Yesss! The first weekprogram with guests for the Musher-Workshop has started and everything goes fine! Welcome Sarah and Eelco! She is a complete beginner with no previous experience with dogs, but she runs already her own 8-dog-team on long distance training, a real talent. He is a long-time-repeater, known here since many many years, now finally back, after he was one of the last ones leaving Eräkeskus in March 2020 after lockdown and border closings. 2 days training with the A- and B-dogs was done, they learned/repeated a lot, difficult situations were handled perfectly well, they went on walks with the puppies, fed dogs etc. and had a lot of fun! And yesterday we started with 4 teams, 32 dogs to the long-distance-training withstake-out-break for snacks and lunch. The dogs were running 28 km totally, on the way back even on the first snow. During the break the dogs got a meat-soup and a bone, of course on a nice straw-bed. And the mushers made a fire in wind and snowfall and enjoyed a typical finnish sausage with pasta-salad. Today we start for a hike from the hanging bridge of Pälvekoski to the cabin Aittokoski to enjoy there a nice cabin-evening with wood-sauna.
The "meatball-season" has started as well! At least 3 times per week we form now small meatballs to freeze them and later feed them on the longer training-runs as a small snack to the dogs. If the musher remembers to take the meatball-bags before training-start... And some more small bags are ready: as we had such a good mushrom-season this fall, we can now share parts of our selfpicked and dried mushrooms with our guests. An ideal souvenir for those who stayed home. Our cranberry-jam with redwine, apple and cinnamon is ready as well; last time so much appreciated by our guests that is was sold out in short time. That's why we added for this coming winter season our new creation of gooseberry jam with apple and melon! Very tasty!