Never pet a dog who's taking himself for a walk!

We set off on what was supposed to be a 13.5 km (8.5 mile) hike yesterday at about 10:30am. The sky was overcast, but it really didn't look like it was going to rain. This hike went through several little villages in the middle of nowhere, and it was an informational trail with ten different boards to read along the way.

It wasn't nearly as strenuous as the hike we did the other day. But there was still a lot of uphill and downhill. And it started off right at the end of our street...uphill.

Looking down our street. Our building is the one right at the end.

We quickly had a nice view of the town of Terchova.

Looking left.

And right.

Many of the informational boards along the way explained about life for the villagers a hundred years ago, and we saw some houses and people who looked like they still live that way today. For example, here's a lady doing the haying! 

I bet that not many women this age would be able to keep up with her!

Just after this, at close to 1:00pm, we came across a little white dog who was taking himself for a walk. We figured he must belong to one of the local houses or people working in the fields...didn't really think much of it. He was a friendly little guy though and we did end up giving him a quick pet. 

A new friend.

This little chapel had a great view. So did the house with the nice garden!

So this little white dog walked along with us. Most of the time he was slightly ahead of us, always checking to see if we were coming. If we stopped, he came back to us. When we went up and sat down for a while at the little chapel, he came and sat with us.

He's now walked with us for about a kilometer.

He's a real sweetheart, but what do we do with him??

We kept figuring that he would head off on is own to where he lived, but he never did. In fact, two hours later he was still with us! We tried giving him away. Using sign language, we told two different families that he's not our dog and he keeps following us. One lady just laughed and shrugged her shoulders. The second guy tried to shoo him away, but he scared him off in the direction we were going and so he was there waiting for us!

It was really nice at the beginning, but this was becoming a problem. He had no collar, and we had no way to control him. And eventually we were going to get to more built up areas, and that means more traffic. 

Two hours and five kms later, he was still with us!

We tried several times to lose him. He would wander in front of us and maybe take a wrong turn, so we would quickly head off on the proper turn. Sure enough, a few minutes later he would come running up behind us!

And then we made it to a busier road. He was not traffic smart like many Mexican dogs, and made a car swerve to miss him once. Of course people were thinking we were stupid dog owners. "BUT HE'S NOT OUR DOG"!

Make a long story short, I ended up throwing rocks at him and scaring him back in the direction we came. That may sound harsh, but the only other choice I saw was to let him get hit by a car. And so the last we saw of him was standing a few hundred meters away, staring at us. Just about made us cry leaving him behind, but we didn't know what else to do.

Not a great end to what was actually a really good hike. We ended up doing 16.5 kms (10.5 miles) so I don't know where the map went wrong. It was supposed to be 13.5 kms, but maybe we did a longer section than we were supposed to.

We've done 72 kms (45 miles) over the last eight days!