You Can't Beat a Beach Vaca With Your Furry Buddy!

As you guys know, we took a week off from the blog a couple of weeks ago to celebrate our 20th anniversary. To celebrate, we traveled up the coast with Rita to Los Olivos and Cambria in central California.

Rita is still getting really stressed in the car (probably a subject for another post) so she was exhausted after our drive to Los Olivos. She collapsed on top of her squeaky chipmunk.

Vacationing with the Dog in Cambria

I'm finally getting around to sharing pics from our recent vaca with Rita to Cambria, which is a small town on the coast in Central, CA. We had a lovely, relaxing time.

We spent a lot of time walking on the bluffs (where we could see seals, dolphins and sea otters - LOVE them! - below us in the water). This was in the huge dog-friendly Fiscalini Ranch Preserve. I liked the bluffs path best because dogs have to be on leash there. If you go there, there are other trails where your pups can go off-leash.

Balancing to Build Up the Dog's Confidence

I wanted to try to do a pictorial of our vaca with Rita to Cambria in Central CA today, but I didn't have time to get organized, so instead I'm sharing a subset of Rita balancing on things while we were on vaca!

I'm always impressed by Mr. N., the adorable Tenacious Little Terrier and the Adventures of Zoe & Phoenix and all the other talented dogs out there who can hop up on trees and whatnot and pose for photos. Since Rita has a lot of fears, I figured we'd try some hoping-up-and-posing pics, too, to build up her confidence - but we started small!

Here she is on a bench. (I know: easy-peasy. But they had all these cool benches made of logs and driftwood so it was mostly for the photo op and to practice her "go to your bed" command. That was the command I used to get her up on all these things. If I pat something - sofa, her bed, bench, whatever - and say "go to your bed" she'll get on it.)