Web Site of the Month

My pick for Web Site of the Month is Dogs Across America! This a wonderful event to promote dog powered sports. What you do is sign up (it's free to sign up) under your state. Then you either contact your state coordinator to find out where the state's group of people are going to hit the trails or you pick a trail of your own. You log the mileage that you do with your dogs on the given day (the trail doesn't have to be located in your state) and send it in when you're done! The original focus of the group was to promote dog powered pulling sports, but they've opened it up to include people dog packing and also just hiking with their dogs on leash. For a general idea of what to do, you can scooter, bikejor, rollerjor, cannicross, dog pack, hike, or do whatever as long as you are attached to your dog!

Unfortunately, things move kind of slowly with this web site and I'm REALLY hoping that if they get bombarded with people signing up, they'll sort of pick up the pace a bit. I joined the email list last year, but there are some people who did some ridiculous things with their dogs (one guy almost cut his dogs foot off with a chain saw!) and everyone seemed to be fine with it and it just drove me completely batty! I have since unsubscribed to the list and really don't recommend that anyone seeking good advice join it, unfortunately. There are plenty of great mentors to be had out there, but none of them seem to be on that list. Phew, that was a bit of a side tangent! Anyhow, like I said, the web site is slow and it can take a while for things to really get going.

For anyone in the Oregon or Washington area who is interested in participating and would like to get together with a group, let me know. I'm shooting for Sun. Nov. 22nd. Quite a while ago I put in to be the state coordinator for Oregon and have sent off a few additional emails and haven't heard anything back. So I'm just going forward with my planned trail. I have a trail picked out that has a paved trail and a bark trail running parallel with each other for most of the duration with mile markers along the side. There's a very gentle incline on the way out, which means a nice gentle downhill on the way back. Right now, I'm planning on bikejoring with just Bess. Heffner isn't really thrilled about pulling for long distances and Bess seems to really like it.

Anywho, I'm hoping that more people will sign up and this event can become more popular!!

P.S. I've also decided that since it's October and I have a ton of older Halloween pictures of the dogs that I haven't used in blog posts yet, I'm going to use them in posts that I otherwise don't have pictures to go along with. I enjoy my posts better when there's a little splash of Heffner and/or Bess in them.:)