Running with the pack

A new "pupil" has joined the pack for our daily walks.  German Shepherd, Hugo, has just turned one year old, but he had never been out of his own garden. His elderly owners were afraid that he might be too strong for them and pull them off their feet; they had discovered that he barked and lunged whenever he saw other dogs.

After evaluating him, I was able to reassure them that he wasn't an aggressive dog at all, but was simply a "reactive" dog. Fear and nervousness was causing him to respond when other dogs rushed to their gates to bark at him. I offered to take him out with my gang, to get him used to meeting other dogs and to teach him to walk politely on the lead without pulling.

It's only been a week and a half, but already he has turned out to be a dream of a dog: quiet, submissive, obedient, and very polite when meeting the many other dogs we meet on our walks. His owners are absolutely thrilled. The lady, who's in her seventies, comes with us on our morning walks (which allows us to have long conversations) and in the evening I take the four dogs by myself.

With the sun beating down for most of the day, I'm having to be creative when it comes to finding places and times for us to get our exercise. The forest continues to be a good option. This morning, just after sunrise, I drove to a wooded spot not far from Villa Rehoboth, and we went for a long walk through the shady woodland. There were some stunning views across the countryside to the backdrop of the mountains (the Sierra Nevada, which is covered in snow during the winter time.)
If you know Villa Rehoboth, where we had the leadership retreat centre, you might be able to spot it here in the distance. (You can click on the photo montage to make it larger.)

The forest is an endless panorama of innumerable different shades of green until, every now and then, some oleander bushes growing up from the river gorge provide a sudden splash of a different colour.

My summer ministry commitments this year include quite a lot of coaching and fair bit of computer work as I prepare for international travels coming up in the autumn. This means that my schedule is relatively flexible for a change, so I can plan my daily exercise (dog walking and swimming) around the different work tasks that need to be completed each day.

I've discovered that Nelson enjoys swimming too, so we've gone on a couple of little hikes to places where we can swim in a lake or a river. Last week we hiked down to a beauty spot with a lovely waterfall that had featured in an old shampoo advert of the 1980s. Nelson, as you'll see in the insert, thoroughly enjoyed splashing in the water and fetching sticks.

It's unusual for me to be in Spain for the whole summer; usually I'm in West Africa for outreach, but there will be no Planting Together initiative this year, as we prepare and gear up to take a much bigger group of participants down to Senegal in 2019. My first trip this year will only be at the end of August, when I head to Thailand for an international missions gathering. In the meantime, I'm coaching missionaries on four continents, and enjoying making time for swimming and walking with the dogs.