Wow! What an experience! We just pulled into Wendover, UT for the night, after a quick doggie sprint at a local baseball field and dinner for the humans at the Peppermill. All tucked in at our hotel, we finally have some time to reminisce about this amazing weekend and experience.
Saturday, Jenny was up early to get in a walk through around 7:30am. First up was jumpers. The run wasn’t going to happen until closer to 9, so Karma slept in with the rest of the family, and Marc brought her to Jenny a little bit before the run. Our run was great, just had a slight bobble in the middle for this tricky handling sequence, Karma almost took the wrong side of the jump, but Jenny was able to redirect her and save the sequence. From there is was all downhill…we wrapped, we jumped, we weaved and screamed across the finish line. A clean run. At Nationals!
Our second run of the day wasn’t until 8:00pm! We were 6 from the bottom. However, there was a ton of spectating to do and some great vendors to get some great shopping done too. Karma got her first Paco Collar. We LOVE it. Really great workmanship and they use this burgundy leather that goes really nicely with the V coat. Karma’s collar has these pink square crystals and looks just perfect! We are going to use it as her new “outfit” for obedience and rally. Since we have Vizsla Nationals coming up, it was perfect timing on the perfect collar. In the early afternoon, we did our walk through and then WAITED, WAITED, WAITED. Very thankful to Carol Keller and Jamie Walton for sticking around to watch our run…they had both finished about 2 hours before Jenny & Karma were slated to run.
Standard was a bit of a mess. Third obstacle in, Karma and Jenny BOTH slipped. Jenny barely recovered and stayed upright. Karma however, crashed right through the jump she was approaching. Total bummer…but after 6 hours of dogs running on the dirt, it was completely packed down and slick. In fact, we saw the two handlers/dogs ahead of us slip and fall as we were waiting to get started. Not a perfect day, but that is totally okay. Without a Q on the line, Jenny tried some independent working and Karma had a beautiful teeter without Jenny babysitting. Always nice to have a victory like that in competition.
Without two clean runs going into the Hybrid round this morning, we knew we were out of the running. So we laid it all out on the course and had a fabulous Hybrid run. Most exciting though was seeing two of our good friends Michael & Gibbs and Dale and Chili make it to finals! We were so pleased for them. And thanks to the power of technology, we were able to queue it up on our screen in the car and watch them run from the road. We would have loved to stay and watch finals, but needed to get some of that 16 hour drive behind us!
We had such an amazing weekend, and were so thankful to all of our friends and family who came out to cheer us on. This was an amazing experience, and we hope to make it to Tulsa for the Championship next year!