My Birthday!

22 years old that is! Yep! It was a really fun day. Nick's cousin invited us to go with him and his wife dog sledding. We went camping with them back in October and Zoe and I found out that our birthday was the same day, I'm just a year older. So anyway, DOG SLEDDING! Any of you who have known me since I was little know that I used to pretend I was a dog and run around the house barking. Instead of boy band posters, in 4th grade I ordered an AKC (American Kennel Club) Official Dog Breed Poster that had every breed of dog on it. Instead of playing house, most of the time my friends and I would run around our backyards pretending we were dogs (sometimes horses or other random animals). I would see dogs while we were in the car and list off what breed it was. I watched Animal Planet ER Vet and dog training shows. People gave me dog books for my birthday. I knew EVERYTHING about dogs. So dog sledding was something I've always wanted to do since I was little. It brought back a lot of memories of my elementary school years and plus it was a fun!

We had two sleds. Spencer and Zoe went on the first and Nick and I went on the other. We each had a musher with us too as we rode. On the way back our musher was trying to run with the dogs to get them to go up a little hill and so I got to drive and then she said I could keep driving with her until I didn't want to so I rode with her on the back the rest of the way. It was a really cool experience. Nick posted a video of me sledding on his facebook page but I'll post some of the pictures on here.

So when they first got to our meeting spot they had to set up the sleds and get the dogs in their harnesses and some of the bigger ones out of the kennels on the trailer. Okay, look at that dog next to me, and look at that box with the paw print on it. This wasn't even the biggest dog but all of them fit in the same sized kennel thing. There were 8 of those kennels on one side and 8 on the other.

The two dogs that are right next to each other in this picture were fighting the whole time. Any time we stopped the one on the left would growl and snap at the one on the right. Our musher said those two would fight sometimes like brother and sister. The one on the right was being mean to the other one the day before so she thought that he was just getting back at her. Our musher finally switched one of the dogs in the front with one of the middle dogs halfway through so they would stop bickering. It was kind of funny though because as soon as we would start moving they wouldn't fight at all.

And this is me getting ready to drive the sled.