A couple friends and I decided to have a fun weekend road trip to Payson, AZ for a flyball tournament the weekend of May 22-23rd. To help make the driving easier, we decided to carpool. We knew it would take some creative packing and cooperation, but we knew we'd be able to fit 4 people and 5 dogs into our Explorer! Luckily I have the roof and tailgate racks, so we put our canopies, tents, sleeping bags and everything else on the roof or on the back. That left the backend mostly clear for the pups and the front clear for the humans.
We had a blast on the drive down and played a road trip game where you're supposed to find certain things or get other drivers to notice you doing silly things. One of them was to wave with your foot and you'd get bonus points if they waved back with their foot. We had 2 guys pass us and the passenger waved back with his foot! Who would have thought?! It definitely kept us entertained for a good part of the trip. And boy is it hard to find a limo when you're driving across the open desert!
We got to the tournament site just in time to drop off a few things before they locked the field. After that we went to the campground to see our lovely site! We were told it was a spot that would hold our 3 tents just fine and it had good spacing from the next site. Well - we got there and there was someone parked in our spot. The host had him move his vehicles and we looked at our site and our spirits dropped. After 12 hrs on the road, here we were looking at a small, dirt parking space with no tent pads and there were other tenters about 10 ft away. *Sigh* Oh well - it was just a place to sleep at night, so we set up in the dust so we could head out for dinner.
We found a great little burger joint for dinner and relaxed while we tried to laugh about our horrible campsite. After dinner we took the dogs out to run around a little, then hit the sack.
The flyball tournament went fairly well. We had never run with Mariah & Indigo before, but they fit right in! Our team name was "Nerd Herd" - a tribute to the TV chow "Chuck". We had a great time racing together and finished 1st on Sat & 2nd on Sun. The actual tournament organization was a bit lacking. We didn't start on time, the racing ran pretty slow and there were other odd issues like the RD training her dog in the ring! (which isn't allowed) One judge would re-run heats when she couldn't decide what to do for a call or when the RD's dog was stopping for treats when they were all over the course (yet they wouldn't re-run when Mariah stopped one time for treats...) Then they would give people forever for warm-ups, but one of our RUFF teams got in trouble for releasing a dog for runbacks right after the whistle blew! They called it "training in the ring". Hmmm... not so sure about their calls. At least we had a good group of people and we had a good time with Keri & Ethan from DEO and MariAnne from Westside Woofers.
We left as soon as racing finished on Sun so we could get back to Denver in time for us to work on Mon. We alternated drivers and drove through sunset and just as we hit Denver, the sun was coming up! None of us slept much on the drive home, but we made it home safe and sound. We unpacked in record time and all went our own ways in a groggy state, but happy with our weekend adventure together. Now that we've all been back awhile and caught up on sleep, we're pondering our next "Nerd Herd" adventure!
