The rest of the week in Scotland

After drowning in the mud at the weekend we bravely stayed on for a few more days at the show site. I had thought this would be an ideal way of being able to check out some more of Scotland while keeping the dogs at a dog friendly location. It was nice not to have to move the caravan to another site and to be able to leave up the garden for the dogs.


This photo shows Pax hanging out in the caravan garden on her new bed. This was one of the few moments of sunshine.

Mainly Dennis wanted to golf and I wanted to do some nice walks in the countryside. We didn't do much of either because of the rain! Luckily Dennis did meet up with a friend on one day and actually had some sun while golfing.

Here was a house on one of the holes on the golf course in Coldstream. Dennis thought I would like to live in this house especially as it has a red front door (my favorite) and had lots of land and no neighbors! Yeah! I told him to buy it for our holiday home but he just laughed. I wonder why?

We did go on one nice walk. Dennis was cranky at the start due to the weather but cheered up as we went on. The views were hazy but still so pretty. We were walking around the Eildon Hills near Melrose in Scotland.

Along the walk the mud was a lovely red colour which showed up lovely on the shelties white feet! To make matters worse Zen decided to roll in something that did not smell very good. It smelt worse than fox poo and Dennis thought it may have been deer poo. UGHHH! I have never smelt anything so bad Notice how Hex and Pax will not sit next to smelly Zen...

So after the walk we went into town to find Dog Shampoo! When we got back to the campsite we had to fully bathe Zen with an outside tap (brrrrrrr) . There was no way Zen was coming in the caravan smelling like that.

Along with the camping we had 2 hours of agility training on site each day with a local trainer called Peter Elms. Although I had no idea what Peter was like but I figured what the heck.. we could always use some time on different equipment. I am pretty confident about my training and am careful not to try anything I am not sure about on my dogs. So I wasn't worried in case he was a bad trainer! Also the price was very reasonable!

Actually I was very impressed with Peter. We were in an advanced group (which in itself was great as sometimes the small/medium dogs get lumped together regardless of their level) and so the training was mostly running sequences and courses rather than training. He set up some difficult sequences and I like to tackle new and different courses. Here were the more difficult scottish courses I was hoping for! Other than an issue with odd weave poles Hex and Zen dealt very well with everything I threw at them.

Here is Zen yelling at me "WHY are these weave poles so funny?"

During the week they had two nights of competitions to raise money for a local dog rescue charity. They were very interesting!

On Tuesday night they had a competition called "Handicap Hurdles". This competition was a head to head, knock out run simultaneously over 2 identical jumping courses of 30 obstacles each(yes I said THIRTY obstacles!). Basically the two courses were side by side but one ran clockwise and the other anti clockwise. The last 6 jumps(yes 6 jumps in a straight line; my nemesis!) of each course came down the middle, side by side, so you could really cheer the dogs on and see how close they were over the final jump. Knockouts are always fun to watch; but please remind me that they are not so fun to run over and over and over! I am too old for this!

The reason it was called "Handicap Hurdles" is that each team would move forward in their start position depending on certain criteria. You would move up one or more obstacles depending on the grade difference between dogs, 10 years difference in handlers age, BC vs ABC and Large dog vs. small/medium dogs. It was funny to see some teams moved up over 6 obstacles at the start. We got a one jump start only once!

Anyway since it was a knockout as I kept progressing thru with BOTH dogs...guess what that meant? I had to run this 30 obstacle course around 10 times!! I finally gave up and gave Zen to Dennis to run. He bravely agreed to do it although he has never run her and really doesn't run agility at all. He ran her twice; once in the penultimate run and once in the final run. Guess who he was running against in the final run? You guessed it...Me and Hex!

I was so proud of both girls as there were around 80 dogs competing and we competed against mostly Border collies and larger dogs. The best news was that this competition raised 240 pounds for the charity! The organizers did really well to put this together, they worked very hard to keep it moving along yet keeping it fun.

So it was the final; Hex and me against Dennis and Zen. Guess who won? Of course, Dennis and Zen!

The winners of the Knockout. 1st place Zen, 2nd place Hex and 3rd place a lovely lurcher (just to make Tony and Lisa happy)

The next night on Wednesday the charity competition was a weave pole knockout. We have some video of that and I will post more later.....