The trip to Van Nuys

I left this morning at 3:30 am, according to schedule. The trip was pretty uneventful and wasn't bad at all. I listnened to the radio, a bit of an audiocd and sms'd with caroline and debbie a bit. I arrived at about ten minutes after 8, which was 50 minutes ahead of schedule. Along with that, I didn't even RUN until after 11! All 4 of my runs were between 11:30 and noon, I think. So I really could have left at 5:30 or 6am instead. But I would have been worried about missing my runs the entire way there so it's ok.

I was expecting Icon to go first in std since it was tall to small, but it turned out that 24 was before 26" and Apollo was the first of the 24" dogs. Apollo was very naughty on his standard run. He didn't stop on the dogwalk OR the aframe. I let him get away with it both times (aside from a "bad dog" comment) but then he dropped a bar during a pinwheel at the end of the course. She might have also called us for touching after the a-frame since Polly ran straight into me. Tomorrow I will pull him or down him or something if he doesn't stop. I need to nip this little problem in the bud! We seem to get this problem after we do a lot of USDAA. I guess I tend to push him more.

Icon was next in the standard ring and he did a good job. I held his contacts for a fair amount of time thanks to Polly. The course was really close so it was hard to keep a healthy distance from him. both our dogwalk and aframe were ok speeds if I recall correctly. I was able to get in a tricky front cross after the chute, which was nice, but I probably should have rear crossed it for the experience.

Apollo was naughty once again in JWW by not staying at the startline. But we did manage to pull it together for a Q. He placed 3rd and got 12 points.

Icon had a really nice JWW run. There were a lot of turns were dogs were going wide and I was able to keep him tight in those sections and he even COLLECTED for me at least twice! So that was double Q 13 and he got 44+34=78 for those runs.

We were done running by noon and I didn't want to get to the motel until at least 2 pm since checkin is at 3. So I just kind of hung out for a while. I took the dogs over to the cricket field to let them run around a bit. At one point Polly found an apparently dead rat on the ground. It was laying on its back with its feed up in the air. Polly sniffed it and as soon as his nose touched it started wriggling. Ick. Luckily the dogs left it alone when I said "leave it".

Once I got to the hotel I realized that they have wifi here now. Yay! So I was able to update my blog. Yay!

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Courses from the day

Std


JWW