We never took the dogs along camping or swimming when we had a car because they would always get wet, and then smelled too "doggy" to want to have them in the car riding back home. If we had the pickup then they could ride in the back and enjoyed going along and running around at the lake. When I was a teenager; I had a wonderful Labrador Retriever who went everywhere with me, and we had a place that people could go swimming and bring along their dogs (who were not allowed at the "proper" beach). I could put the leash on him and walk across town and down to the beach to swim.
The swimming hole was appropriately named Dog Beach, and there were almost always people there with their pets in the summer. Jet loved to swim, and he also loved to retrieve. He would swim out and find a piece of driftwood, and them swim back to me with it, very proud of himself. Sometimes, he would find one of the big driftwood logs floating in the lake, and it was always funny to watch him grab a branch and try to drag it in to shore. If I were sitting on a driftwood log, then he liked to come up and sit beside me; but it was always a challenge to get him up on the log without rolling the log and dumping me off of it.
