Once to the park, though, it's really very quiet. Occasionally there's a single bark to be heard, or kids playing in the pool or on the playground, but other than that, it's rather nature-y. Which is very nice, truth be told. Relaxing for me, few distractions for Elka, and we go home happy.
Today, though, on a lark, we tried a different park. I drove to it, because I wasn't sure if it was going to rain, and because I had to throw something in a mailbox.
We got to the other park, and first I ran into the problem of where to put the car. There are a lot of sports fields there, soccer and baseball, and a lot of parking lots. Not a whole lot of places to walk, though. So I parked near a maintenance office looking building, near a mossy sort of lake, and we got out.
Truth be told, I didn't take pictures at this park. It's right near the highway, and was really noisy. It's open to cars (remember all the parking lots?) and so there was a lot of traffic through the park itself, which made safely walking to a place to let Elka on the long leash a bit nerve-wracking. There was no sidewalk, and not much of a shoulder. There were Canada geese at the lake, and some seagulls, and Elka watched these with interest, when she wasn't jumping around like a freak. She was both excited to be out on a walk, and just kind of nuts because of all the noise. The fact that I didn't like the noise either didn't help her much, I'm sure.
We found a paved walkway with a whole bunch of war memorials to walk through, and a jogger yelled "Excuse me, your dog is beautiful!" to me, so that was really cool. There was a fence around the playground. So, while it was good to have the experience, and expose Elka to a different sort of environment, we're going to stick with our customary park.
Most of our walks are in our crowded suburb, so they are kind of busy and noisy and annoying, but we like to drive to a park about 20 minutes away where it is a nice quiet enjoyable walk.
ReplyDeleteWe have SO MANY barking pups on our walks
ReplyDeleteStop on by for a visit
Kari
http://dogisgodinreverse.com
@Kolchak I'm glad you have a park you can access! I suppose if we were used to it, it would be one thing. But our "normal" park is so nice and quiet!
ReplyDelete@Kari We have at least 6, depending on our route to the park. I feel bad for the dogs, 3 of whom I can hear from my house for most of the day, if I happen to be home.
When we go to the dog park there aee a few doggies there who bark a lot, but it's mostly quiet playing! :)
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Luna
I find more barking when dogs are frustrated or defending their territory. We often find more of them behind fences on our walks than we do at the dog park.
ReplyDeleteWe prefer quiet:) The other day at the park there was a very noisy Bearded Collie, he barked non-stop at his Mum while she threw stuff in the river for him. Usually Frankie is hard to stop when there is a dog around he doesn't know but he just looked at this dog from a distance with disdain. He really doesn't like dogs barking. A few nights ago we went for a street walk. Mostly it's quiet but one street has got 5 houses with dogs that bark abuse as we walk past. Frankie always wants to hurry past and Beryl looks at the dogs with a kind of 'what's your problem' expression on her face.
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