this is driving on US 2 west - you can see the snow storm that is over the northern lower peninsula in the distance over Lake Michigan

 Pictures of Lisa Janders' Christmas room

Randy dressed in the parka we bought from Jan Shaw - ready to go out and groom trail!

I have been negligent in my reporting duties……………   It’s been a long week, Friends………

Christmas Eve was lovely going to Magnusson’s for traditional Polish food (pireogies sp? And sausages from Detroit) after we trained the 2 teams.  Sunday/Christmas we went to Jan Shaw’s for leg of lamb – I think it might have been my first time having lamb- it was delicious!! Even had some mint jelly and the gravy had cherry preserves in it!

The day after Christmas we set out for Bark River (just ½ hour west of Escanaba) to get dog meat from Greg Janders, the mink farmer.  We knew if we didn’t we would be out in 2 days--  Getting there went fine pulling the horse trailer that we moved a stand-in freezer into to store the meat (though as cold as it has been lately, the freezer would more likely be keeping it warm……).  We loaded the meat (about a ton of frozen, special mixed, meat) and had a tour of Greg’s wife’s (Lisa) Christmas room – when I say that I mean the WHOLE ROOM!!!!!  The living room was full of decorations and many many of them are moving mechanical ones!!!!  I thought I liked Christmas – she has me beat!!!

So we take off at 3:30 heading home on what should have been a 3 hour trip – we get to the east side of Escanaba and Randy pulls over on the side of the road because he is seeing smoke coming off the tires!!!!!!!!!!!!  The tire is rubbing on the inside of the wheel well because the spring broke…………Now Randy had replaced a lot of the parts on the trailer before we ever left in the fall so this (just like all of our roadside nightmares…) was totally unexpected!!  As we were limping our way to a place to fix the spring, you guessed it, the tire went flat!!!  We found a place less than a ½ mile away that said they could fix it tomorrow so we verrrrrrry sloooooowly drove there (after moving as much of the meat onto the truck as we possibly could cram in the boxes on the truck!!!) and hoped we wouldn’t wreck the wheel rim!!!  Got there and decided we may as well spend the nite – got a room at the inn……….  Went out to dinner at a steak place and had an excellent meal!  Next morning we head to the mechanic shop and at 10 am they hadn’t even looked at it.  Rand volunteered to run for parts so he took the wheel off and we drove ½ hour to buy springs and a new tire.  Get back and it is in the garage at least, but now it’s lunch time……..so we go to a log cabin restaurant that overlooks the bay and have our lunch -  we get back and it’s still another 2 hours until it is finally finished!!!  So back on the road without further problems and get home after dark – and surprisingly Jim and Denise (the owners of the place we are renting) are here for the week!!! 

So now we are already to Thursday – we train dogs with Randy on the sled (he had been on the sled for almost 2 weeks at this point – had to wait till he could comfortably put the snow hook in to stop and not have it pull out.  We we had gotten enough snow that now the snow hook would not hold!!!  So in the 17.5 mile run I had to get off the snow machine, run up to the team and fix “something” 6 times – that may not sound like much but each time was a “near disaster” with the hook not holding and the team going off on a tangent on a trail newly made by a snow machine…………plus when you are dressed to be sitting on a snow machine in 0 degree weather, you have to peel layers off just to be able to see what you are doing even if it is just untangling a dog, let alone changing out leaders……which is on of the times we stopped!!!!!  I would no more get re-dressed and caught up to Randy than he would stop again and I would start the whole process over……….  Needless to say I was not happy when we were done…….

Went in and had ham dinner with Jim and Denise and Friday again and had bean soup.

I thought that Saturday’s  training would go better because we had decided that every time he stopped we would hook the snow hook into the snow machine runner – how wrong was I!!!!!  The worst time we had to stop they were going down a totally wrong trail that we had no idea where it led and was a single snow machine track through the woods – I tried 5 times before I finally got lined up for him to put the snow hook in the runner – then we had to hook the team into the snow machine by the other snow hook, undo all their tug lines so they couldn’t pull as hard,  I led the team around 180 degrees in this narrow deep snow trail, Randy had to manhandle the snow machine 180 degrees and then I got on the machine and we got them started back to the turn and on the right trail……….I hope it sounds as exhausting and stressful as it was…………..  After that mess we decided not to even train the other team….and I didn’t find out till later that Randy had wiped out in the first quarter mile only to have the dogs stop just long enough for him to jump back on the sled!!!!!  So he was sore and had not been able to see out of his glasses for most of the trail!!!! 

Saturday nite we went to Magnusson’s for pizza – it was a thank-you for helping to put the race trail in for the Tahquamenon race next weekend – so it was all dogsledding people swapping stories!

Yesterday we trained the team we had not trained the day before and I pretty much “insisted” that we use the snow machine and not the sled…….at least until we could have confidence the hook would hold and the dogs took the right turns on command.  It isn’t as good of training for the dogs using the snow machine instead of the sled, but I needed a break from the stresss…..It went better that way but we still had to stop with problems 3 times.

For New Year’s Eve we went to Brown’s (the same family that hosted our Thanksgiving dinner) with most of the neigbors – we stayed there and stopped in to Pine Stump Junction before midnite to see if there was any dancing going on, but the music was terrible………..terrrible just for old folks like us…..  We were surprised there were only 2 snow machines there because people have been telling us that there were over 100 of them parked outside the bar!!!!  Also there were 3 or 4 accidents with them (one a fatality) in the last week – so many people up here for the snow over the holiday!

Randy is out grooming the trail and we don’t know if we want to train today or not – have to go into town at some point and get more fuel…….

Happy New Year to all!!!!