We only went to the beach for two nights. We needed to check up on our condo and do some business things with the management company. The weather was on the cooler side, temps in the low 50's at night and upper 70's during the day. Beautiful clear skies. So, really nice! On to the interesting stuff! One of the challenges with taking Murphy to the beach is getting him enough exercise. Dogs are not allowed off leash on the beach at any time. I am too old to be running on the beach, well, maybe that is not it exactly, ahem. We knew there was a dog park (Bark Park) nearby and checked it out on our last trip but did not go in with Murphy, we were short of time. It looked to be a really, really nice setup. Yesterday afternoon off we went. Only 3 or 4 dogs in the "big dog" section. We went in and took Murph off leash (we know he gets along with other dogs from our walks in town). For the first 15 minutes he stuck quite close by us, never venturing more than about 20 feet away. Had no interesting in playing with a ball at all. Hmmm, says we..... We found a nice bench to park on with an elderly gentleman and just leg Murph do what he thought best. He eventually went over to check out the other dogs and people. By this time there were at least 10 dogs present. We noticed that Murph was more interested in the people. He did socialize with the other dogs but did not get into their games much. It was apparent he was in stimulus overload, really drooling. We stayed about an hour and by that time he had "loosened" up significantly. When we decided to leave, we did not call him. He keeps an eye on us all the time so when we got up and started walking up the path towards the gate he just came trotting over and got in the lead. He went to the gate and waited for us to hook up his leash. This seemed to go well and we are pretty sure he will do better with each visit. This is pretty important because he needs his exercise. It will also allow us to spend more time at our place. I have no problem taking him there twice a day. He did not really get a lot of exercise at the park yesterday, not like he does when we play in our backyard. When we got home today, the first thing he wanted to do was make sure the squirrels were not in the backyard and get those tennis balls flying! He was hitting about 100 MPH for quite a bit when we first started playing. I could just see that he needed to gets lots of that pent up energy out. We have been out to play 3 times since getting home and now he is relaxing on his rug. He met lots of people as usual. I am thinking his idea of a great vacation would be to ride up an down in the elevator all day long meeting people. My OH was walking him on the beach but I forgot to take my camera with us. It was a perfect shot of those two, darn! I wished this site allowed direct upload of pics, I have given up on things like PhotoBucket, might see how one drive works.
You're a Forum Supporter, so you can upload photos. See the Technical section for details. If you have photos, we definitely want to see them
Too bad he can't be off leash at your beach. Is that typical of N.C. and S.C. beaches? (It's been more than 50 years since I went to school in N.C.) All of our beaches are state owned and almost all are dog friendly, though there are occasional closures for wild life breeding etc.
Hi Ski. Not sure if it is typical of SC beaches, but in NC it varies a lot. One beach allows dogs off leash from mid October to Mid April, another allows it all the time, a third not at all. It is not necessarily that they are not "dog friendly". It has a lot to do with migrating and nesting birds. Also, Myrtle Beach is way, way too busy during "the season" to have dogs running all over the place. Most of the condos do not permit dogs at all. It took us a while to find ours that allows owners to bring their dogs but not renters. Tomorrow we will be going down to Oak Island, about a 30 minute drive and he will be able to run free. Frankly, I would rather the busier beaches did not allow dogs off leash. There are just too many people that let a dog loose that has no business being loose on a beach full of people and other dogs. For some odd reason if they have an aggressive dog it feeds their ego as to how "tough" their dog is. The beaches here are owned by the towns, btw.
