Our hiking place of choice was the Torrey C Brown Rail Trail Beautiful trail, mostly shaded by trees, lots of neat things to see and watch like the geese above.
As well as beautiful scenery like the gorgeous lily above. I love day lillies, even the tiger lilly, and that picture came out quite well if I may say so myself.
And if you payed really close attention, sometimes you'll find something really neat, like this bird, We THINK it's a Great Blue Heron. I thought at first it was a funny looking log. The tree he's on was across the river, so no way to get really close, so I pulled out the camera and zoomed in and took pictures from three different angles. I love these type of birds(herons, Cranes, etc), so was very pleased to see this on my walk! Unfortunately, tho my camera is a decent one, the quality of pics when I zoom in as much as I did isn't great, but it's still a rather neat photo!
Secret loves hiking in areas like this, she is constantly on hunt for fun things to chase. I would love to be able to take her out OFC because of how keen she is on game. We literally had a squirrely jump out underneath her nose and I had to drag her fuzzy butt away LOL I'm not exactly sure what caught her attention in the woods to bring up the radar ears above. She is my gamiest on live game dog, but so gentle with little dogs and cats, I love it.
The biggest problem were the rude bikers, but most of the bikers were wonderful. We'd be walking and I'd hear "On your left", I'd pull the girls in, and they'd go by, slowly so as not to scare the dogs. THe rude ones would just run up on our butts and zip by. Granted, by the end of the day, the two girls were pretty blaise about it, but at the beginning, Aurora was rather put out by the idiots flying by.
It was a great walk for Aurora, who hadn't seen strollers before. She learned quickly that Strollers meant kids, and she LOVES kids. She met this little boy going up and coming down, and had him giggling licking his face like crazy. She got to the point she'd see a stroller and get all excited, so she was in for a HUGE surprise when the last stroller she saw had a dachshund in it LOL
The weather wasn't horrendous, was 77, but the humidity was decently high that along our 7 mile trek, I stopped 5 times to offer the dogs water. It was pissing me off to see people out biking their dogs, no water on the bike for the dogs, in weather that was making me sweat at a fast walk, let alone if I was forced to trot.I made sure to thank the one walker I saw who had this neat vest contraption on her great dane that carried her dog's water. She agreed with me about the stupidity of people. A very sweet small dane and I really need to find that vest, as I told the dogs they should be carrying their own water instead of me LOL
If you're going to walk with dogs in the summer, you need to take LOTS of water, I carried quite a few lbs on my shoulders, to make sure they were covered.
Lots of wonderful compliments on my girls, even by people who didn't slow down, but were nice enough to tell me how beautiful they were. I'm so glad I didn't wear my headset like I normally do. I wear it to walk in beat with the fast music I have labeled just for our walks, but it was a very nice experience
I had hoped to make it a longer hike, but I am not in shape and my bad knee started aching, thankfully it was just an ache, not a throb. It has been amazingly good recently, and so I took the walk without the brace .. well, I also didnt' want to deal with the disgusting feeling of sweaty knee under that brace! It also was getting a bit too humid. Next time, we'll get up earlier and go, as the girls seemed to enjoy. .we may go back tomorrow(Well, Secret & I, and someone else :)) depending on how I feel. By the time it was all said and done, we hiked 7 miles, not bad, heart rate monitor says that's 1200 calories!
Got about a mile from the car, it started sprinkling, had a small training session with the lady with the dachshund. Her 11 yr old male was the one in the stroller and being good, the younger one was on leash barking, snarling and lunging at my zoi, who were ignoring him. She picked him up and was soothing him, so I gave her some hints on what to do and not to(which includes picking him up and helping his napolean complex). Hopefully it'll help the next time he sees big dogs
So all and all, a nice morning, went shopping at petsmart, picked up some new beds which were already on sale, then I got an additional 15% off, then came home and took a nap :)
