Trip to the Beach

Tilly’s first trip to the beach was a family day trip to Borth. Safe to say she loved it. She could not sit still the entire way in the car. Quivering with excitement she knew we were going somewhere special, and she did not want to relax for even one second in fear of missing any of the fun. Once we arrived Tilly got to experience both sand and the sea for the first time.

Borth, or Ynyslas to be more precise, has large sand dunes which must be crossed before you actually reach the beach itself. These dunes were difficult to traverse, and this was further complicated by Tilly confusing the imprints of everyone’s feet and shoes as burrow holes. This meant every single footprint had to be sniffed and dug very thoroughly to ensure that there were no tunnels for Tilly to explore. As you can imagine this continued on the beach also, especially as a horse had just been ridden across the sand leaving horse hoofs amongst the other foot marks. These trails of hoof prints were even more interesting to Tilly due to their size suggesting to Tilly that bunnies the size of the Were rabbit in Wallace and Gromit roamed the shores of Borth. She was now overjoyed at how many big bunnies seemingly lived on the beach for her to chase !

We had lunch when we arrived. Tilly wanted to share our picnic. Of course she did…. why would she want dog biscuits when she could eat our feast?! In an attempt to guard our snacks, we put Tilly’s extendable lead under a rock a couple of metres away from our picnic blanket, so that she could continue to sniff around next to us. Unfortunately, we had underestimated both Tilly’s determination and her strength, because when my back was  turned she managed to lung and engulf my entire sandwich in one swallow dragging the rock behind her. There was no chance that the actually managed to taste the sandwich as she ate it so quickly!! After this we had to reassess our lunch eating technique to ensure that nobody else lost any more food to our canine hoover. One of us would hold her lead while the rest of us ate and then we would swap.

After lunch we took Tilly right up to the sea to see if she wanted to go swimming. Tilly was very bemused by the concept of this moving body of water which kept chasing her and then running away again. We presumed Tilly didn’t want to go swimming, so just walked her along the edge of the water instead. Then one of us started to try skimming stones and immediately Tilly raced into the sea, plunging her face in and returned with a stone. Astonished we threw another pebble to see what she would do, and she did the exact same thing. Considering fetch wasn’t normally overly successful with Tilly we were very impressed that she was actually dropping the pebbles at our feet even if the pebble wasn’t normally the one we threw for her but a random one off the bottom. It was also so cute because she would only submerge her face, and she would emerge soaked with little droplets which were sprinkled along her whiskers and little twitching nose.

I think we can happily conclude that Tilly very much enjoyed her first (and definitely not last!) trip to the seaside, especially as she cwtched up all comfy in the car on the way home. In her later years Tilly had many more trips to the sea when she came to visit me at my university, and she never displayed any less joy than on her first trip. These memories of an elderly, bumbling Tilly snuffling about on the sand will stay with me forever and will form some of the last chapters on Tilly’s sunshine filled life.