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The Louisiana Agility Adventure (long)
The first thing you need to know about driving from Central Missouri to
Northern Louisiana is that it's a damn long trip. And it's even longer if you have a brain fart, get on the wrong road south, and go 100 miles out of your way. Nothing like turning a 10+ hour drive into an 11.5 hour drive, almost all on 2 lane because neither Missouri nor Arkansas seems to allow 4-lane highways to run North and South, only East and West. The second thing is that Southern Arkansas is, well, UGLY. Not just a bit plain, but UGLY. Flat, poor, trashy, and it stinks from all of the paper mills. From what I could see, Southern Arkansas is apparently pine forests, with a few peanut farmers thrown in. The Big Three in Arkansas are Sonic, KFC, and Western Sizzlin, (over 80 items on the buffet!) You'd drive along to a teeny little town and there wouldn't be a gas station but the Big Three were there every time. Arkansans also really like naming things after their towns. So in Pine Bluff, you can find the Pine Bluff mortuary, the Pine Bluff bank, the Pine Bluff hardware store, the Pine Bluff tattoo parlor, the Pine Bluff Nissan dealership, and Pine Bluff park. Apparently residents have difficulty remembering where they live. And they have a big THING about not driving on the road shoulders. There were literally signs every 3 miles telling us we couldn't drive on the shoulder. Why do we need to be reminded that often? How short IS their attention span?? Northern Louisiana is marginally prettier than Arkansas. Still flat and still stinks from industry or paper mills or whatever, but there's spanish moss, live oaks, and huge magnolias. There are also mosquitoes the size of housecats. Honest to pete, the mosquitoes there are literally a half inch from nose to tail. You don't swat them, you knock them off you and stomp them dead. Oh, and don't forget the fire ants. Viva got bitten badly on her left foot Friday and I had to soak it in benadryl gel 4 times a day for the rest of the weekend. The agility facility was great--an indoor dirt/clay floor arena with air conditioning and high permanent stadium seating--super for observation. They certainly LOVE air conditioning there--the ambient temperature was just a hair above meat locker. We all froze our butts off but the dogs loved it. Good judges, good clubs, but I was surprised by some stuff. The weave poles were all dinky handmade rebar. Flimsy, and the poles all stuck up at slightly different angles. Cala kept getting tangled in them and even Viva missed a Jumpers Q yesterday after she got hung then off stride and skipped one. She hasn't missed a center pole for 2 years. All of the equipment was good quality but looked like it had seen better days. I think it would have helped if they had actually scrubbed it; the obstacles were dirty enough that it was almost difficult to tell the contact zones from the rest of the obstacle. The clubs refused to use electronic timers because "they're too expensive." This also didn't make a lot of sense to me. You've got a 4-day 600 run per day trial here. That means a gross of $36,000--and you can't spend enough money for a decent set of weave poles or a $1,500 set of timers? For that matter, there was a big group down from St. Louis (home of signature gear), they probably could have rented timers and brought them down, which is very reasonable to do. Viva and I are in our typical pattern, which is basically that we almost never Q. She only had 2 jumpers Qs all weekend. No standard. Right now I'm in a funk about it. I'll get over it, but sometimes I need to grump. I really wanted to at least have the *chance* to go to Florida this year, but it takes 4 DQs and with no more trials until September and only 1 in the bag, it's not looking likely. Cala, OTOH, is coming along nicely. She's still very green, but she finished her NA in 3 straight runs, got a second JWW leg, and nailed and held her contacts ALL weekend. Her contacts were the talk of the trial. I've got a picture coming--it's a great one showing her on the aframe. I blew a titling run in Jumpers with her yesterday because I thought she had missed a weave pole on her first pass through so tried to pull her to do it again--and she took 2 jumps and a tunnel on the way back. Turns out the judge told me she hadn't seen her miss one. If I'd just gone on she would have been clean and finished the NAJ. But she's not at all ready for Open yet, so it doesn't really matter. I'm keeping her in Novice until she can run without refusals and wrong courses, so probably all of September, depending on how things look maturity wise at that point. Then I'll move her up to Open on both sides at the same time. Overall a good weekend. Unfortunately in our delirium of exhaustion we took a wrong turn AGAIN on the way home and the return trip ended up taking over 12 hours. I'm whipped. Glad to be back in a place with normal-sized mosquitoes, rolling hills, and people who use real luggage instead of trash bags when they travel. |
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