Oh my!!!

Just an average week of training back in the home land?  not quite, but it was just what I needed!

This past week I was getting a little anxious training by myself all the time.  I was starting to feel a little like a crazy cat lady… If I wasn’t training I was home, cleaning or baking or feeding cats.  …and when you  spend more time talking with cats than you do people you know things are going down hill rapidly.

So i packed up my car and headed west into the distant land of Minnesota.  I drove practically to North Dakota!  Destination?  Wynn Robert’s house.  I needed some time to refresh my mind and Battle Lake MN was going to have to do.

My days were filled with farm chores, fish scale skiing through farm fields, setting beaver traps, making gingerbread houses, skiing under christmas lights, and eating my body weight in chocolate chips.

I fed the cows, and chased the chickens, and tried to remember the pecking order of the 4 horses but three of them were white so I was really hopeless.  I unloaded bags of grain and tried to avoid stepping in any cow pies and horse poo as I tromped around in my ski boots.  We failed at making a gingerbread house, however we did get it all decorated before the roof caved in, atleast no one was inside!  Those spicy gum drops are dangerous I tell you.

Our last morning in Battle Lake we classic skied out through the fields and over the frozen ponds to the beaver lodges.  Wynn, Pa Roberts, and I had set two traps two days earlier and so Andrea, Wynn and I set off across the tundra crossing our fingers that we wouldn’t be coming home empty handed.

The first trap was empty.  So dejected we moved on to the next big bad beaver lodge!  This beaver lodge was gigantic!  Not that I’ve seen too many in my life, but this would be like a beaver palace.  And from the beaver palace we trapped the beaver king!!!  He was a monster, I’m surprised Wynn got him out of the water. We just kept coming out!  And of course the beaver king would have a stately beaver tail!  It was awesome, and thrilling.  We all got super excited my the catch.  Then we realized we had to get the beaver home…

We must have looked like such a weird gaggle of kids trudging out through the cat tails.  Wynn with a beaver on his back and me with ski poles in one hand and an axe in the other (dangerous I know).  Andrea being our lovely caboose documenting us as we plodded along.

That afternoon we made the trek even further North to Grand Rapids.  Its been a low key couple of days but its been perfect.  Andrea and I have hunkered down at Kelly Kjorlien’s house for the week.  We have beds and been told to help ourselves or starve.  I’m in Grand Rapids until next sunday with three races on the docket over the next week.  I’m excited to get on the start line again.  To ski hard and try to hit more targets.

More updates to to come from the races and through the week.  And hopefully some pictures of our great beaver adventure!