The first appointment was for me. Since we were the first appointment of the day we got in right away. They were very efficient and got me in and out fairly quickly. That actually left us some spare time before our next appointment. So we decided to swing by the off-leash park at Marymoor.
For those of you not familiar with Marymoor it is a huge park with many different activity areas. There is an area for flying planes, a velodrome, soccer fields, baseball diamonds, tennis courts, children's play area, rock climbing walls, concert venue, bird watching area, off-leash dog park and much more.
The dog park is a little over 40 acres. There are paths, large fields, forest areas, and five or six access areas to the river. It's a great park as there is a lot of space and different areas depending on what your dog likes to do.
As we well knew, this was a great time of day to go as it's never very busy in the morning on a weekday. Since this would be Boogie's first time to meet other dogs and other people we didn't want to overwhelm him. As it turned out we were correct. There were some dogs there but it was very easy to be by yourself most of the time.
We started out going in a direction where there were no dogs. This time of the year the grass is very high in some of the areas. We didn't dare let Boogie go off leash as we figured we'd lose him for sure in the tall grass. After walking a while we came to an area with shorter grass. There was no one in this area either so we felt comfortable letting Boogie run - though we kept his leash on him so we could catch him if need be.
He couldn't get any of our dogs to play with him but he did enjoy chasing a tennis ball a few feet a couple times.
From there we headed over to the river. Slugger and Sparkie went right in. As always, Slugger was swimming half way across the river to retrieve his tennis ball. Sparkie went splish splashing around with her ball. One time on the way back to shore, Sparkie left her ball in the water about a foot of the shore. In this particular spot there were boulders between the shore and the water. Boogie was on the boulder when he saw the ball. He went running after the ball - not realizing that dogs can't walk on water. He fell in over his head but didn't panic one bit. He just started swimming right back to shore. He came out, shook off, and went off down the path like nothing had happened. What a guy!
As we walked down next to the river where we came across a number of dogs and people. At first Boogie would run to the end of the leash behind me crying if another dog even looked in his direction. But very quickly he'd get a little braver and would want to get a little closer. He acted the same whether we were meeting people or dogs. But we were very proud of him in how fast he would get a little more brave each time.
When we got to the area with benches and a common area in the middle we met a lady with two Scotties. Boogie was much more brave with dogs closer to his own size. After a very brief time of being leery, he decided he was the big brave dog. He was chasing those dogs all over the place. He totally forgot about me and went racing across a bridge and out of sight. After 30 seconds or so I decided I'd better call him back. What a recall the little fellow has - he came right away just as fast as his little legs would take him.
On the way back to the car he decided to get started on his agility career and practice the dogwalk!
I was too busy making sure that Boogie was safe during the trip around the park that I forgot to take many pictures! Maybe next year.
From there we went to our remaining three vet appointments. The girls definitely enjoyed the park much more than they enjoyed the vets!
Debbie
7/26/07
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