Day 2 at Nicolet race

We left you at day one of the race at Nicolet – the trail was very curvy and more than one 6 dog driver and many open drivers had trouble (Jim Blair went from winning first place last weekend to being disqualified for falling twice in the first quarter mile and then losing him team this weekend).  There was a lot of the trail in fields and going down onto a river.  Randy ended up being 18^th over all for the first day.

Sunday was not as cold, but as they say “a recipe for disaster” day starting with it beginning to snow heavily at the start of the open class.  By the time Randy went out the trail was chewed up pretty good because it was slightly warmer and had snowed some.  I saw all of the other teams come in and still no Randy.  One of those moments I call being a “dogsledder widow”….. waiting and wondering for the longest time.  Finally he came in and had had problems with the dogs going off the trail and them stumbling through the deep snow (the trail had broken down into punched up slough).  We found out that he had taken just a bit more time than he was able to in order to be in the money for pay out.  Then we packed up and the truck wouldn’t start……..then Hermel went to the gas station to get more gas for the generator to heat the “house”  in case we had to spend the nite (we had already run out once the nite before because it took more gas than Randy anticipated to heat the trailer and the truck with the weather being colder and he had hitched a ride with Jim Blair to the gas station in town to get more gas).  Randy got the truck to start by jumping it with the Bellerive truck Hermel was driving and finally we got started towards back to Bellerive’s.  We got there and opened up the back of the trailer to find out that 5 dogs had gotten out in the 40 minute trip and they flew out the back like they were hit in the a… with a boot jack.  15 minutes later we had re-captured all 5 dogs and were settled in for the nite.

This morning we had a breakfast date with Melanie and Patrick at 10 and when I woke up and saw the clock said 9:30 we killed ourselves dropping the dogs and getting ready to go………..only for me to look at the phone and see that it was only 9 am not 10 (found out tonite that the clock must have been dropped yesterday when we had it outside on the truck to keep track of the time and the “little hand” doesn’t track the right time for the ½ hour times………..

So it’s been a rough trip so far and we have only been gone 2 weeks…….things have got to start going better……….right????????