Part 1, Friday, Dec. 4th

Our first indoor show ever, and the first time I’ve made Quigley do 4 rally runs in one day. Little trooper that he is, we qualified in all 4, even though the scores in the second trial dropped off quite a bit.

This was to be expected though, it was a long day – we arrived at around 7.30 am and by the time we left it was about 2.45 pm. I’m not going to subject him to more than 2 runs in one day very soon again.

Today brought us RAE legs #5 and #6, with a score of 95 in Excellent and 97 in Advanced in the first trial, and 86 and 82 in the second.

No placements this time around, since they pretty much all went to multiple people scoring in the 98-100 range, so we narrowly missed a couple. I’m not too sad about it though, this club was really stingy on placements and only handed out the same size ribbon as the qualifiers (just in different colors), not even any rosettes. For such a big show that seemed kind of lame, but oh well.

Part 2, Saturday, Dec. 5th

I liked being at the show site within 15 minutes this morning. Still tired from yesterday though, but ah well.

It was really cold though (about 45 degrees at 8 am – all you Midwesterners and East Coast people are going to laugh at me, but both Quigley and I were freezing!) and I was worried if he would make it through the Honor Sit because he was shivering so much.

Our Excellent run was not beautiful (mainly issues with heeling, and Quigley went around the wrong side of a cone on the spiral), but we qualified with an 87. The advanced run was much nicer, and had so few stationary exercises that it felt like I had missed half the course when we passed the Finish sign. It was a fun course, with 4 270 degree turns, two about turns, some pivots etc., so it flowed really well. Again, the heeling could have been better IMO, but we got a 95.

That’s RAE leg #7. 3 to go!

Part 3, Sunday, Dec. 6th

Another freezing cold day. Today I felt pretty pea-brained, to the point where I had trouble figuring out the correct pattern of a spiral around 3 cones in our Excellent run, even though it was perfectly reasonable, just the opposite way of what you’d expect. I guess all those cones got to me over the weekend. By the time I passed the Finish sign in our Advanced run I was just glad that that was it for the weekend and we could go home.

We qualified in both runs (with a not so great 83 in Excellent and a much better 94 in Advanced), so this was RAE leg #8.

More to come next week Wednesday/Thursday/Friday at the Long Beach shows. Then we’ll have a break until mid January, when we go to work on our UKC rally career some more.