Sun and Dogs and No Fishing
Billie and I were here this morning not passing a tracking test.
Except for the not passing, it was a very nice trip. We drove up on Saturday and stayed at a motel where they asked if Billie enjoyed her stay when I checked out. They also put us in the end room right next to the outside door, which means I avoided the 'people bursting out of their rooms while I'm walking a big dog and carrying a suitcase in a narrow hallway' issue, which, trust me, is not as much fun as it sounds. The motel itself seemed about due for some updating, but those two things made it a very nice place to stay.
We had to be at the park for the 'draw' (the order in which the entered dogs would run the tracks) by 7:30. The motel was about 20 miles or so from the park and, of course, I'd never been to the park before being it was in Illinois and the first time there'd been a tracking test there and all. So, I check out and leave shortly after 6:30 AM and there's no traffic because it's Sunday morning and apparently normal people have other things to do (what those other things are we shall discover shortly) and I make very good time and am feeling pretty good and thinking, jeez I'm going to be arriving at this test embarrassingly early.
So, I get to the main entrance to the park and there's a line of people waiting to get into the park. "What's going on," I ask the two guys at the end of the line. "The park doesn't open until 8," one of them says. "That can't be right," I tell him. "I have to be in there at 7:30." He shrugs. He is going fishing and, plus, he's the guy at the end of the line. I figure that this 8 o'clock rule can't possibly apply to me (since I seriously have to be there at 7:30) so I drive past all the guys with boats waiting in line--and there are at least 25 or 30 of them--thinking well, there has to be someone at the beginning of the line who will let me in. But when I get to the beginning of the line there is a big gate across the road and no freaking way to get in. I turn around (very carefully as there is a big, and I mean big, ditch on one side of the road plus the thirty cars with boats on the other. I tell the guy at the head of the line (who is wearing camo pants, what is that, so the fish won't see him?) that I have to be in the park at 7:30. It is clear why he is the guy at the head of the line because he tells me that there is a back way in and gives me mostly good directions for how to get there. They are only mostly good because although I get to the right road easily enough, I can't actually find the entrance. Thanks to the beauty of cell phones, though, at that point I call the test secretary and she gets me the rest of the way there.
Now, I am no longer embarrassingly early, but rather pretty much right on time. Billie and I draw the first track, which many people don't like, but which I am pretty happy with. Billie starts okay but gets drawn off about half way down the first leg and gets blown off by the judges. For anyone keeping score at home this is where she failed in the last test too.
So, fooey.
However, in tracking it helps to have alternate measures of success, since there is only perfect or failed. This weekend my alternate measures were to learn something and for Billie to have fun. It was a nice day and a nice drive out the day before. It's the first overnight trip Billie and I had been on since she started having seizures. She had a pretty good time tracking--she doesn't care from judges blowing whistles, for her it was just a new tracking field. She met new people, slept the whole way home. I got good advice from a couple of women who have trained tracking champions, ate some good food, spent some quality time outside, and had an uneventful drive home. I kept thinking I should be more disappointed about not passing, but, really, it was a pretty good weekend.