Just back from 2 weeks in New Zealand, with Quigley staying at a friend’s house while we were gone, we didn’t have much time to prepare. Even worse, I came back with a cold that turned into a flu on the way home, so I spent most of the week sleeping.

So I honestly wasn’t expecting much success, but this is my favorite trial of the year, so I was determined to show up and have fun at least. Turns out it was a good weekend after all.

I had us entered for 4 rally runs each day, plus one obedience run in the morning trial only.

On Saturday we did Obedience first, and everything was quite beautiful until Quigley laid down on the group sit before the handlers had even left the ring to go out of sight. This was really disappointing, as he has been so good with it recently, including our last try in AKC Open in December. So far this was our best “would have been” score in Open, we would have gotten a 188.5 if Quigley had held his sit.

In Rally we qualified in both runs in both trials. The scores weren’t stellar, since Quigley was kind of slow and we hadn’t practiced since our last trial on 12/11/10, but he got a 4th place in level 2 in trial 1 and a 3rd place in level 2 in trial 2. Another thing that makes UKC rally more difficult for us is that level 2 generally runs before level 3.

On Sunday, heeling in obedience was a total disaster and Quigley needed a second command on the retrieve over the jump to come back to me. He wasn’t having fun, and with 3 rally runs still to go for the day (one was before obedience), I had us excused from the long sit in the sun. I forgot to ask for my score sheet, so I don’t even know how bad it was. The drop on recall was perfect though, which made me very happy.

Rally – Qualified in all 4 runs again, with one third place in level 3 in trial 2. He was better than the previous day, perkier and faster.

So while we got nothing in obedience, we now have 4 legs toward the newly introduced URX title (the exact equivalent to the AKC RAE) and 8 more points toward the UKC Rally Championship.