The beach

On Sunday Indy and I visited Grand Mere State Park on Lake Michigan. It was rainy off and on, but thankfully, by the time we reached the beach it had cleared up.

Grand Mere is a pretty state park, very undeveloped ... a little too undeveloped if you ask me. There were no signs directing people to the beach, or anywhere really, just tons of well worn trails that wandered off in every direction ... through miles of very high sand dunes. Needless to say, Indy and I wandered off in the wrong direction ... after aimlessly climbing and descending multiple sand dunes I fully expected to see water by the time I reached the summit of the monster size darn near vertical climb sand dune, only to be met by a view of another dune, and another one after that. Clearly, I had gone the wrong direction, so we started back tracking, a tiny bit lost, but eventually made it back to the car, hot, sweaty and swearing, I realized my keys had fallen out of my pocket, so, back we went, to climb those damn dunes all over again. I found my keys but I officially HATE sand dunes :) I griped at Indy for not being a tracking dog and for pulling on his leash the whole darn time (the trails weren't wide enough for heeling). Eventually we saw someone else on the trail and followed him to the beach, which was lovely. Indy did what can only be described as frolicking, those of you have have labs, know what I'm talking about. We played fetch, well, I said "fetch" he thought I said, "keep away", typical. In his usual joyous fashion, he bounded right up to a big female Shepard type dog, got in her face, taunted her with his toy, trying to induce play time ... the big doofus doesn't have a clue how to approach protective dogs. She growled and pitched a fit, luckily nothing more .. one of these days Indy is going to get himself into trouble because he doesn't understand why anyone wouldn't love him. Then our friend Ivy, the 11 pound Shi' Tzu bullier of big dogs arrived to put Indy in his place.

In order to be respectable dogs they had to play keep away with an old fish skeleton they found on the beach, yum. Indy dug a big hole in the beach as Ivy supervised and chased the flying sand. Poor Ivy must have required some serious bath time when she got home that night. Luckily Indy is a wash & wear dog, a nice hot shower and he's ready to go. Then I just have to clean the mud off and sand off every surface in the bathroom.

We left the beach happy and exhausted. Indy slept the whole way home, one happy and content lab.