So long!

It has been so long since I last wrote to my blog. I've been really lazy :)

My trip out east was really fun. I arrived in Boston on Friday Nov 14th around 11pm after my takeoff was delayed due to low visibility in Boston. Then as we were backing out of the gate, the auxiliary power went out and we had to pull back in. Yay!

When I arrived in Boston I realized why I could get a car for only $17/day. The car rental agency was a 30 minute shuttle ride away from the airport! But on the bright side, having a huge bag of luggage and a dog in a crate granted me a free upgrade to a Jeep somethingorother 4x4. And I was grateful because... well you'll see later in my tale.

The weather was pretty nice when I arrived in Boston, considering it was almost midnight. About 40 degrees. I had to get to Brantford, Ontario by 1pm on Saturday so I decided to try to get to Albany, New York before crashing. With hunger gnawing at my stomach, I stopped at a McDonald's on the way. They were sold out of EVERYTHING except quarter pounders! I was outraged! How can a McDonald's be sold out of anything? It's not like they're Wendy's, who always serves fresh - not frozen- beef. Icon and I had some not-so-nice words with their cashier.

We had quarter pounders for dinner. There may have been spit on them.

It took me almost 3 hours to get to Albany (with an uncountable number of stop at toll roads. What an inefficient way of travel!). It was around 2:30 when I arrived. Luckily (this is sarcasm) the hotel had computer problems JUST as I was checking in. It took the night hotel clerk about 30 minutes to get me my room key. To make up for making me waver in half wakefulness in the reception area, the clerk offered to have coffee with me at 7am when he got off work. Thanks buddy, but NO.

At 7am I was on the road (without coffee) and had a fairly uneventful drive to Canada. At he border I was a bit worried that I'd have some trouble since my Canadian passport had been expired for a year an a half. But no worries! The only thing he asked about was why "Rent" was written on the rear window of my rental. I told him, "I don't know! It's a rental! Maybe they wanted to rent it?".

And not much later I was in Brantford!

And it snowed.

And snowed.

And snowed some more.

And I was happy for my 4x4 jeep.

But to make a long story short, it was really fun visiting my family and friends. And I got my passport renewed!

On Thursday I drove back to Boston for the Springfield cluster. It's the largest AKC trail of the year and is help indoors on dirt. It's a really well run trial and pretty nice place, although it gets really dusty after the first day. Icon didn't have the best trial of his life, going only 3/8 for the regular runs, but the majority of the mistakes were mine, not his. Ok, they were all mine :) But we did somehow manage to win both ISC Std and ISC JWW for the ISC Combined win, which was fun :).

And I got to run Soleil the Beauceron in her JWW runs. We didn't qualify in any of them, but we got really close and I had lots of fun with her!

Nancy had her RV there and I'm so glad because it was really cold some of the days. I left Icon in the car the first day, but after that I moved him to the RV. It was too loud and dusty in the building for him. It was so cute, Icon and Pinot played a couple of times. We tried to get it on video, but as soon as we turned on the video camera, they stopped playing. Border collies are so weird.

And that was my trip out east!