Hope you all had a wonderful Blessed Thanksgiving day!!!

We had a great week all week!!!  Tuesday Mitzi, Keyon and the 2 kids came up to visit us for a couple of days!!  They rented a house an hour away from us - they arrived Tuesday just in time for them to go out with Grandpa and ride the snow machines watching him train a team - then we came back and they each drove a one dog team down the driveway and then I pulled them around a one mile course on the dog sled behind the snow machine!!! great fun!!!  

Later we went out to dinner in Hulbert at the restaurant we have been to before where they feed the deer herd right outside the windows next to your table -----unfortunately because of deer season they  were not allowed to feed deer so we couldn't see any................

Wednesday they came back over and Mitz rode around the trail training dogs with her dad and the kids and Keyon and I stayed back and made 7 snow people to greet Grandpa and Mom at the end of our driveway when they came back from training!!!

That nite we went over to their rental house and had an early Thanksgiving dinner!!  delicious with all the trimmings!!!

They left Thursday morning early because Keyon had to work Friday = we went to Carol and John Waltman's and had another nice turkey dinner!!!  pretty hard to stay on a diet this week!!!!

Saturday was church and we have been training every day but a little later because we have had to wait until the slush that froze overbite to thaw out a bit so the dogs didn't hurt their feet - as of today, most of our foot of snow is gone - some left on the trail  but not much!  We were training and noticed that Gear was having trouble keeping up so Randy left Gear and me on the trail side and we started walking home - she certainly pulled me hard enough she didn't appear to be injured!!!  It turned out that I walked her for 2 miles!!!  that was some exercise wearing winter boots!!!!

It must be Thanksgiving  because the lights in Newberry are on!!!!

First time to use the snow machine to train!!!

 since Thursday we have gotten even more snow (not like New York state though...............) and we were able to run the snow machine to train the dogs on sunday!!!  It was a lot less bumpy and more comfortable for me to ride on!!!  You don't feel all the holes and roots in the trail as easy!  There's about a foot of snow on the ground and enough that Randy plowed the driveway with our plow truck - 

We ate out at the Wolf Inn - which is a restaurant on the way to Newberry that has been closed for a while - once whitefish that was delicious and once nachos supreme - new owners and management and the menu is good!!

Monday we started out at 6 am to drive to Detroit for the funeral service of Bill's (our son-in-law, Amy's husband) mother.  We expected that it would take 6 hours and that's what it was - got there in time to have some family visiting time, stayed for the service and then drove back home to feed dogs at 10p!!  The roads were good all the way except for the 1/2 hour drive from our house to Newberry and we used 4 wheel drive on the truck!

the angry straits of Mackinac - it's usually pretty calm but the winds were from the right direction today to make white caps and 3 foot waves!

Coming back across the bridge tonite - less wind and pretty with the bridged lighted for the holidays!

Tomorrow Mitzi and her family are here for for a couple of days so the kids will be able to see how training dogs goes and maybe some winter fun activities!!!  Have to take some good pictures!!!

Maybe winter is here to stay................???

 

the buck pole in front of the American Legion in downtown Newberry - some nice racks there!!

Picture from training in the part of the woods trail the locals all call "Narnia"!!!  10 dogs on a 12 dog line

 the last weeks has gone by fast --  Saturday nite, church then Sunday training 1 team and the 7 month old pups and dinner at Jan's with Waltman's;  Monday training both 10 dog teams knowing that we would not train the next day because of opening day of deer season ( Grandma managed to slip on the snowy step of the 4 wheeler getting on to start and got run over by the wheel so we are working hard on the lyrics to a brand new Christmas favorite, "Grandma Got Run Over by the Dog Team"); dinner at Waltman's on Tuesday nite after a trip into town; Tuesday no training because of hunters in the wood (though there are not many hunters or deer around here!!) and finally Wednesday with no training and another trip into town because the pull cord on one of the 2 the snowmachines we just got from trading our 2003 Harley in September!

I have finally conceded that it's time to take the Halloween decorations down because today I wrapped Christmas presents and watched "White Christmas" (until Randy came back in the house and nixed it!!!)

Tomorrow we plan to train one team as we are supposed to be out in the woods only from 11 to 2 - that leaves us just about enough time to hook up and go the 18 miles we are planning!!!

I have tried to get the movie to work that I took the last time we trained, but it doesn't seem to want to play once I have it downloaded into the blog - any suggestions??

Will let you know how tomorrow's training goes!!

IT'S JUST NOT GETTING COLD!!!

 

Let me please introduce, Rosie the Robot!!!!  she is new at the Pine Stump Junction bar!!!  She is just settling in there and actually they are having a naming contest, so for me to call her Rosie is just a throw-back to the Jetson's and their housekeep "Rosie"  we didn't see her in action tonite when we went to dinner with Laura and Bruce (they were not very busy so the waitress said she hadn't even had to "warm her up" and use her today!!  Mostly she delivers orders and picks up the dirty dishes...........pretty amazing to see out here in the wilderness!!!!  They purchase her because they can be swamped at peak times for snow machines and side by side/4 wheeler seasons!!!

It's a little difficult to pick out the actual reason for the picture from all the decorations, but this is what it looks like to be out of power and wanting to plug in and run as many electrical things as possible in a power outage!!! (tv, internet, computer, microwave, lights, fan for the furnace, etc..............)

Good last couple of days of training before it gets too warm and rains for a couple of days - ran 2 teams yesterday 14 miles and decided that it had been far enough for the 7 month old pups to keep training - they are doing super good but we don't want to go to far for "developing" bodies - even though 2 of them are bigger that most of the 20 adult dogs we have!!!  So yesterday we only hooked up 2 10 dog teams and it was incredible how much less work it seemed!!!   You would never imagine just running 5 dogs less would make a big difference but it really does!!!  especially not having to harness Marble, who is like harnessing and octopus!!!

So today we thought it was going to warm up too fast and be raining when we could train in the cooler morning - so I am just to about to get into the shower and Randy changes his mind and says lets go train.....so I start getting dressed...........then it starts pouring.........then we're not training...........so I'm almost in the shower...........and were going to train..............then it starts raining again..........finally we did not - instead I vacuumed and made chocolate chip keto cookies for Randy and we went out to dinner!!!  Not much planned for the next couple days but we will see how the weather is and may be training ======  only 11 weeks until the Stage Stop race in Wyoming!!!!

Speaking of that and indecisiveness..........Randy said yesterday that maybe the price of fuel is going to be too high to travel up to Alaska this year, even though it will be the 25th anniversary of us getting married there!!!  so we shall see............

Back again!!!

First off I am going to show you some pictures from our time up in the UP so far this year............

Rainbow that we say last nite getting gas in Newberry after church - and then the storm came that has left us without power for the last 24 hours!!!  Thankfully Randy is a wizard at connecting the generator to multiple cords so we have all the essentials.........heat, microwave and tv and computer!!!!

My first of three pumpkins to be carved this year - I was trying for a scary face!!!  the flowers we got on Halloween and there is a spider and web decoration in the bouquet!!

this little guy was parked in town when we went into the lot for the senior center - we had stopped for me to shop for material to make this year's Christmas ornaments!!!  The guy that owns it had gotten it in Wisconsin for $400 and drove it back to Newberry for the kid's Halloween party at the community center - he was going to make a haunted trail and the kids would have to walk through the legs of the skeleton!!

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Some of the beautiful color up here............sadly every bit of color is gone now!!!

my Halloween decorated arrangement outside our back door-- see the ghosts hanging? more to come on them............

 scene from one of the lakes that we run by training the dogs

the poor dead bodies of my ghosts retrieved from the garage where a red squirrel brutally ripped them from my decoration tree and dragged them across the floor and left them in shreds!!!!!!!  who knew a red squirrel would climb up that tree to grab my ghosts to use for bedding!!!???  the next day I sprayed them with bleach and there were no more murders!!!!

Well we arrived here at Deer Park in the beginning of October - so far the training has been pretty good - I think we have only missed about 4 days of training due to the weather - there was a time in the beginning that we were trying to do each dog 2 days on and 1 day off but with the warm weather it hasn't 't been that easy - actually pretty hard to do just every other day..........but we are happy

The big training session was last weekend = there we're about 16 teams here to train and both saturday and sunday we left from our side of the road first to train so we met every team head on coming back!!!!  In retrospect, it was a bit much for the puppies that we are running in the team = they were intmidated by the other dogs but eventually got over it and went by fine -  there were probably 40 people there for the pot luck in Bruce and Laura's pole barn and the speaker was a vet from Colorado and she did a great job of doing a preliminary and secondary physical exam of dogs when they have come back from a run to check for injuries

We haven't spent any time sight seeing and have gone to Marquette once for dog medicine and once to Escababa to get dog meat.

When I think of more I will tell you in the next post!!!