Training Day

The boys, seat belted in and ready for adventure

These are my two best friends. Whenever I am not at work, I'm usually hanging out with these two. They both love to play fetch and go for walks. Part of the reason I chose to get a camper and start camping was so I would be able to take these two with me when I went. We could hike and do outdoors stuff together and get all of us off the couch and back into nature, if only for a weekend.

Before we start our journey all of us need to do things to prepare for our upcoming adventures. Living with anxiety means almost always having to overthink everything. The big guy on the left is my 24/7 watch dog. Not much gets passed him. He loves to let me know also by barking about it. He's also a little less than stellar on a leash. Looking up dog friendly camp sites and their rules got me thinking the guys could use a little work. They've got the basic, sit, down and rollover down but there's a lot more we all could learn.

So I signed the big guy up for basic obedience classes at a not so local dog training class called River Run Dog Training. We're two classes in and I can already see some improvements. We spend our Saturday mornings in "school" where he gets to be used to hanging around other dogs without barking or pulling on the leash to go play with them. He's actually doing pretty well and calms down a lot faster after just 2 classes. I work both of them on what we learned in class during the week between classes. It gives their minds something new to do and they get some new jobs with it also.

The plan is to take the big guy until he graduates to the next class and then give him a break and take the little guy for beginners and go back and forth until they're ready to go camping and go on hikes at different camp grounds.

Once we all get better behaved on a leash we'll start going to local places to just hike, while I work on getting the camper updated and ready to go. It's nice to have plans and small goals I can set for myself and achieve and move on to the next goal.

That's all I've got for today. Hope everyone enjoys their Sunday.