My coworker and I took a walk on Friday during our lunch break. Accompanying us was her dog, Emma, a beautiful Golden Retriever and fountain aficionado.

This campus is covered in fountains, and we hit a fair number of them on our walk. We started with the fountain at the bookstore, which attracted the attention of tourists who snapped Emma’s picture as she tossed her ball around in the water.

After the bookstore fountain, we walked for a bit before moving on to another fountain that Emma eventually rejected, probably due to its small size.

After all, why bother with a small fountain when you could roll around freely in a huge field of grass?

Another fountain down the way was set up as a sort of water corridor. Emma happily traipsed along the man-made stream until reaching the fountain at its end, where she promptly dropped her ball so she could better inspect the miniature geysers spouting from the center.

The fountain below wassupposed to be the last fountain we visited on our walk, but the water was so gnarly (check out the bright green color and the algae growth) and Emma dove SO deep into it that my coworker suggested we stop by another, cleaner fountain to give Emma a chance to clean off.

Can you believe that water? And there was a student dangling her feet in it. ICK.

So we stopped once more, at a fountain that was nice and clean, which Emma loved, until my coworker tried to splash her to get some of the icky green water off her. Then it was immediately, “NO I DID NOT SIGN UP FOR THIS, GET ME OUT OF HERE.”

Thus concluded our walk.

Dan and I had already been talking about teaching our dogs to swim, but this outing with Emma made me really crave a space where we could safely do that. Dan’s parents’ house is hard, because even though they have a pool, they also have other dogs and a grandbaby that we’d have to contend with. I’ve also looked into the local lakes, and while Quarry Lakes allows swimming, it’s only for humans, not dogs. Lake Elizabeth doesn’t let anyone in the water, and I’m not really interested in taking Nix and Leela to a huge off-leash dog park like Pt. Isabel or Ft. Funston where they can go swimming but will be more likely to get into a fight with another dog over some random piece of driftwood they’ve decided is THEIRS.

Maybe a visit to the campus fountains (the clean ones, anyway) is in order.