July 18th, 2023
On this day as I had the previous days, I got up at 6 am and got myself ready before taking Eve out and feeding her at 7 am. After she ate, we headed up to breakfast. Once everyone was done with breakfast, we all completed an obedience routine.
After our obedience routine concluded, we were instructed to grab our stuff to head to one of the satellite lounges.
On this day, I went second. Before my route, my instructor asked me how I would feel about going to target this day. I said sure, I actually wanted to get Eve a different toy to see how she would do.
We headed out on a route, which went extremely well. She was able to navigate me through Target and even to the toy section with minimal distraction. I grabbed what I needed, and we headed to the cash register to pay.
When we got outside of Target, I said to my instructor “I feel a drop of water.” Shortly thereafter, my instructor said I do too. As we continued on our route, we experienced quite the downpour. The class supervisor was following us at a distance. When she caught up to us, she asked if I wanted to stop and get a ride back to campus. I quickly obliged, especially because not too long after that we heard thunder. This was all because the one day that I left my jacket behind it rained. I learned the hard way in this instance, to always have my rain jacket in my backpack just in case it started raining as we were on route.
One of the other class instructors picked us all up before heading back to the lounge to pick everyone else up. Once we got back to campus, we gave our dogs water and a bathroom break then headed up to lunch.
After everyone finished lunch, we went back to our rooms to prepare for a lecture on traffic checks. During this lecture, one of the class instructors drove a shopping cart at each team, as we were walking past her in order to simulate what our dog should do in the event of an obstacle coming towards us, such as a moving vehicle. This was all to prepare us for our official traffic check that we would have on Friday.
After this lecture, we were given some downtime before 4 PM when we had to feed and give our dogs a bathroom break. Once this concluded, we had more downtime until 6 PM for dinner. After dinner, we had a little more downtime before having to give our dogs water and another bathroom break. We gave our dogs a final bathroom break around 9 PM before going to bed.
