Raising Markus is the series where we share stories about our time raising Markus. Said to be aggressive and having gone unadopted for over a year, Raising Markus is the story of a rescued dog from Korea given a second opportunity, now in Vancouver, Canada. This series will include the lessons, joys and struggles of dog owners fumbling our way through our first adoption. The hope is that if you're considering rescuing a dog of your own, our stories are useful to you.

From the last update, we took Markus on a walk around Vancouver for the Vancouver Mural Festival, we lost something of Markus' that someone kindly brought back to us and we visited Ambleside beach.

The Vancouver Mural Festival

The Vancouver Mural Festival is an annual event that is a (roughly) hour-long walk around the neighbourhoods of Vancouver to see beautiful displays of public art. Painted on the walls of buildings, the tour of these murals are free and it's a fun way to spend an afternoon.

Along the tour, there are clusters of booths for food and drinks. There was even one that was a dedicated beer garden. Wherever you choose to start, it's worth making your way over to Main St. where there are more booths and festivities happening along the entire street. Sections of Main Street are closed for this event and it draws a lot of people.

If your dog is reactive and not great with crowds, it's perhaps not the best to take your dog down Main Street. If you're there to see the murals, each individual mural at a time really isn't that busy. The setting of each mural is different, but they generally have enough space for dogs to move around.

The Good Samaritan

A few weeks ago on a walk around a friend's neighbourhood, we lost Markus' SMASHpaw tag. We're not sure when it happened, but by process of elimination, we knew it happened during this walk. The unfortunate thing was that the walk itself was pretty long, so retracing the entire thing to find a little piece of metal was going to be tough. We brought Markus with us so we could at least make a walk out of it.

Part of the reason we tried to find the tag was because we had a pretty nice one and we didn't want to lose it. If you've been following us, you'll recall that we got our tags a few months ago from SMASHpaw. These tags are a thing of beauty and they're made to last. The only way we were ever going to have to get a new one was, in a case like this, if we had lost it.

After retracing the entire walk, we weren't able to find the tag, so we ended up ordering another one from SMASHpaw, but that wasn't the only thing that was lost. Attached to the tag was Markus' dog license and we needed to get a new one. This was a bit of a longer process to cancel the existing number and get a new one.

Normally, this is something you can do online but since we were going to be out of town for the weekend, we wanted to have something done before we left for our trip. To get the tag quickly (usually the tag is mailed out) and because of their hours, we had to go out of way during the work day to process everything in-person. Oh, well.

It's been a few weeks since that happened and since then, we've already received our new SMASHpaw dog tag in the mail and have been wearing it proudly.

Randomly on one of these days, I received a text on my phone from someone who had come across the tag and would like to return it to us. Turns out they were on a walk and saw the tag on the ground. Picking it up, they saw my phone number on the back of the dog tag and reached out to us via text and asked how they might be able to return it to us. We got in touch with them and they kindly returned the tag to our friend's mailbox!

In true Good Samaritan fashion, I assume that a lot people must have walked by this tag and didn't give it a second thought since it's been so many weeks. We really appreciated this individual for stopping to pick it up and then going the extra mile to not only contact us, but drop it off too. We left them a gift for their generosity and now we're the owners of two SMASHpaw tags!

Ambleside Beach

Since the weather has been incredible the past little while, we made a visit to one of our favourite beaches in the Vancouver area: Ambleside Beach. 

Ambleside's a bit far for us normally, but it is one of those places we have always enjoyed going and spending some hours. This was the first time we were coming here with Markus and we managed to take a nice long walk in the sun from Ambleside Beach all the way to the Park Royal area.

If you wanted to follow along, we mapped our walk along Ambleside Beach.

We’re so grateful for your support of The Markus Project. We mostly choose our locations through searching and word of mouth. If you know of a park, trail or location you think we should check out, please share it with us. We’d love to know!