The adventure is finally over.  I'm currently sitting here drinking my coffee (with cream finally!) but missing my breakfast of meat, bread, cheese and veggies (yes, I had cucumber for breakfast for the past week!).

I guess I left off last with us heading into the last day of competition.  Nan, Deryl and I skipped the team bus ride to the Ice Hall so that we could get some breakfast and then have our morning walk.  As soon as we stepped outdoors, it was POURING.  The first cloudy sky since we arrived in Helsinki   Guess that should have been a little bit of an omen for the day to come.  The three of us and Rio took a cab to the venue.

Medium dogs were up first and we were all a little on edge waiting for Nitro and Lucie to run second last.  Their turn finally came and all of us held our breath.  There was not a sound from any of us.  In a heartbreaking turn of events, Nitro & Lucie lost their connection and Nitro went into an off-course tunnel.  The very first mistake of their competition.  Lucie did have a girl come up afterwards and ask for her autograph however!  LOL

The Small dogs ran next and Flip ran once again with no course faults, but a few time faults.  For a first time at the Worlds, Suzanne looked like a veteran out there!

The Large Dog Standard (Agility) was the last event of the competition.  The whole arena was absolutely packed and apparently you couldn't even purchase tickets.  Even with 150+ dogs running, I was glued to my seat watching.  There were so many different handling styles and course stategies, it was fascinating.  As per the rest of the runs on the weekend, this course was no different for showing that even the most accomplished dogs & handlers could go off course in the blink of an eye.  Fizz and Adrian were up late in the running order and were still in contention for a top place finish.  Adrian looked as though he was giving it his all and Fizz was right there with him.  They had beautiful contacts, tight turns, but one minor mistake as Fizz ran past the See-saw.  They did get great applause from the crowd as Adrian showed off his gambling skills off the dogwalk.  Encore & Susan were  the final Canadians to run.  Once again, everyone held their breath.  They had a picture perfect run which brought all of us to our feet only to be deflated a few seconds later upon discovering that Encore's up contact was called.  Five faults.    Juice, the next dog to run, bettered Encore's time by a fraction and went on to be the World Champion.

All in all, what a fantastic competition.  The venue and the competitors were certainly World Class!  For me, now that I've had time to reflect, I'm thrilled with the way things went.  I now know that I can handle almost anything a judge can throw at Rio and I and I know that we can both handle the pressure.  I think both Rio and I got a great high from running in front of that big a crowd.  The energy in the building is incredible and its a great rush to run a course hard, like you've got nothing to lose.  I'm coming home charged up and energized to train harder.  I've now got a list of things to work on (okay, its not written down yet, but I'm getting there!) to keep me busy for the next many months!

Our trip home on Monday was un-eventful although very long!  We got up at 4am and had a mini bus take Lynda, John, Spirit, Daryl, Adrian, Susan, Fizz, Rio and I to the airport (the rest of the team followed the next day as we could only fit a limited amount of dogs on each flight).  We got a little scare when the security guy gave Spirit some hard looks and made sure she 'fit' in her crate (Rio's crate was smaller, so I started to get nervous).  He finally approved of Spirit's crate set up, although he did make her take off her collar.  When he asked me to put Rio in the crate, it was like shoving an angry cat into a small carrier and she fought me like she never had before (Lynda thinks that she can be the poster girl for "Crate Games 2 - The Airport"). Once I finally got her in, she immediately started happily eating her stuffed Kong.  The security guy didn't say a thing .

We flew Helsinki to Frankfurt and then on to Toronto.  We passed through customs easily after they checked our Rabies papers.  The customs agent asked me "You know there's around a $30 fee?"  I said yes, where do I pay?  He said "You can pay next time." LOL

My Uncle Bill picked me up at the Toronto airport and then I spent the night in Burlington before driving home on Tuesday.  I made it home in time to pick up the very excited Kyra from school.  Until the time when she fell asleep, she was talking a mile a minute about all that she had done.  Piper too, was excited to see both Rio and I and hasn't let me out of her sight except to run like a fool with Rio all over the house.  Rio is happy to be reunited with her beloved cat   We both are suffering from the time change and have been wide awake at 3am—never thought that the dogs would care about time change, but apparently that's not so!

I have so many of you to thank for all your support.  I absolutely loved all the notes that you all sent and all the support you gave me.  I've been going through all my emails and notes again this morning and can't tell you how much they all meant.  I got the biggest kick out of the OVBCC list that was giving up to the minute results—even I got caught up in the excited emails this morning! 

Hopefully there will be another World Championship Adventure in our future, but if not, I'm definitely going to treasure the memories from the two World opportunities I've had this year!


Here's a video of Rio's standard run posted by Gail, one of our excellent Canadian supporters.  I'm just posting the link because if you go to the page and click on "watch in high quality" (which is under the video on the right), you can get a much clearer view of the run.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9A2IycokSE  I'm still laughing at Rio barking at me during the run!!