As you saw from my last post, we are in Charrette, Quebec with our good friends the Bellerives (Melanie, and her parents Renelle and Claude) and arrived on Friday early evening. We called to let them know we were close and they came up to the “sugar shack “ to turn up the heat and turn on the lights for us before we got here. Saturday we trained on their trails all the dogs, and then went in to the “big house” and had coffee – they were apologetic that they couldn’t have dinner with us Sat nite because they had arranged to have dinner with their architect and his wife so we just settled in from a long day of having problems on the road and shopping at Walmart!

Sunday we got some fence from the barn at Bellerives, and because the snow is so deep, we were able to block off the drive down to the barn with a 6 ft. section of fence and drop the dogs in groups of 4-6 (depending on who gets along with who) they had great fun running around the cabin (not as much as I thought they would go around, but then I’m not a dog!) Every day they have a giant front-end loader (one I know you would like to drive Lucas!) come up and scrape the very-uphill drive here to the sugar shack. So we have huge snow banks and waist high snow to make a perfect “yard” for the dogs to play/exercise in on the days we don’t train.

Sunday nite we walked down to the big house and rode with them up to the only restaurant in town that Claude’s brother now owns (Claude used to own it) and had dinner with Melanie, Renelle and Claude and Marce and GiGi, good friends of the Bellerives. Delightful conversation and good food – pretty funny every time I try to guess what to order from the French menu!! (funnier yet, I got French onion soup for an appetizer) Lots of talk about the Daaquam race and the trail for this weekend at St. Luc with all of the snow they have had and are getting pressed for time to make a good trail to race on.
Today (Monday) up at 8, fed dogs breakfast, then Randy oatmeal, read books and rested and noted that we have an additional guest in the sugar shack that I had heard last nite – a mouse only as big as a fur Ball!! Scratching around in the box the dog meat is thawing in near the kitchen!! Now mice are generally very scary to me……but since I had one come into our Michigan house while I was on the toilet in the bathroom and I yelled at the mouse to get out, I have developed and new sense of power over the little creatures and they seem not to bother me as much (here’s hoping I can do the same thing with snakes!) So today when we were training down at the barn Randy got some “sticky mouse traps” and we will see what we catch!
Training was good (trained all 34 dogs) and most everybody looked happy and healthy. The video I took was not great and you will have to look with a magnifying glass to see the team out in the distance down the hill – I couldn’t see well enough in the digital camera to tell what I was capturing.Sorry about the quality of the video- I know what I am looking for and can hardly see it, so I am imagining you all are going to have a really hard time!

Fed dogs and waiting to drop them again and then walk down the hill to the “big house” for a family dinner. Hadn't heard the voices of our grandkids (Ocean and Aeja) in too long and loved having a little chat with them.
Had to give a big thank you to Claude, last year when we came here they had plowed the hill, but it was so narrow that the sides of the dog truck scraped the snow banks and Randy had to cut down a tree that we kept hitting with the side of the truck. This year the drive is plenty wide and he has already cleaned it down to the ice 3 times since we have been here!! So we are having no problems driving up and down the hill.

Dinner was lovely as usual (with my favorite salad - some special seasoning and oil) and the Bellerives are perfect hosts!

Today is Tuesday and it was a "drop the dogs around the truck for fun" day - and they were much better this time, especially since we knew today which ones don't really "play well together"! Not only did we catch one "critter" (I say critter cause it doesn't look like a regular mouse, tinier and like I said before, round like a fur ball) that Randy thinks is a shrew - whatever! he was stuck and dead! also another critter found its way into the dog food bucket and couldn't get out which Randy found while we were serving breakfast to our 34 kids!

Now I am up at the house hooked in to the internet in the formal living room (nicest room I've ever been in) and doing laundry and writing to you!! Know that we are having a wonderful time and are still safe!!! Will give you an update tomorrow after training! (by the way, someone out there reading, post a comment for me to let me know if you can go back farther into the posting history than the number I limited it to pop-up when you open the blog - I want to make sure you can access all of the older blogs somehow - especially my Mom!)