On to Quebec!!!!!!!!

Over the last few days we have gotten some info to lead us to the decision to go to Quebec - the Rondy had been formally cancelled, the snow here is a bit iffy and Melanie Bellerive told us that the postponed trail for St. Luc (their race) is on for this weekend and the trail is good - plus there are 3 more scheduled to run in Quebec.

To give an update of the last week or so.............went to the race in Kalkaska and did open and 6 dog - the 3 year old leader in the open seemed overwhelmed with the soft snow (probably comparing it in her head to the beautiful trail she had been training on....) and didn't perform nearly as good as she had been in training - plus some problems on the trail with the driver that went out first in the unlimited and then caused an emergency call to all the trail help to gather at the trouble spot and then prompted the trail judge to call all the drivers in the open and 10 dog to come in to the finish line, causing almost all of the drivers to be short mileage wise from the drivers who went out first...sooooo the whole day for that class go thrown out.  not a great day for us anywho, but we couldn't really tell how we compared to the rest of the teams because they had not done the longer mileage.  On Sunday we tried another leader in her place and she didn't do any better.  Still soft trail and hard for the dogs to go through.  The really bright spot in the weekend is that Randy also had trouble with the leaders in the 6 dog team and so he changed out at the last minute an old leader for a 1 year old that had only lead in training one time (I suggested we try him in training because three times this training season he had left the free drop dogs at the truck after training and run the whole trail again by himself!!!!) and he did fabulous leading in the first race of his life!!!!!

We had sad news this weekend- Keith Bryar passed over on Saturday nite after gallantly battling cancer for several years - he has been a long time dogsledding friend of Randy's and with his absence, we will miss years and years of his experiences and those of his famous dogsledding parents.  We happened to be racing with his sister Danae and her 2 daughters at Kalkaska - everyone at the race was devastated and remembering the times Keith had been Keith....

Tomorrow we make the decision aobut whether we want to miss the big snow storm approaching the southern part of the Michigan mitt by going ahead of it (I am leaning towards following....) or staying and trying to train on our trail if the snow comes early enough tomorrow on Wednesday and leave Thursday (cause it takes us about a day and 1/2 to get to Trois Rivieres)

bought a new infrared heater so we will have 2 in the house while we are gone to heat without the wood stove running - we have in the past just had one in the back laundry room but maybe this year we won't have to drain all the pipes and worry about frozen and bursting pipes (thank you again Mark Kukal!!)

more tomorrow when we decide when to leave!!