One of the traditions that we had as a family was to go camping at Salisbury beach on Labor Day weekend. We would get the kids out of school and drive up early and grab some food at Salisbury House of Pizza. We got there early, not only to beat the traffic, but to give Boomer some “ocean time” while there were relatively few people on the beach.
For some reason, every single Friday the weather was gorgeous and the sunset was incredible. The picture above was scanned from a scrapbook from Sep 2005 when Matthew, Becky, and Emily Jennison played with Boomer on the beach (Becky and Boomer played tug-of-war in the picture at the top right!).
One of the things that Boomer didn’t get enough of was swimming. He loved it. We had a pond in the backyard but didn’t want him to jump in it because it was kind of swampy (he did jump in a few times and always smelled good afterwards!)
But at the ocean he loved to play fetch and go out into the waves to retrieve the ball.
The only downside was that he would get all soaking wet and then roll in the sand. Usually we would make one more throw deep into the water and when he came back we would run him up to the parking lot so that he wouldn’t roll in the sand.
The worst sand-rolling incident, however, was in the summer of 2009. After rolling in the sand he got some in his ear and scratched it until it cut open, and then it became badly infected and his ear (and the side of his head) swelled up. We took him to the vet and it took a few weeks to heal!
Below are some pictures of Boomer doing his favorite activity at the beach: retrieving a ball.
Boomer also loved to dig, dig, dig!
He hung out by the trailer quite a bit, and when the sun got hot he would lie in the shade within reach of his dog bowl!
