Carmel Beach – Doggie Utopia

Let’s be honest with one another. Traveling with your dog unless they’re some kind of lobotomized pure-bred beauty, can be stressful. And if you’re hesitant to try training because your dogs, like my dogs, are probably not well-behaved. I like to think of our training style as Montessori with an Anarchist bent. And since Lola and Jackie O.’s favorite hobbies involve things like, trashcan, knocking over trashcan, eating contents of trashcan, hiding bits of foil previously used to cook salmon in the sofa (no doubt for a later snack) from the trashcan, or Jackie O.’s latest hobby…stress shedding, it can make traveling with them intense.

I’m not going to dress them up into the ultimate traveling companions. It’s often by necessity or my own neurosis the dogs end up coming with. But there are trips that make up for all of the shedding, snarling, and frightening of concierges, like our most recent one to Carmel, CA.

Carmel State Park Beach 

It’s off leash, looks like a magical fairyland, and turned both of my dogs into goofy happy fur-balls of true bliss. I understand dogs can’t smile the same way a baby might, but I’d trade your happiest kid photo for the portraits of pure puppy joy snapped while staying in Carmel. I was reduced to two words while we roamed the Northern Californian paradise, “magical” and “wow”. The beach is simply put, exquisite.