The Days of Johann, an agility dog!: A fun little hike right out our front door!

Are we lucky or what?!? Last Saturday the weather was just amazing....68 degrees and super sunny. Mum calls it shorts and sweatshirt weather.

So what did we do? We headed out for a nice little hike right out our front door.

We live at the top of the mountain, and there isn't any traffic up here at all. The only cars we see are our neighbors or the bus twice a day on school days, and sometimes the occasional utility truck or gravel truck.

Mum spent the entire day on Saturday cleaning the cabin. She used her new HAAN steam cleaner and went to town on the floors and the rugs. She even pulled up the rugs, moved all the furniture and cleaned the dust bunnies out.

So come later in the early afternoon, we were ready for a break!

We headed down our road and passed our neighbors to the south. Just after their lane is a road that isn't maintained by the county and it's pretty washed out, just perfect for our hike.

Mum is still getting used to walking all three of us, as all of us are good pullers. She doesn't really mind that we pull because we can pull her up a mountain. It's a little more challenging for her when we are going down, so she uses the word 'easy' to tell us to let up and let her navigate going down a hill.

But Rach doesn't know 'easy' yet. So Mum and I and Gracie helped Rach learn on this hike what the word means and he picked it up about one half the way through our hike. What a good boy! Keeping Mum from falling is important to us and he's helping with that now.

We walked for a while and got to the part of the road that comes from the other direction (it's a loop) and passed by a couple of vacation cabins. No one home. Just then Mum looked down and saw a nut she didn't recognize. Rach noticed too as he is really into eating nuts (not a good thing that Mum has to watch about him). Turned out it was a basic acorn, but an acorn from a Live Oak which isn't that common around here. That's why it's so big!

We walked some more and came across an amazing smell, we all had to get in there!

The road we walk on and most all the ground up here is very sandy soil, which leaves lots of prints. We found this one and Mum had to take a pic because it was one of the largest prints from a raccoon that she's ever seen! About five inches long. wow....big guy.

On hikes like this, during this time of year when the leaves are off the trees, you can just see forever! So Mum likes to take stops and just take in all the scenery. We were happy to oblige!

Funny thing is we were all looking to the left, profile shots!

We kept walking around the loop and back toward our cabin, but we weren't done yet! We decided to head up the other direction and up the mountain just a little more. This is the path we walked a lot before we got our fence up at the cabin. Mum was pleasantly surprised that she didn't get winded at all going up and up and up. She's in better shape than she thought she was, good Mum!

We stopped to watch a robin flit and flight around. We were very close, just only about five feet, but we stayed quiet.

When we got home we had to spend some cool down time on the back deck and share some organic apples with Mum. This is Rach's first apple after a hike treat. What do you think? I think he likes it!