Spring Cleaning

     With last post my schedule was already wacky, but with me procrastinating on the blog the last few weeks it's even wackier. But that doesn't matter, there is enough to write about.

    After the week of winter we had there came a week of summer, and all the dogs we were starting to shed, inhaled deep and drew all those hairs back in, or so it seemed. Which leaves us with dogs who are back in their winter coat and nice spring temperatures. It was great and bitter sweet at the same time, because it means that my favorite season is over, but the hiking season is just beginning. 

    Funny story about the place where we went hiking. There is a real life sled dog training area, we think it goes all the way around the forest, but we don't know for sure. In a few weeks we will probably go back and try to hike the whole sled dog training path. So we can see if it's something we will use next season, or maybe a few times, depending on how long it actually is. 

    When we got back home we decided to put away the mushing stuff for this season. I took apart all the lines and put them in the washing machine, together with all the dogs harnesses. We do hose them down from time to time if we had an especially muddy training, to avoid chafing, but we only really wash them once a year, at the end of the season.

    It's always fun to see that the harnesses didn't actually change colour, but that they were just very, very dirty. 

    When you watch the lines you can almost see how many years we've been doing this, or at least with more than two dogs. The blue lines were our first 4-dog lines. Then we got red ones and the black with the reflecting pieces through them. And at the start of this season we got the orange/black ones with solid black neck lines and tug lines. The pink ones are my two-dog lines for when I go with the kickbike. Before our 4 dogs lines, we had two seasons where we mainly used two dogs and back then we had an orange two-dog line. But I believe we gave that one away. It's almost looking at rings in a tree when looking at these lines. 

    

    We've also put our vehicles up for the summer, or at least until we need to start patching them up again for the fall training and later for winter, because we've booked our vacation to Sweden for next year. There are some nice projects stacked here. Like; the wiring of our quad is okay, we just need to add a battery and we could use the lights, which is very, very useful because we usually train when it's still dark. And the runners of the sleds need replacing, or at least some work, there is still so much to learn, especially because we live in a country where snow is almost non-existing.

    It's always kind of a sad time when we need to put everything away. But it's also a time for trying new things and getting other projects started. I look forward to what will happen this off-season.