This past weekend was both really fun and stressful for Kaiju. We took him to fun places. We also took him to where we knew he wouldn’t do so well.

The visit to my workplace on Saturday was the first of those iffy places for Kaiju. There was nobody there, though, and although he clearly would have rather not been there, the visit was brief (all I needed to do there was to pick up something I forgot on Friday) and he did not have any freak-outs.

Fido Factor iPhone app then helped us find the near-by dog-friendly state park to visit. The place was great. There was no fenced-in area, but the open field was far away enough from any streets that we felt okay about letting Kaiju off-leash to play with dogs. Kaiju loves dogs and sticks to them, so when they are there, we don’t feel too nervous. Kaiju was a very happy camper.

On Sunday, we watched Kaiju play with Pudding the Shiba and other dogs at the dog park in the morning. Perhaps because of the more pleasant temperature, Kaiju played for a long time and more constantly than usual.

That afternoon, we ventured out to MSPCA Walk for Animals at Boston Common. We knew the location of this park was not Kaiju-friendly. It’s in the middle of the city. However, the park itself is quite large, and the event was only taking up some of its space. We had a lot of space to move away to. There would be a lot of dogs, also, and it might perk him up, we thought.

Well, we were wrong. We were not at all able to approach the event. Every time we tried, he plopped down in the grass, and refused to move. Other dogs didn’t really matter to him. We soon found ourselves quite far from the event tents, sitting and listening to the voices from the speakers, for a long time.

We found out later that there was at least one Shiba representing well at the event. 🙂 Check out the album of the event by the local (really awesome) photographer, Jay Stebbins. Yay Shiba.

When we were leaving, unfortunately, there was a big (for Kaiju) surge of people around the exit area. It wasn’t a good situation for Kaiju. He crouched down so low that his belly was basically touching the pavement. And he couldn’t move anymore to any directions. We ended up carrying him because that felt like the only way to get him out of there quickly.

Boston Garden, across the street, was much less chaotic. We gave Kaiju a chance to regroup by roaming around on the peripheral. His tail never went back to a full curl, but he was no longer frozen nor frantic. Still, he jumped into the car so fast when we opened the door for him that we felt pretty crappy about how the whole thing turned out. 🙁