Tell and Lisa's big adventure

Tell and I entered the Red Deer Highland Games trial. I didn't mention it on the blog because I figured that way I could always back out at the last minute and no one would be the wiser - if you remember the title of my last entry, you understand why...
At any rate, I decided we'd give it a shot, plus we had other reasons to head south (more on that in a bit), so off to Red Deer we went.
Long story short, Tell won the nursery class. Given that he's had some confidence issues lately I was completely caught off guard with how he ran at the trial and for the first time in a while I found myself slowing him down and stopping him, which was a very nice surprise. I'm hoping that now that I've got that "first trial" out of the way that I'll feel a little less like throwing up next time I go to the post. ;-)
After the trial we headed south with Louanne to Scott and Jenny Glen's.

On our way to Scott and Jenny's we passed through Vulcan. It turns out that Louanne is a huge Trekkie - who knew?


Vulcan's "big thing" - the Starship Enterprise

Louanne begged me to take her picture with the rest of the Enterprise crew. I was of course more than happy to oblige.

Live Long and Prosper, Louanne.

I finally dragged her away from Vulcan as I was really looking forward to getting to Scott and Jenny's.
Tell and I had a lesson with Scott. He gave me a number of exercises to work on with Tell.By the end of the lesson I could see a huge improvement and by the next day he seemed like a new dog. The whole trip was worth it just for that, but there was more to come...

I also picked up a new dog...

Meet Hope.

Hope was bred by Alasdair and Tricia MacRae. Tricia has run him this year as a nursery dog where he's done quite well finishing in the top five overall at the Bluegrass.

He's a sweet dog and is settling in very nicely.

I'll take some better pictures of him when I get a chance. At the moment it's raining hard enough that I'm thinking about building an ark.

I've had Hope out on sheep a couple of times and it's been loads of fun. I'm looking forward to trialling him.

All in all, not a bad weekend! A huge thank you to Scott and Jenny for finding Hope as well as for being great hosts for the weekend. The company was great and the food was fantastic. I'm looking forward to heading back down their way for their trial in July.