Completely, utterly, totally exhausted. But also on such a high! The 2016 Vizsla Club of America National Specialty and Companion events has come to a close. After a week on the road, we’ll be headed home to Colorado tomorrow, but first a quick (ok, maybe not quick) recap of our week’s event.
Last Friday, we headed out on the road with Ginger and Heather in our annual carpool. The ride was pretty uneventful — until they dropped me off at the host hotel. Ginger and Heather were staying at a hotel close to the agility site (we are doing agility Saturday – Monday) but since Jenny is on the VCA board and part of the show committee, it is just easier to be at the host location for the entirety of the event. Anyway after dropping Jenny and Karma off, they made their way to their hotel and ended up getting a flat tire! What a pain. Luckily no one was injured and just a delay was all that had to be dealt with.
Karma totally zens out during road trips.
Saturday and Sunday we held an all-breed agility trial. On Saturday, Karma picked up a Q in Master 20” Jumpers AND a 4th place!! Coming across the country and being able to hang for a placement with the Border Collies is pretty exciting 🙂 Jenny is also in charge of the ribbons and rosettes for these events, so the days were kept super busy organizing the awards and prepping for the award ceremony. To reward our agility community for all our hard work all weekend, all the agility folks got together for dinner and some cold ones. Perfect way to end a long 3 days of hard work!
Tuesday was Obedience and Rally day. Since Karma already has her Rally Excellent title, she can enter both Rally Advanced B and Excellent B. If she qualifies 10 times in both of those events on the same day, she will earn her Rally Advanced Excellent title. It’s not a title we are going to pursue, but she picked up a QQ at last years National and this year was no different! That makes her 2nd RAE leg! In Advanced, she qualified with a 91 and in her excellent class she walked with a 85. Lol, she hates Rally, but she sucks it up once a year so we can compete in the Iron Dog Competition at Nationals. In Obedience, she earned her 2nd Beginner Novice (BN) leg with a 186.5 AND a 3rd place! Then she earned her 2nd Preferred Novice (PCD) leg with a 183.5 AND a 2nd place! Obedience and Rally day was good to us! 🙂
Wednesday would be Karma’s last day of scheduled competition. Since she has her Senior Hunter title, she is eligible to enter the Hunting Bitch class. This class is filled with very accomplished Vizslas, including Karma! Most had titles in several other venues besides hunting tests, and we were happy to be exhibiting alongside this group. However, what happened next was total icing on the cake — Jenny and Karma picked up SECOND place!! Jenny has never won a placement ribbon at Vizsla Nationals, so this was entirely too cool!
Since Karma was finished for the week and since there is a hunting test this weekend, her co-owner, Tad, took her back to Colorado to maybe work a couple birds before the test. Jenny stayed and worked the rest of the Specialty posting results to the VCA Facebook page and lending a hand where needed. Tonight, we capped off our week with the annual banquet. This was pretty fun because we were able to surprise Jamie (who is VERY hard to surprise) with The 2016 Outstanding Sportsmanship Award. And we had a champagne toast to Gunner and Heather who took Select Dog this year! This year’s trip to Kansas with it’s Wizard of Oz theme was super fun — and we are already looking forward to the 2017 event in Del Mar! 🙂
