Thursday, January 26

We managed to get to Charette , Quebec with only 2 wrong turns this time!!  It is quite like home to pull into our friends place and park.  Everyone is still at the race and will be until at least late tonite.  We ran into a little rain on the way but the roads were good for the most part.  We came through Montreal a northern route that we usually don’t take and managed to avoid a lot of the bad stop and go traffic of people leaving the city at 5 or so. 

Woke up and fed dogs just as the front end loader from the Bellerive’s business was coming to plow all of the parking lot around the barn.  We moved so he could plow the 3 inches of snow we got last nite and then fed the dogs breakfast.  We wanted to be able to train and see if anybody was hurt from the race Tuesday so we hopped on the 4 wheeler with bulldozer tracks and tried to find the trail the Bellerive’s train on.  It was pretty hard to see with the new snow and blowing and we did have a trouble pulling the tires up one of the hills cause it was too deep (scratched that part of the training trail….)  After going over all of it 4 times we got out the snowmobile so that I could be sure to hit the right corners to lead our dogs training and went over the whole thing another 3 times.  Hooked up a 10 and 9 dog team and found that our leader, Spark, has a fissure in the palm of his foot – so don’t think he will run in lead this weekend.  The rest looked good!!!  3 o’clock and the major part of the work day is done so we looked up the race results from yesterday and found that Claude Bellerive is in 2^nd after having a bad day yesterday and that Melanie won!!!!!!  In the 6 dog class!!  So we are very happy for them and are thinking about Claude as he is on the trail as I write this!  Plan to pack up and leave for the Friday night meeting at the race site sometime late afternoon tomorrow.  Check in later!