This is Fort Funston, it used to be a military base but now it is a dog beach wonderland. It is no more than a five minute drive from my house and a perfect place for the dogs to go NUTS. I took them here today because it was so nice and sunny and warm out that I just couldn't justify staying inside.
There are 4 legs of the trail that I take them on. From the car to the ocean is the first leg. Lucy notices nothing but the frisbee, "Lu, slow down, you need to conserve your energy" I said, but she totally didn't listen. Zephyr (the best dog ever) meanwhile trots along keeping up at his own pace, enjoying the day as I had intended him to. There is water halfway through the first leg of the walk but the Z man never drinks it. Lucy does and we move on. Now it was so hot that by the time we got within sight of the ocean she runs straight for it, swimming in the tide pools and of course drinking TONS OF SALT WATER. In the middle of the second leg she gradually loses interest in the frisbee and her eyes start to look a little bloodshot.
LEG 3 The shit started to go down. Suddenly the dunes no longer looked like they once did. What was once a steep slow hill up in deep sand was now ten times harder and off the trail. I felt like we were stuck in the Sahara with the ever-changing dunes. Whenever I stopped (to avoid puking) Lucy immediately laid down, I gave her a ton of water from the bottle that I packed. Whenever there was shade she immediately laid down. I started feeling, once again, like a bad parent who had misjudged her poor child's capabilities.
SO THERE WE WERE near death, talking about what we should have made of ourselves, telling each other that we could make it, we would make it. I'm telling you it got sketchy. We finished leg 3 of the trip but we might never speak of it again.
At the beginning of the 4th leg the dogs found some good shade and Lucy all of the sudden had the worst ocean water diarrhea in front of all the other parents. I took them over to the shaded area I had been trying to get to and let them rest for awhile.
We headed home and she was her usual annoying self in the car, so I figured she couldn't be feeling too bad. When we pulled into our parking spot at home I was thinking about our adventure and about how they would be good and tired for at least two days and as I rolled up the window I hear a YELP and there is my darling puppy with her floppy black ear stuck in the top of the rolled up window.
