She's a swimmer!

Wes, Lucy, and I went to the dog beach at Montrose Harbor yesterday with some friends down the hall – ENT Doc, Lawyer Lady, and their dog Winston. You need a car to get up there, which is why we hadn’t been before, but ENT Doc and Lawyer Lady have one and offered to take us all up there. Winston (a 1-year-old King Charles Spaniel) is Lucy’s boyfriend; they play together in the hall, and Winston goes for his midday constitutional with Lucy. In the fall, when I go back to work, they’ll have the same dog walker. So yesterday, under cloudy skies, we took off for the dog beach.

Lucy has been on a beach and near water before. When she first came home with me, I was living with PennPal in Charlottesville at an apartment complex on the Rivanna River. There was a beach (on which Wes proposed to me), and Lucy liked running around there. She was never really interested in the water, which was just as well; chances are the current would have carried her puppy self away. So we were really excited to get her to the Lake, where the waves (yes, there are waves in the Great Lakes) are a little calmer – at least they were yesterday.

When we first got to the beach, Lucy was thrilled to be off-leash but a little hesitant about getting in the water. Wes and I had to catch her and put her in there to show her she’d be okay. After that she’d splash around at the edge of the water, but wouldn’t go in past where she could stand. We finally got her back in towards the end of our visit, and this time I took her out past where she could stand. As soon as I let her go, she started paddling! It was so cute to see. She wasn’t as scared the second time I took her out, and she continued splashing around in the surf until we left.

It’ll be fun to take her out again and to take her out further out in the water. The only bad part of the trip was that we had to give her a bath the moment we got home. She’d decided at the beach that the best way to dry off was to roll around in the sand, which we did not want deposited in the apartment.

Lucy slept off her beach excitement while Wes and I worked out and went to the grocery store. She must have consumed too much lake water, because her digestive tract seems a little out of whack today. All worth it though, I guess!