Fancy meeting you here..

One of the amazing things we’ve found since we lost Jasmine and started our schnauzer family all over again with first Renae, then Susie-Belle and more recently Twinkle is how many very good friends schnauzers have helped us make. We spend a lot of our time these days making sure the girls are happy, and with Susie-Belle and Twinkle this means a strong focus on getting them out and about to meet a lot of dogs regularly, gain new experiences of different places and provide as much fun for them as we can to help them to heal from the abuse they have experienced in the past. Our friends Jolyon and Dean, who met entirely through our schnauzers have become very close friends, both their dogs with our girls and us humans too. We share a lot of similar interests and many things parallel in our lives, it’s remarkable. One of these is they have a house in France, a couple of hours south from us here and we took the opportunity yesterday to go down and stay with them for the first time.  By a remarkable coincidence, a few miles from their house, is another member of our favourite Schnauzer Forum which is where we’ve met a lot of wonderful people and arranged loads of walks and meet ups. Yesterday’s must be the first one though to come together in France and it was fun. And hot. Very hot.

Sarah and her husband, an excellent chef generously provided us with a delicious lunch after we’d struggled out in the heat to give the dogs a bit of a run, their lovely young standard schnauzer Gaspard was quite overcome with excitement at meeting our girls, in fact we think he may have rather fallen in love with little Twinkle, she was certainly very keen and playful with him all day. It was wonderful to see her so happy when a lot of the time she seems so worried about life. One of the reasons we are so keen to network with others who are happy to meet for walks is to allow her the chance to feel happy and carefree as it is with dogs she so clearly feels happiest.

 

 

At one stage during lunch, there was a rather loud splash and plop and it was Twinkle taking a tumble into the ornamental fish pond. Not sure what had spooked her, but she was jumping out the way of something and in she went….and didn’t seem too bothered by it, in more than likely cooled her off and so far she’s shown no signs of being worried by baths. We have yet to get her in for a river swim though.

Back at Dean and Jolyon’s place the humans in the party all had a refreshing dip in the pool, the only schnauzer to get in however was the youngster of the group, Watson, Susie-Belle popped over to have a look at us, but wasn’t tempted, preferring to stay in the shade to cool off.