It occurs to me that, although I have often posted pictures of my daily early morning walk in Duthie Park, I have never presented readers with a proper, dog-relevant guide.
A map of the park is posted at the various entry points to the park - see below - and for a leaflet published by the City Council you can click here, but I do feel that important information is missing in the official documentation, and I shall try in this post to fill in the gaps.
Here I am at the park entrance, a five minute walk from our house. This is the place where Gail lets me off the lead. The rules state that dogs in the park should be kept 'on a lead or under close control' but early in the morning, when you only see other dog walkers and the odd runner or cyclist, and no children are present, the 'close control' thing is liberally interpreted...
First stop is the gate to a closed off area behind the café. Every day I check this out, hoping that, as happened on one glorious instance last year, the gate has been left open and I might chance upon a trolley left unattended by a delivery man and laden with accessible sausage rolls and chicken sandwiches... One doesn't readily forget such episodes.
Next I move on to the decking area outside the café. It's true that any tasty foodables dropped by the previous day's customers have usually been cleaned out by our resident overweight seagull population, but on occasion one can still get lucky.
Now it's time to scan the large grass area around the bandstand, as this is where other dogs play fetch, and ball-stealing opportunities abound. (We've covered this topic in a previous post).
If nothing's doing on the ball front I trot over to the rhododendron bushes, through which I take a short cut and patiently wait for Gail while she walks the long way round the path.
And here we are now by the boating lake. Although I have only once, when a reckless puppy, actually jumped in, I do like to wander along the rim and see the slightly nervous look on Gail's face.
When I tire of that, I divert into the secluded stone shelter where the variety of interesting smells are always worth investigating.
Close by this is a lovely boggy 'wetland area' which, for some reason, Gail disapproves of me running across.
Finally, just before leaving, we pass the children's play area. Although it's unfenced, dogs are not supposed to go in here. These days I generally obey, although I did once have fun hiding from Gail under wee house on the left and refusing to come out...
There are, of course, lots more places in Duthie Park to tell you about, but these can wait for another day.
PS from Gail: I want to apologise on Nobby's behalf to the poor quality of some of these photos. I now finally have a diagnosis for the ongoing problem with my phone camera and am trying to decide whether or not it's worth getting it fixed or just biting the bullet and buying a new phone.
