What a Darling Lake!

 One of our favorite things to do is to take the dogs to some water and let them play! I'm not sure why, because they are a big mess and then we have to struggle through bathing them right after spending hours outside and it's quite exhausting. But, we do it anyway.  First we stopped at Bonnefield Lake, but it had pretty clear posted rules about dogs staying on their leashes, and they can't really swim if they're on their leashes...unless we swim too...a little cold for that...

They're just happy being outside though, just look at that cute puppy.

We decided to move on to Lake Darling. We had never been there before, but we googled lakes near Fairfield and thought it looked like a nice one.  We thought. Google neglected to mention that it was drained 2 years ago for sludging, drudging, and general perking up.  Above you see Zach pointing to what we thought was going to be the lake.  We kept driving through this beautiful park and telling each other, "we'll see the water just around the next bend!" 

 We did find a nice little pond for Zoe to swim in though, and found out her fetching is much better in water than it is on land! On land she is very good and finding what you threw but doesn't have much interest in actually picking it up and bringing to the thrower.  She swam and swam and swam after that stick and brought it back almost every time!

Buster swam some too but it was a little deep for his taste.  He was more interested in following me around while I took pictures and surveying yet another beautiful view of the empty lake.

We had to try a few self portraits to get both of us with our eyes open

And the dogs were more than happy to jump back in the car after swimming and fetching and traipsing and hiking for a couple of hours! After baths at home, they were peacfully content the rest of the day! What a relaxing Sunday afternoon.