Beach goers

We are constantly planning excursions through which we hope to gain maximum value of exhausting the dog for minimal time investment. Dog parks, we've discovered, don't really do much on the maximum value axis, since Max doesn't do much when we arrive. He pretty much just sits there waiting for us to do something. We usually run around a little bit, in a futile attempt to engage the dog, but then we realize we aren't dogs and this is, after all, a dog park. No sense in humans pretending to be dogs. Our dog, on the other hand, takes great pleasure in pretending to be human.

The beach, on the other hand, provides an amazing ROI when it comes to wearing out the dog. We used to drive all the way to Muir - a long, windy road - to get to a dog beach. But one day we realized that Crissy Field is a significantly shorter drive and Max (for whatever reason that we can't explain) runs harder, faster and longer there than Muir. Talk about ROI.

Sunday was one of those ROI days. A trip to Crissy Field early Sunday morning resulted in a full 45 minutes of non-stop running, fetching (a task virtually unheard of until Sunday), and romping in the water. 45 minutes may not seem like a huge span of time, but this dog was worn out at the end. An excellent recipe for getting some peace and quiet the remainder of the day. We were a happy group of P's this weekend.