Travel Log: Lexington, KY ClickerExpo

Last weekend, Lowell, Maebe, Cadence and I loaded up the car and headed to Lexington, KY for Karen Pryor's ClickerExpo, a three-day conference on clicker training. Since the weekend was filled with so many wonderful experiences, I am going to have to recap a day at a time.

Thursday: Hitting the Road

Thursday morning we packed up, and made the always sad trip to drop the dogs who were not coming with us off at our friend's house for the weekend. Jade has stayed there many times and pretty much forgets about us immediately, though he did watch us through the fence as we drove off which was a little heart-rending. Tristan just takes things as they come, but Django was a bit clingy at first. Nevertheless, I know they are cared for well there, and do just fine.

We hit the road and made the 5 1/2 hour trip to Lexington in the afternoon. It was a fairly entertaining car ride as Lowell, who usually falls asleep immediately when a passenger in a car, forgot that he had taken a No-Doze and drank a large Red Bull, then wondered why he felt like he was on speed or something. He made for a much more animated road buddy as a result.

We rolled in to the Lexington Marriott around 4:00, checked in, unpacked the car, and took Cade and Maebe out for a stroll. Honestly, I was quite anxious about what I had gotten into by bringing a not-yet 12-month-old pup to a training conference with 400+ people and hundreds of well-trained dogs. There would be hours of lecture, busy training workshops, lots of distractions - I wondered how he would handle it all. He's a very even-tempered guy who tries so hard to be good, but is still a distractable adolescent with a lot of energy. I figured worst case scenario would be me hanging out at the park across the street a lot while Lowell told me what I was missing in the seminars.

We picked up our registration materials and cruised quickly through the store with the dogs. They handled all the crowd and commotion in stride, though they were really excited and interested in everything.

In the hotel room, they wrestled a little bit, but were quiet and on their best behavior. We looked over the agenda for the next day, and all got to bed early.