A day at the Park

The Pacific Northwest has an extremely dog-friendly culture. I imagine it's just an urban legend, but I've heard a number of different people say that the city of Seattle has a larger population of dogs than of children. One of things that I loved about visiting either Seattle or Portland was the large number of dog parks. Some were huge, like the one at Magnuson Park in Seattle where the picture on the left was taken, but a lot of them were in small sections of neighborhood parks.

Kansas City has a long way to go before being as dog-friendly as Seattle. There are a couple of large dog parks a long way out in the suburbs. Before I found a job, I took Leo out to Heritage Park and to Shawnee Mission Park quite a bit. He could swim at both places, but because there are so few other parks, they both are usually crowded. That's probably fine for most dogs, but Leo doesn't like to play with other dogs if there is a tennis ball around. He gets along with other dogs just fine, but doesn't think they are nearly as much fun as a human throwing a ball for him.

Today we went to Penn Valley Park, which is right next to the World War One Memorial. From the Memorial, there is a great view of downtown. By the way, I knew John McCain was going to be in town today, but did not know that part of his itinerary was taking a tour of the Memorial. A CNN camera crew was the only evidence that he had been there earlier in the day.


The dog park at Penn Valley is fine. There is not any place to swim, but it does have both large open areas and shady areas with a couple of picnic tables. Dog owners in Kansas City don't do a great job of cleaning up after their dogs, but today the park was in much better shape than it was the last time we visited.

There was a couple at the park today with their pair of bull terriers. They (the terriers, not the couple) had a great time chasing Leo, who was chasing his tennis ball. He is still not in very good shape, judging by the number and length of the breaks Leo took, but he's getting there. You can see all of the pictures from the park on flickr. But I think the picture below from when we got home shows that it was a successful trip!