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The 2008 Beargrease Marathon Race - Part 1
By early afternoon as we approached the US/Canadian border in Sault Saint Marie the temperatures had finally risen to just above zero. The US customs official asked us the usual questions: where were we going, why, and where had we come from. As I answered that we were from New Hampshire Anastasia leaned across and announced, "And we've been driving since Vermont with the window stuck open."
© 2008 Jaye Foucher The customs official looked horrified. "In this cold???" "Yeah, we're freezing!" He stepped out of his booth and said, "Let me see if I can fix it for you." He tried pulling up on the window, but I informed him that we'd already tried that to no avail. "See, it goes down but it won't go up any further than this." I used the window button to demonstrate. "Wait, try that again." As I hit the up button he pulled on the window at the same time and to my surprise he managed to pull the window all the way up. "You fixed it!!" I wanted to hug the guy. Hell, I was so grateful to be warm I would have married him and had his babies at that point. :P As we left customs and were happily chatting about how nice the guy was to have fixed the window for us and how grateful we were to not have to drive the remainder of the trip with the window down, we pulled into a toll booth and I hit the window button to roll down the window and pay the toll. "What are you doing???" Anastasia cried. Oops. We stopped at the next gas station to raise the window again (at least we knew how to do it now) and to remove our many layers of clothing in the restroom. Driving across the upper peninsula of Michigan we were once again alert and chatty and having a good time. 
As we drove along the south side of Lake Superior we were amazed at how enormous the lake was, and at how unusual the ice formations at the shore were. In Marquette we stopped for dinner and to feed the dogs.
Just prior to 10 pm we began to see the lights of the the two cities Superior Wisconsin and Duluth Minnesota, which lay side by side. "Oh my god, it's huge! A dogsled race starts here, in the middle of a city?" I had imagined it to be something like Fort Kent Maine but instead it looked like we were approaching downtown Boston. We turned onto Route 35 south around 10:15 pm, heading towards Fayth's house where we were to stay that night. Fayth had guessed that she lived about an hour or so from Duluth so we assumed we'd be there around 11:30, but not only was she mistaken about the length of time it took to get there but it also turns out there are two Route 35's and we chose the wrong one...the scenic route as you might say. When we finally arrived at Fayth's, just outside of St. Paul, it was closer to 1:30 am and both Anastasia and I had gone from exhausted to giddy to cranky in the past few hours. We decided to drop dogs then so we wouldn't have to get up again at 6 am, and then gratefully fell into our beds completely exhausted. The next morning we awoke around 8 am. We went out to feed and water the dogs and then I left Anastasia and Fayth watching them while I went in to shower. Fayth came inside as I was drying my hair and went off to work with plans to meet up with us that evening in Duluth, and when Anastasia came in a little while later she mentioned being still shaken by what happened with Jackson. "What do you mean 'what happened with Jackson'?" I asked. "You mean Fayth didn't tell you?" Turns out that Jackson had somehow gotten off his drop line at the truck and disappeared. The other dogs made no sounds to alert Fayth and Anastasia that a dog was loose so they hadn't a clue until they walked over to that side of the truck to clean up. And although I had 2 girls in season at the time, Jackson didn't try to go to them but rather just took off. Fayth and Anastasia spent about 10 minutes searching for him and following tracks before he finally came running towards them. He had been chasing the scent of wild rabbit; apparently quite a few of them live in the area. They had no idea if he actually caught one but he did have strange looking poops for the next few days so we nicknamed him "rabbit breath" for the remainder of the trip. :P I was relieved they found him quickly and that I wasn't aware of what was going on until after he was found (less stress that way), but had to wonder: what next? I had planned on running the dogs about 12 miles to loosen them up that day but by the time we finished getting ready, packed up, stopped for breakfast and made the 2+ hour drive into Duluth, it was early afternoon. Since we had to be at the Opening Ceremonies around 6 pm, I didn't figure we had enough time to drive another half hour north to where there was a trail, run the dogs, drive back to Duluth, go settle in at Ann and Al Stead's (where we were staying that evening), feed dogs, get ourselves ready and find our way to the Opening Ceremonies in only about 4 hours. Instead we found a car wash and opted to wash my very filthy dogtruck so that my sponsor's logo and my own logo would be visible again. | |
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