September 9, 2007, 12:10 am : 27. Go for a proper walk on the Moors

Today my sister and I went for a walk on Dartmoor with our dog. While this doesn’t seem all too exciting, it really was, and I’ll explain why.

We have had our dog for 10 years now and from the day we got her home from the rescue she has hated being in a car, she gets car sick and will normally either throw up or poop. But today we thought we would at least try, she has calmed down a lot since she was a puppy and we were taking her in our, smaller, car instead of dads where she has to sit in the big boot and gets flung around any time we go around a corner or hit the brake. We started by preparing the car in case she was sick, covering the back seats with an old shower curtain and some towels. When all the equipment was ready (leads, water, treats, etc,) we got the bean bag she normally lies on and put it in the back of the car. My sister then got in the car and I handed her the lead so the dog would jump in. It’s a three door hatch back so I pushed the seat back into position and got into the drivers seat. Setting off she wasn’t sounding too stressed, my sister was holding on to her and had treats to keep her attention. The plan was to see how she was once we got to the top of the road, we got there and while she was whining a little we decided to keep going.

As soon as you get on the moors there’s a small cafe on the left, we stopped there deciding to do a short journey first time and try going further another on another trip. After getting past the gate behind the cafe we switched to the long lead so she could wander about a bit. She was loving it immediately. A normal walk for her is about 10 minutes long up the hill we live on and back down again, same old houses everyday and we all just want to get back as soon as we can, but this time everything was new and fun. Even for us, we could look at the views around as well as watch how much the dog was enjoying it. On our usual walk she is always pulling at the lead and jumping at people and dogs we pass by but this time she just walked a bit a head of us, sniffing about, when we came to people or dogs she paid little to no attention to them and wasn’t even too bothered when we passed a group of ponies. In the end we managed to walk for about an hour and a quarter on a beautiful sunny day. We stopped at the end of the walk at the cafe. Before we could get back to the car to get the water bowl another dog walker gave us a ice cream tub full of water, which was nice of them, except I got the feeling they were telling us we should have thought to bring our own, when we had and had also been giving her water from a bottle during the walk. Finally we had some lunch and took the dog for a quick walk to let her pee and then headed home

I think I got the better end of the deal, sitting in the back of the car on the way home as the dog was so tired she just lay on the seat panting.

It really was a great day, and not only did the dog have the best walk of her life so far, I got to cross something off my list. Hopefully we will be able to go on more walks like that with the dog, as i said getting further onto the moor each time.

Leave a Reply