Ollie met a cow this weekend.

It wasn’t the first encounter with the bovine species so we had a good idea what to expect. And fortunately it wasn’t an up close connection, either. I don’t know what would have happened under such circumstances.

On Friday we headed to upstate New York and rather than leave our adopted hound in a kennel for the weekend, a sure way of ensuring a stress-free trip, we brought him along.

Driving with Ollie can be a form of torture, even a ten-minute trip to Dave’s Marketplace at Hoxsie Four Corners. For Ollie this is an adventure, a time to see new things like passing cars, pedestrians and if he’s lucky, another dog. He takes such excursions seriously, standing between the driver and passenger seats, intensely looking ahead.

At the sight of another dog, he abandons his post to get a better view from a side window and if weren’t for the head rests in the back seat that provide a barrier of sorts, he’d surely climb into the back to watch from the rear window, too. Yelling at him is pointless. He’s of one mind – “I want to meet this dog.”

That might be tolerable if it wasn’t for letting the rest of the world know. It starts with a whine that escalates into a howl.

If that’s the experience on a trip to get eggs and bread, I wondered how we would fare on a four to five-hour road trip. Carol assured me it was possible. In fact, she made the trip on two occasions this fall, saying after the first hour, you shut out all the noise.

But she was prepared. She brought along a couple earmuffs and a bottle of sedatives, which veterinarian Dr. Barbara Korry provided. The sedatives were our fallback position. We really didn’t want to drug Ollie for the trip.

Getting to Hoxsie was no different than prior trips, only that I kept pushing him into the back seat and attempting to calm him down. Commanding him to “sit” worked briefly but there was always another car traveling in the opposite direction. He was up quaking with excitement and worst of all announcing his discovery. By the time we got on Route 37, I was thinking I’d better take the sedative because I was going to go nuts otherwise.

Then like some switch being thrown, he suddenly stopped and stretched out on the back seat. It had to be a miracle. I didn’t dare say anything to Carol for fear of breaking the spell. We made it all the way to the second rest area on the Mass Pike.

As soon as we pulled off the highway, he was up and on the alert. Carol took him to the doggie park area where he christened the fire hydrant suitably positioned in the middle of the fenced in park. To make certain he’d done the job, he gave it a second squirt before heading back to the car. Naturally, he wanted to check out every parked car along the way, straining at the leash to follow some scent he’d detected and was compelled to follow.

Leaving the rest area was traumatic. Ollie let out a piecing howl. He sounded like we were torturing him. I kept we eyes on the road and hands on the wheel. Maybe no one would see where the noise was coming from and decide to report us for cruelty to animals. His performance was somewhat better at the second rest area and it looked like we’d make it the rest of the way with him curled up and asleep on the back seat.

Maybe it was the smell or the crunch of dirt and gravel under the tires, but when we arrived at the farm, a five-minute ride from our destination, he was up and twitching with anticipation. The first of the cows was on the opposite side of a barbed wire fence running beside the road. Ollie was transfixed. His whining quickly transitioned into a howl. Then there was another cow, and another and finally more than a dozen waiting to cross the road to a milking barn.

It was a case of overload for Ollie. We tried to calm him down, making him sit. He was up in an instant, glued to the scene of passing cows.

On the way home the scene was repeated and I dreaded four hours of howling. Carol had the earmuffs ready, but then when we got on the highway he settled down.

Even more extraordinary when we got to Hoxsie Four Corners he watched the cars, the pedestrians with their shopping carts and even spotted a dog without so much as a whine.

I guess in Ollie’s world after seeing a cow, life in Warwick is nothing to howl about.