Update for the last of February!

It’s been a pretty calm week – trained twice – both times bitter cold but a good trail (except for the day we trained and had to go through foot high blow-in trail because it was so windy!!)  All the dogs are looking good except for Briget (who seems to have gotten really old really fast and can’t keep up) Cool, who injured his ankle going through the deep drifts – we think- and Sidney, who just has been continually acting injured when we run him in the team and who probably won’t race this year.

We went to dinner at Melanie’s on Wednesday nite – and thoroughly enjoyed our time together – actually 4 hours!!  And they all had the annual entertain the customers event the following day (snowmachining to a resort and then ice fishing and dinner and many other fun things…………)

Thursday we trained and everybody looked good.

Left at 10 on Friday to go 1.5 hours to the next race at Pont Rouge and it took a bit longer to get there because of some blowing snow and snowy roads – had to ask where the race start was and had I spoken French I would have been able to understand that the race site was across the highway from the address given!!!  Met a little girl Gabriel and her father Guillome while we were dropping dogs for supper – he spoke limited English and she was four and none – quite cold – and windy!!

Rand y went out 6^th and had a hard race for 10 miles because his leader, Grace was just not pulling (found out later she had some fissures on her paws so that was the reason) and he came in last – the next day was not much better and he stayed last of 13 teams.

The really good news was that we got to both our long-time friends-dog-racers-but-not-doing it any more- Suzanne and Mario!!! It had been 2 years and we were happy to catch up = and also our friend from Maniwaki, Cat, was there on Sunday because she came 5 hours to see and help her friend Jean and to see her family in the region (she grew up in Quebec City so she is feeling very warm and homey)

So good weekend with getting to see old friends and then headed back to Bellerives – Randy somehow managed to catch a cold so now he’s congested and coughing – we got a call from the Canadian covid testing company telling us that we needed to contact the (we found out they never picked up the covid test they required when we crossed the border and had to perform on a virtual nurse visit……………) so we had to deal with that for an hour today and found out that Patrick, Melnie’s husband had a positive covid test and now they are quarantining  at home this week!!!  Plus we had something funky going wrong with our generator at the race and the diesel truck ----both of which have been fixed by kind friends!!!

So the plan this week is to train and then go to Claude’s race that he puts on every year in St. Luc about an hour and a half from here and then probably head home to Michigan – maybe things will change if randy doesn’ t seem to get better – he’s on all kinds of over the counter cold/cough meds and albuterol nebulizer treatments so we will see over the next 2 days!!!