I chose the title of my talk for two reasons. The first part connects with the book, The Doctoral Thesis Journey, which I co-edited with David Hunt in 1994. The journey metaphor still works for me as a way to talk about the thesis process. The sub-title, Travelling with Charley, is borrowed from an account of a particular kind of journey John Steinbecks’s road trip across the United States with his standard poodle, Charley, chronicled in his classic novel, Travels with Charley. The sub-title connects with a new book that I am working on now, with the working title, Of Dogs and Dissertations: Notes on Thesis Writing and Life.