Like I said yesterday, we took Molly to the beach last night to cool off and have some fun as a reward for all her work and a good break from the heat for all of us. To my family, no, I don't know why I've started talking about going to the beach instead of going to the shore. Probably because now that it's five minutes away, it really is the beach itself I'm talking about when I say it rather than the entire coastal area when used to mean when we talked about "going to the shore." I guess you could say I live at the shore and go to the beach a lot with my dog.
We used to just walk five minutes down the gravel road to get to a more secluded beach, but I'm not up to all the walking, especially with all the loose sand and dune climbs that trip involves. So now we have to get into the car and drive a little ways to the car-accessible beach in the little town south of us. To many of you this may sound odd, but it is the norm to be allowed to drive your car onto the beach. Only some nature preserves and bathing beaches really forbid it. Of course the natural terrain and all the dunes limit accessibility a great deal so it is only the places where there are maintained roads that you can get onto the beach, but once you are onto it, you can normally drive as far in both directions as the dunes and outlet streams allow.
Now, back to the dog-related babble. We started by letting Molly get some of that digging urge out of her system. Unless we give her a command to say otherwise (she has a digging command that she learned as a pup), she is really only allowed to dig at the beach and she knows it. So when she gets onto that sand, she wants to dig and dig and dig.
She is so happy that she is literally springing onto the sand to dig.
Molly digs and digs and digs. She throws the sands to both sides.
I usually ask her if she is trying to dig to China, but really she doesn't dig very deep (a good thing because that way we don't have to go around filling them in). She tends to dig ditches instead, throwing the sand to both sides.
That's why we put her dig on command. She's actually helped dig when we've helped clear some ditches to help drain water for a neighbor before.
Her leash looks tight because we're using a flexi leash as it is made instead of like we usually do. A loose leash gets in her way digging and she seems to be learning the difference because later she was loose leash walking on the long rope when it was set on her collar (YAY Molly!).
I have to go out now for a bit, so this will have to be a multipart blog entry. Hope everyone who reads it enjoys the pictures almost as much as Molly enjoyed "posing" for them.
