Another drab Sunday so another consult with Mission:Explore from the Geography Collective and mission number #ME0016 was selected.

“You are now a dog.

Let a dog take you for a walk and then think about how you sensed the world differently.”

We put our trusty hound, Harri, on a long lead and followed where her nose took us. Harriett is very much creature of habit and took us on one of her regular walks.

(If she excapes from the garden she doesn’t go anywhere near this route so it must be a habit induced by the wearing of a lead.)

She led us through the village, past the church and down on to farmland where she knows she can get off the lead and have a good run, and maybe chase a rabbit or two.

Walking through the village and Boy Wonder was watching the dog, sniffing what she was sniffing…

(That’s a leaf not a dog bomb.)

Viewing the world from doggy-height…

Sticking his head into holes that the dog had stuck her head into…

And listening out for the sounds we think the dog might be intersted in. On a fairly typical Sunday in the village we could hear planes overhead (no ash-cloud this weekend!), birds and shooting. As we walked down into the fields the shooting became louder and the dog was clearly excited by the noise, running back and forth and joining in with the occassional barks coming from the shooting party dogs.

Usually the walks are a chance to catch up with what has happened over the school week, general chit-chat and watch the red kites overhead. Being a dog for an hour brought the focus back down to earth, even in the earth occassionally.

Boy Wonder would have taken his new dog status further but I drew the line at letting him get in the drainage ditch with the dog - she smelt bad enough, I didn’t need him stinking us out as well!

ME0016a isn’t getting much enthusiasm from Boy Wonder - draw the dog that took you for a walk. I’ll wait until it’s too wet to go out and see if I can get him drawing.

With two missions complete we are really enjoying using Mission:Explore to give our weekends a slightly different focus (Mission:Explore by The Geography Collective is available from Amazon). “Let’s go on a Mission” gets a much more positive response than “Let’s walk the dog” and once Small has recovered from Chicken Pox our mission team will be back up to three.