Freezing weather and travel chaos; essential travel only? As the rest of the UK
As I sat in my warm house on Friday evening I watched as the Facebook updates came in with people cancelling their plans to attend. Best excuse of the weekend? “I have to look after my friend’s pigs”! I went bed thinking it might be a struggle getting up and about at 05:00 the next morning, and it was.
Car de-iced and off we go!
First indication this might be a less well attended event was the availability of parking spaces at the Old Schoolhouse in Rhyd Ddu, usually the Saturday morning arrivals have to park on grass verges or on the railway station car park.
With a relatively small attendance it was decided we would mostly all stick together and venture up the Rhyd Ddu path towards Snowdon (no, not all the way). Leaving behind the trailing handlers and their dogs to go and do their own thing we set off for a nice walk.
But first we welcomed our potential new member Ruth. Ruth has a four month old black lab so should fit in well around here and is looking forward to getting into 6 months of bodying.
We found a likely looking spot to the North of the path and set up our office for the day. A fair bit of snow about with a few drifts in places. Your correspondent, once he’d got his breath back, was duly deployed to a likely looking hiding spot.
Down the hill, climb the wall by the stream, cross another smaller stream, wade through the drifts. Find a bit of cover. Camp mat out, bivvy bag open, climb inside out of the freezing rain.
All good so far……
First arrival was Max, followed closely by Gareth. Brief play with the ball and then Gareth noticed a little injury – a tear of the dew claw. Bleeding quite a bit and staining the snow. Max needed TLC for the rest of the day.
Next arrival is Moss with Antony
So first job of the day done and Barry, after another ball search, sets out to return to the office. It’s hard to see where to step when there is snow about covering the smaller streams. Consequently Barry was not all that surprised to find his leg going in up to the thigh. Discovering his leg was stuck in the mud was a little bit more annoying. The team back at the office noticed that Barry hadn’t moved for a while and concluded he was stuck. Once they’d finished chuckling they got on the radio to see if he was OK. In his cheery voice Barry informed them of his predicament. Barry now has visions of having to be rescued by the team which would be bad enough but the prospect of receiving an award at the AGM dinner (a smelly stuffed dog in a cracked glass cabinet) gave him renewed energy and he finally managed to break free with help just 20 metres away. Shame avoided.
A bit more messing about on the hill and a fair few younger dogs being introduced to each other meant we had quite a nice morning although some handlers may have been losing patience with some of the little pups.
So, day over. De-brief. Dinner – lasagne and apple crumble from our guest chef Tom. Great job.
Then off to the pub for the Gareth and Geraint show. Why do tourists believe everything these two say? Translating the Welsh names of mountains, “it means pointy mountain” was bad enough but telling them we had one member lost out on the hill who we were going to look for after a few more pints was a bit beyond the pale!
Sunday morning and we’re all of to Geraint’s place. A bit of training in the fields and some obedience and stock testing was the order of the day. Training was interrupted by a rather large crashing noise as a young lady failed to take an icy corner and collided with Geraint’s wall. A fair bit of damage to the car but all the people were OK and Geraint’s wall remained intact unlike the section on the other side of the gate that was crashed into a couple of weeks before.
We did a bit of civic duty by spreading a hefty load of sand onto the road. A bit more training then coffee and cake.
So, a fine and eventful weekend. Could have stayed at home with the TV and Playstation but had a grand old time in the great outdoors.
Looking forward to January
Cheers and best wishes for the festive season to everybody.
BB
