Well, five days down and a lot of sleep lost, but we had a blast. So much to tell so might as well get comfy. There was a lot of action. I'll start with Wednesday.
Wednesday started fairly early with the goal of arriving at the Portland Expo Center at 7:30. Somehow I ended up ahead of myself and got there just after 6:30. Yikes! Wednesday is "specialty" day. For the Danes, that meant we started with the Mount Rainier Working Dog Club show followed by the Willamette Valley Great Dane Club specialty. My role in this whole thing was to bring all the raffle prizes collected over the last 8 months or so since I volunteered myself. Other than that and a few little random things, I appointed myself official photographer. I took right about 1,300 pictures the first day and I surely won't post them all here (That's what Facebook is for!) but I do want to share a few, starting with some of the fun raffle prizes we had. And I have to say, that silly girl of mine wanted to try out every single stuffy toy we had. There was the nasty (awesome) oppossum, the snake, a warthog, a monkey, and a couple others.
From the working dog rings -
At one point I was just wandering around outside the ring and caught this...
From the across the ring....
And outside the ring....this cute lil' thing is what had the fawn Dane all worked up and in play mode.
Newfoundlands!
Rottweiler!
And from the group ring:
I couldn't resist - frog-legged. LOL
And here....is the #1 Doberman in America and the bitch that took THREE, Count em'!, THREE BIS (her 19th - 22nd) while in Portland: Ch Protocol's Veni Vidi Vici "Fifi"
She was in Florida at Eukanuba, too, and I never did get a chance to watch any breed so didn't see her. I figured she had to be coming to Portland since it's one of the biggest shows in the country with plentiful opportunities for majors and whatnot. I cannot express how exquisite this creature is. She almost seemed robotic in her automatic stacking and subsequent sustained hold in that position. That is, until I saw the way she shared a look with her handler, Jocelyn. She's pure beauty and her movement is a glide.
I loved this face!
So after the working dog specialty and group were complete, we moved over to another ring for the first of the two Dane specialties. The second was to be held the following night (Thursdsay) after Best in Show.
Here are just a few shots from that show:
The lovely awards table.
And that wound out the first day. I had brought my crates with me so at least I was able to stake out a spot early. That was one load off my mind.
I was already exhausted by the time I got home and still had to put things together for the next four days. Unfortunately it was pouring down rain all evening long so I opted to risk waiting to load until morning. Unfortunately it was raining just as hard then, too. It made for a bit of a rough start, but that's Oregon this time of year.
I love all the pictures!! Thanks for taking some Malamute ones. That's Ricky. He's won a TON of BIS and BISS, I've lost track. He's gorgeous though.
ReplyDeleteYou had some really awesome raffle prizes! Layla would've loved the possum.