One week of Winter

     The reason that this post is late, later than I wanted to, is because I wasn't ready to put an end to this piece of winter we've been having. 

    But with the temperatures rising, almost 20 degrees celcius more than last week, all the snow and ice melted away, and the first spring flowers showing their heads. I thinkg there is no way that I can keep denying it. Spring is coming. 

    It was a week, only one week and in that week we did a lot. It started on Saturday with a little light snow, not yet enough to do anything with, but by the next day we were in the forest and had taken the kick spark with us

    It was fun and another thing that made me feel just like a real musher was that, finally, all the dog poop in the dog yard was frozen, into the snow. It seemed fun at first, I mean, who doesn't want their dog poop to be so solid? Until I realized that it would just melt into the snow and then freeze stuck again. Yay for slashing poop, instead of just scooping it.

    The dogs all had a crazy amount of energy, even our old lady Keyla, who turns 10 this year turned frisky again when the temperatures fell below zero. Which was really fun to see. 

    But even that couldn't stop the snowy fun we were having. The roads were a disaster and people in Belgium really can't handle their snow, but that didn't stop us from having fun in the forest. In some places I drove faster with my mountain bike than some people in their cars. It was a shame that they started to throw salt around right the minute it started snowing, so the streets weren't filled with snow. 

    One of the things on my personal bucket list is that I can get to work with the dogs and sled, just so I can say I've done it once. When there is even a little chance of snow people start getting scared that they can't go anywhere. And my clients start getting scared that I can't get to work. I always say that even if there is a lot of snow I can still make it, I just take the dog sled. The same is true for my partner. His bosses always threaten him that if all the roads are closed due to snow and he's the only one who can come to work he has to do everything on his own. But sadly, this year is also not the year we can go to work by dog sled. 

    It has been such a strange season. We thought, without cliché-ing that the 2020/2021 season would become our year. We would have 6 adult, Siberians who really wanted to work. Not including our 2 oldest Siberians, who we could come out with in the Happy Dog class. We'd finally decided that we wouldn't be participating in the dryland sprint races, but try to go towards the 'tour' class. So we'd started to up the distance in our training rounds and lower the speed. We'd calculated which distances we'd need to reach by which race. But then all the races were cancelled. 

    And these first two weeks of February we would've been in Sweden to sled with the dogs. Which also got cancelled. I myself got a little discouraged because of it, but this week of winter in our own country was a small band aid on that wound. We booked again for next year, so maybe the 2021/2022 season will be 'our' season. 

(📸 by Christel Michiels)

    Then just a mere week after we took the Kick Spark out, and right about the time that I started to get used to all the snow covered fields. We had one training earlier this week where we couldn't even take the sled out, because there wasn't enough snow on some of the paths, so we had to take the quad. 

    On the 14th of February we went out early in the morning, because we knew that everything would start to thaw. And yes, the next day, all the snow was gone the seasons seemed to change from winter to spring instantly.