Mental health days are good for the soul....

I took a few days to enjoy the nice weather and company of my friend Laurie from Oceanside. We hiked 3 days in a row, went geocaching, ate, and just hung out. It makes me realize I need to do this more often!

On Sunday, we went hiking for a few miles at Rattlesnake Bar in Loomis and found 7 geocaches. On Monday, we went for a hike on the trails by the American River with our other friend, Pam, and dogs. There are family ties between every dog in this picture. (From L to R, Hope, Kane, Toddy (on the log), and Linar.)

Let's see here are the family ties: Toddy is Hope's mother, Linar is Kane's mother, Toddy is Kane's grandma, Hope is Kane's aunt (his dad Pryde is Hope's half brother from one of Toddy's litters); and Hope's dad Hanford is Linar's grandfather....those CCI lines cross everywhere!

On Tuesday, we went for a hike in Cronan Ranch and found a bunch of caches there too. I invited our friend Patti and her dog Maggie to join us as she also geocaches. We hiked over 5 miles and found 12 caches (Patti and Laurie found 14, as I already found a couple of ones they found that day). Patti hit her 1500th cache that day! I'm closing in on 1000! Woohoo. Maggie is also a Lend a Heart dog, so we have done several pet therapy visits with her over the past several months.

Patti aka, "Wetpaws" and Maggie...

Hope and I on the stoop...

Happy porch dogs!

The nice part of this hike is we hit the American River about halfway through the hike, so we stopped for a snack and let the dogs swim. Maggie is much faster and stronger swimmer than Hope!

It really felt good to get out there and be "active" again! Thanks Laurie for the excuse to take a few mental health days off from work!