In the movie, "A Man Without a Face", a disfigured Mel Gibson agrees to tutor a struggling pre-teen, named Charles Nordstat, to pass the entrance exam to a military academy that Charles wants to attend. For one assignment, the young pupil turns in a treatise on government that he obviously plagiarized. His punishment? Rewrite the assignment or there will be no more tutoring. Charles is allowed to write on anything and so he titles his essay "Why the Silver Surfer Sucks More and the Green Lantern". Which, when held up against the previous essay he submitted, looks base, foolish and uninteresting. But at least it came from his heart.
With that in mind, I offer you, "Why the Coronado Dawg Beach Sucks More Than the Ocean Beach Dawg Beach".
First, let's review this past work-week, shall we?
Monday 4:30am-5:30pm
Tuesday 4:30am-5:30pm
Wednesday 4:00am - 5:00pm
Thursday 6:00am - 5:00pm
Friday 3:45am-5:00pm
Enough has been said on the topic and if you are unfamiliar, click on "The Great Upheaval" topic to the right.
This is now week three of this schedule and alarm bells are starting to sound inside my being. "She can't take much morre of this, Captain!" (in thick Scottish accent)
My goal this weekend is three-fold:
1) Physically move my body as little as possible
2) Physically move the Dawg's body as much as possible
3) Do just enough pick-up around the house that the health department does not come-a-knocking
How to handle 1 & 2? Dawg Beach, with a chair and stack of magazines, of course.
I have had the Coronado Dawg beach recommended to me a couple of times recently so I decided to try it. If San Deigo had a "Hamptons" where the well-heeled went to play, it would be Coronado. If we had a Beverly Hills, it would be La Jolla and if we had a Venice Beach, it would be Ocean Beach.
So we were off to where the rich dawggies play. I had a basic, working knowledge of where the Coronado dawg beach was and I knew we had arrived when I saw a parade of leashed dawgs headed over the grassy knoll to where the beach must be. "That's odd" I thought to myself; "If this is a dawg beach, why all the leashes?" At Ocean beach, you throw open the back of the jeep and the dawg leaps unfettered from the car to the sand. Well, when in Rome . . .
We got the harness on and the leash out. Backpack? Check. Chair? Check. and we joined the parade.
When we actually got to the beach, about half the folks "released the hounds" so I did the same. Got that? Half the folks unleashed their dawgs. What is the point of a leash-free park if you don't unleash the dawg? Its like sending a kid to a candy store without any money. To each his own.
The first thing that struck me about the beach was how comparatively small and uninteresting it was. Ocean Beach is the largest leash-free dawg park in America. Coronado *ahem* is not. Ocean Beach also has an inlet where you can walk inland for about 1/2 mile along a river of sorts. The Coronado Dawg beach butts up against the North Island Naval base and has helicopters flying overhead every few minutes. Whatever - grading levels of paradise at this point, right?
As we made our way towards the water I noticed a big steaming pile of "dawg has been here" left behind in a clump of seaweed. "That's weird, you would think that these folks would be a little more conscientious about that sort of thing." I thought to myself.
That was when I stepped in a big steaming pile of "dawg has been here" that squished between my toes. As Sean's sixth-grade woodshop teacher would say, "Shootdang!". The magic was somewhat lessened at this point. Of course, the dawg was having a ball tearing back and forth.
I set up the chair, magazines and dawggie water bowl and waded into the surf to clean up. When I got back to the chair, everything was covered in flies. Everything. I must have set up too close to a clump of seaweed.
I moved camp and the flies followed. That does it. Packed up camp. Headed to the car - disregarding the "leash your dawg when walking to and from the beach" rule.
15 minutes later, I threw open the back of the Jeep and the dawg bounded onto the Ocean Beach sand. Back where we belong.
Stayed at the beach for over an hour and had a great time. Sure, there was a scuffle or two with an aggressive dawg here and there - but they're dawgs. It's what they do. Not a leash in sight and nothing but sand between the toes.
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