoot my dog by accident?
They're not gonna shoot the dog.
But make a long story short,
after hours of us looking,
bling, bling, bling,
we get a phone call.
And this is when we're back headed to Memphis.
We had something to do or something,
and they called.
Oh yeah, yeah.
Cause the very next morning we went looking,
and then we had to go take care of the family business.
And they got the phone call.
Hey, we found your dog.
Yep.
Found our dog.
Where are you guys located?
They gave their address.
They were in the farm next door.
I'm like, are you kidding?
Somehow Ranger got through a fence,
and made it over to these people's house.
So, you know, later on we came back to pick him up,
and they had been feeding my dog hot dogs all day.
No, no, no.
Hot dogs and cheese.
Oh my gosh.
Yeah.
Hot dogs and cheese.
So you know my baby's stomach was toe up.
His stomach was toe up.
But he was so happy when we pulled up.
Cause he had been fed hot dogs and cheese all day long.
All day.
He was next door.
So, not that much terrified.
We knew where he was.
Yes.
Unlike the one in Kentucky,
where it's pretty much on strange property.
This one, it's a family farm, so I wasn't concerned.
If we didn't find them, my cousin would find them,
or the neighbors would find them, and they did.
So what's the moral of this story?
Moral of this story is, what's those things called?
Those apple things?
You need an apple air tag.
I probably need to get some apple air tags.
Or stop hunting.
No, no, not gonna do that.
Not gonna do that.
Some apple air tags might be the fix.
Might be the fix.
Or there are these collars, sell like in troll collars.
I mean, they cost like 1200 bucks.
We can get those.
What if they lose the collars?
Then we've lost 1200 bucks.
Oh my gosh.
But we won't do that.
We won't lose the collar or the dog anymore.
Really?
Yes.
Do you wanna talk about the story how you lost Scout?
Scout?
Do we have to talk about that one?
We'll talk about him on the next one.
Okay.
We'll talk about Scout next time.
Now that was an amazing story.
We need to make a movie about that one.
Yeah.
That is movie worthy.
Somehow we need to make that like a cartoon.
This is the time I wish a dog could talk.
I need to know what happened to Scout.
I need him to tell me.
Yes, we'll talk about that next time.
Yeah, that's a good one.
All right, until next time, y'all.
We'll talk to y'all later.
If you made it this far, you are the true champion.
You could have been anywhere, doing anything,
but you instead chose to spend your time with us.
And for that, we say thank you.
Thank you.
I'm Derek.
I'm Makyla.
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Do good, be good.
Until next time.