Alabama Oops

For those of you who are new to following a long distance race, you have to realize that updates are slow, and servers go down from being overloaded. Mushers do not have to sign out of checkpoints unless it has a mandatory layover. So if the Checker isn’t paying attention a musher may be missed until they show up at the next checkpoint.

I haven’t heard from Karen, that’s a good thing, but I got calls from Marlene Daniels and Doug Grillot. Doug was in Skwentna and Marlene was in Finger Lake. Both of them said that Karen and the dogs looked good, hot but good. The dogs were drinking lots and some of them wouldn’t even wait for Karen to put the soup in the bowl and were drinking right out of the ladle.

Karen is now in Rohn, so the Happy River Steps and the Gorge are behind her. It’s clouding over so maybe things will cool off.

For those of you that weren’t at the Musher's banquet you missed a funny mistake during Karen’s introduction to the stage. Carey Caragane is a local weatherman in Anchorage and has also served as the MC for the Iditarod banquet for as long as we’ve been coming up here. When he announced Karen he said, “here is Karen Ramstead from Perryvale, Alabama”. Now I don’t know if it was the collective giggle from the crowd, or if he realized that Alabama is not a hot bed of mushing, but he turned towards Karen shaking his head and said to her, “that’s not right”. After a brief discussion he returned to the mike and apologized repeating the introduction using the proper province and country. During Karen’s run through Anchorage on Saturday, some fans were jumping up and down when Karen went by yelling, “we’re from Alabama too”.

I got Olena’s whelping area ready yesterday, so now she has some place to have her puppies. I don’t expect them before the weekend, but judging by the size of here it could be any day now.

That’s all for now

Mark