Pre-Halloween Update!

Another week has flown by! We have now been here for 16 days and have trained 6 times – 3 teams of 7 or 8 and finally the dogs are acting like they know what they are supposed to do when we start harnessing – they were pretty wild especially some of the young ones and the new dogs we bought last year. Yesterday when we were hooking in the last dog in the team one of the pups from last year chewed the tug line ahead of her in half – and Randy had just replaced it the nite before!!!!!  It was like she said “oh, new line!  This will be yummy!!!”  We ran the dogs 6 miles yesterday and took them across the road to the area we usually don’t start training on until  we have maxxed out on the number of miles we can get on this side of the road.   The reason we went over there is because this is the annual rig training session put on by Bruce Magnussen and Jan Shaw – the 20^thor so I think……. And so there were about 4 or 5 other teams out training on the trails which gave us a chance to run our dogs by them and see how they behave – we did 3 head on passes and passed a truck twice so it was beneficial training and they all did pretty well, even the young dogs! Last nite we went over to Bruce’s and watched as more and more trucks and trailers with teams pulled in and we all sat around the fire sipping and eating until 9 and then Randy (who had not dressed as warm as I had encouraged him to do…..) got cold and we came home. Tonite is the big potluck and they have a speaker coming in so I will have to give report on that later.

This past week I was still recovering from the cold and it was rainy more days than not but we did manage to go to the lower Tahquamenon Falls on last Sunday and took some beautiful fall foliage pictures.  We also watched a movie at Jan’s one nite, looked for her dog, Katie, one morning when she decided to hide in her yard instead of coming back in the house like she does every other morning – we rode around on the 4 wheeler looking for her in the cold rain because we knew how upset Jan was to not find her for 2 hours! Yesterday I spent half the day looking for my new birthday earrings and my necklace and haven’t yet discovered where I put them!  Good thing it’s a small place to live!!

The trees’ leaves are beginning to fall as we are past the peak of the color season but it’s still beautiful out there!!!  Hope everyone is well and we miss you all!!!