beach

we went down to barwon heads for the weekend to celebrate our first anniversary. i found this really cute little dog friendly cottage for us. it was perfect other than 2 yappy jack russells next door. fortunately wombat was having an amazing dog weekend and pretty much ignored them other than a couple times where she was sniffing around the fence line (which was just bamboo and so the dogs could see each other anywhere the vines didn't cover) and the dogs came up to the fence and yapped away at her. she growled and barked back (understandably) so we had to drag her away and then she was fine (no obsessive trying to go back to the fence and be aggressive). it did mean we couldn't just let her roam the perfect little backyard without supervision though.



sleeping on the patio area:

sitting at the front door watching the world go by (exhausted from the beach):

13th beach area (where wombat got to play fetch):

playing fetch:

sandy nose:

wombat had a great weekend with her dog behaviour. first she showed us how well she could ignore the yappy dogs (and the other growly dog behind us that was growling when the yappers went crazy at it). then she did well with all the dogs at the nude beach (we take her there cuz the beach is usually deserted. this time there were LOTS of people and dogs there). we tried to make her go swimming there (zac went in and i went up to my knees-- the water was FREEZING!) but she wouldn't go in more than her toes. we even ran into a dog her size on the trail coming back up and she did very well (we did put her into a corner and surrounded her while the 2 guys with the other dog almost carried their curious big dog past).
the next day we took her for a big walk to the main strip in barwon heads (the house was about 2km from there). we ended up actually walking down the entire main strip with her (when we were there for our wedding last year we kept saying how there was no way she could do that because of the amount of dogs on the strip). she did very well (although she did get a lot of stares because of her muzzle but she was well behaved and didn't do any crazy gowling or jumping/lunging at other dogs). we had lunch at the place we had our wedding reception with wombat (it's now just a take-away place on weekends and the rest of the property is a used furniture shop) and walked along the beach with her. we drove her up to 13th beach area and found an area free of dogs where we think she's allowed off lead (?) and had a big game of fetch. in the early evening we took her for a walk in the trails by the oval near our holiday house. before we left on sunday we even got to have coffee at a cafe on the strip with wombat at our feet (although zac commented that she did seem more freaked out about being with us in the fenced in cafe courtyard than locked in the car byherself). poor dog came home exhausted (i was a bit tired too but we turned around right after we arrived home and walked up to the sydney rd st party for the next several hours).