Yesterday Athena took her very first trip to downtown Portland (who knows if she ventured downtown in her previous life, but we will assume this was the first time)! We live about a 20-25 minute drive away from downtown and decided that yesterday would be a perfect day to show Athena the sights.
We started our adventure by parking in a big fancy parking garage in the middle of downtown where Athena had her first experience in an elevator. She enjoyed peering out the window at the people below for the short 10 second ride.
Once out in the fresh air, Athena did what she does best: used her hound nose to sniff anything and everything! It wouldn't be a proper outing without an initial hound sniff.
Seeing as we didn't provide Athena with her usual morning walk, we decided to work up a sweat by walking along Portland's
Waterfront Park. Even though this new walking location provided Athena with quite a few new people, dogs, bikes, sounds, smells, and sights to take in-- she did pretty awesome! During our walk we even encountered the cutest 4 month old Pit Bull puppy that Athena couldn't resist meeting. This encounter made me giggle because it was like meeting Athena's twin. As soon as the two dogs sniffed butts, they both went into play bow action. After a couple of laughs, we contained ourselves (and our dog) and wished the new puppy owners well!
Following our walk on the waterfront, we headed back to Pioneer Square in the heart of downtown Portland. On our way, we passed some of Portland's finest establishments such as
VooDoo Doughnuts and the U of O Duck Store (we might be biased to this one, but we are raising Athena to be a hardcore Duck fan like us, so it is only fitting to have her visit the store!).
During our time spent downtown, Athena had the opportunity to meet a handful of new people in which all the greetings went well (she has shown fear towards men, so we are working on having more positive male greetings). She also practiced many of her basic commands such as "
heel" and "leave it" while in the presence of some major distractions.
We ended our downtown adventure by snapping pictures and people watching in Pioneer Square. Athena probably didn't enjoy the people watching as much as B and I did, but she was sure fixated on the many pigeons that inhabit the area. She also took some time out of her busy pigeon stalking to further stalk observe people getting food from some food carts.
Overall, we had a great time exploring downtown Portland with Athena! Although we were limited to outside activities such as walking along the waterfront and people watching in Pioneer Square, we think that this downtown experience is very dog worthy (and probably should be taken advantage of during the summer months seeing as it could be much less enjoyable in the Portland rain!). Athena started snoozing the minute she got in the car and continued her napping the whole afternoon. I would say that's reason enough to believe that she enjoyed herself =)
Check out these other dog worthy Portland adventures:
Personal Beast Pet Store,
Cartlandia Food Carts, and
Green Dog Pet Supply.
