I wish I could take my dog for a walk and come back feeling exercised and relaxed. Instead, I came back today feeling like I'd just fought my way through London at rush-hour. There aren't many decent places to walk a dog around here that are within easy walking distance, so it's a long trek before the 'walk' can even begin, and my dog stops every few metres to sniff the pavement and pulls me back to get smells that she missed until I get her to open ground, which means it's 2 steps forward and 1 step back for the first 20-30 minutes of any walk, with my spine being twisted by her pulling me as she stops.
I tried to take her somewhere a bit different today, but it took a while before I found a route through the winding rows of houses to some open fields, and walked along a river bank for a while before being forced back to the busy main road by more houses. Then, I took her across an empty field in another direction, but a farmer pulled up on the track beside me and asked me to get off his land. I went back to the road, which didn't even have a pavement and put up with the noise and fumes from the cars streaming past until I reached a quiet road that wound up through some farms to a village/collection of houses and flats a few miles up the road, but there still wasn't anywhere decent to walk, so I made my way back home by a different route, but one which also forced me to walk beside roaring traffic and breathe fumes for most of the way.
