My effort towards cementing Canadian and American relations!!  The couple wanted to see if this big fluffy dog would pull a sled!!!  and he did.......after a fashion!!!  Sometimes he was headed in the wrong direction!!!!

Day 2 of L’Epiphanie was good – not great, but good!  The only problem he had was that a dog driver he passed, then she passed again and she couldn’t get away – so even though Randy had made up 2 minutes on her to catch her, our dogs and her dogs didn’t have enough left to pull away from the other team so it actually held Randy back from doing better (because there was 3 back and forth passes with stopping/slowing every time)  He had left out 2 dogs so went with 12 dogs – they hung in there pretty good considering the trail was mush by the afternoon when they ran – it did rain some the night before and made everything covered in ice but by afternoon it had softened and just made the trail really tough slugging!  The other thing (dog racers always have just one more reason why they didn’t do better………) is that our dogs were getting over a bout with some stomach flu and diarrhea – we think that prevented our really tough wheel dog Soldier from having enough energy to finish hard.  So Randy actually improved by one place and came in at 11^th!!!  And also won some money!!!!!  Being 11^th our of 17 is a big improvement over the last 5 or so years so we are ecstatic!!

We trained the dogs that didn’t race over the weekend today – and naturally because we tried to use dogs that haven’t led in forever, we had trouble getting out on the trail – it also didn’t help that Caleb is in heat and the leaders kept stopping and turning around to see her……..!!!!!  I ended up holding the dogs out on the trail while Randy went back and got Greg (who had led in the race both days) and we took off and did a nice slow getting-back-in-shape run.

Have to do less on the internet over the next 4 days cause I have used up too much data the first 3 weeks we have been in Canada!!!!!  So unless something noteworthy happens in the next couple of days, I will catch you up on Thursday!!