Time to say goodbye to 2017. We started 2018 with a trip to Slovenia. It was a sudden decision, but I really missed my family and friends. So I drove 2400km alone with 3 dogs, in a car, with some stops on the way. First stop was in Barcelona, visiting some friends and spending great time there, we even climbed a small mountain and had a decent training with the dogs.
It was such a great feeling to arrive to Slovenia, my first thoughts were "oh how nice, a place where people drive normally, where everything is green, where the food is soooo good, where everything is so small and so close..." I loved seeing my family after such a long time, and oh my I missed mom's cooking. We climbed some more mountains in Slovenia, my biggest wish was to just really have some long walks in the green countryside again. So basically we walked A LOT all days when the weather was not too ugly. I could see friends again, one of them getting married, one of them with a baby, some of them same as always, but it was just great to see them all.
We also got a chance to compete one day in Croatia, it was MikMik's and Roo's first start in A3. Ben was on rest, so he got to cheerlead for us all, but in the end he was not that interested in cheerleading and preferred to just play with little pieces of rubber that he found in the turf and just entertain all the people there. Both "puppies" were so great on their first A3 competition, Roo even won agility run, I think it was one of his best runs ever. MikMik seemed super confident and I was especially proud of their weaves.
Then after 10 days we headed towards Vigo to participate on AWC qualis. Well what to say about that, not very successful results wise, some bad luck and some great runs, but what really matters is that we actually had so much fun, I think they all did so amazing (yes, Ben got to run again and he was brilliant), the surface was great to run on, so it was pure fun. The courses were really difficult for us, I did notice we are not really on that level just yet, but that's fine.. It was qualis, so nobody should really expect easy courses. However, we had some little mistakes, with MikMik it was basically just my handling mistakes, she was pretty awsome and confident, oh and I even completely forgot the course once, with Roo it was mostly me being too slow for him on some really crazy fast straight lines, he was pretty awsome too and with Ben it was mostly bad luck, he fell in a tunnel twice, knocked a bar which never happens, etc... But ok, all in all we had a great time and I really loved seeing so many beautiful runs of other competitors on so difficult courses - I guess it can be done :) The level of spanish agility is rising so fast, so many great teams, really impressive, just sadly I had to miss most of super runs from medium and small category as I was just to busy preparing and rewarding my dogs. This will definitely be a fun year and fun qualis, can't wait for more.
So here comes a video of some of our "almost decent runs" ;)