A week in the Ardèche: becoming friends with 3 or 4 friendly local dogs

 

If you ask the boys what was best on our summer vacation, they'll probably answer the house with the dogs. If I ask further, it wasn't about the house or garden but about the dogs. Indeed the house owners possess 3 dogs. We knew there would be animals but couln't really imagine to which degree we'd interact. 

The chickens were in the back of the garden and we didn't see much. The cats are apparently shy and inhouse mostly so we only saw one once. 
But there were 3 very sweet dogs that ran a couple of times a day for a while through the garden in supervision of the owner.  And our boys were obsessed with them, constantly checking if they were outside, wondering when they'd come outside and checking with the owners where they were.   
Hence when the owners were gardening futher with the dogs around them we "lost" our boys for a couple of hours.  The dogs were definately more fun than the pool. 

There was the mother Papaya and her little fun wild pup Tigri and then the calm adopted Dolly.  And the last couple of days they were dogsitting Tigri's dad as well so then there were 4. 

So we often had some visit during our morning coffee, which we welcomed very much. 

But we also chilled a bit together at the pool now and then. 

One night we spotted the cat

When we had to leave our vacation spot after a week and said goodbye to the hosting family, this could not be done without a photoshoot with the dogs.  Lots of fun but hard to achieve.  We got some fun pictures out of it but never with all of them together. 

While in France there is also each night a program about adopting animals on tv, the boys sure were starting to dream about becoming a dog owner as well. Ahum, well, euh, rather not.  But I do miss Papaya, Dolly and Tigri,  that's true. We all miss them.  
Well maybe we'll go back there, it sure was a great place to spend our vacation!