Picture of Jenny Damm

Jenny Damm

Florida rocks!

We have soon been here in Florida for two weeks now and we have such a great time! The first seminar started the day after we arrived and we have had seminars every day but two, those two days we spend paddling kayak. I think kayak paddling is my new favourite activity, especially among thousands of alligators! 

Today is the last seminar day and that’s sad… The seminars have been so fun! I’m enjoying every single day and every single team. I really have the best job in the world! We have had several days with tricky, advanced courses, some novice days and a puppy day. Each day has been great. The puppy day probably the most chaotic one with tons of informations squeezed in to those hours. But I love puppy training and teaching about foundation work, so it was also a great day! 

Tomorrow we’ll leave to Orlando for a three day trail and both Lilli and me are looking forward to that so much! It will be fun to run but also fun to se a lot of students running IRL! 🙂 

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We are staying at the home of Steve and Lisa Jacobs. They have such a lovely house and they are just wonderful hosts. Me and Lilli are totally spoiled!

  

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The house seen from the agility field

  

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Every lunch break Lilli spends in their pool. Perfect exercise!

  

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Out for a morning walk. We are looking for the alligators living in the pond beside the agility field. But Alan the alligator is not awake this early 😉

  

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An ok day at work!

 

 

One of my students unfortunately got injured the first day of seminar, so I was running her dog Rumour. Never fun with injuries but for me it was a pleasure to train her. Wow, I almost stole her. She just jumped right in to my heart, what a fantastic little dog!

  

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Lilli always make new friends. Here is her very special and cute little friend Otis. They both train running dog-walks 😉

 

 

Sunday night at Siesta key beach. Every Sunday they have a drum circle at the beach. They start to play an hour before sunset and there are lots of people dancning. I think that was probably one of the best way spending a Sunday night!

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Our alligator kayak tour on Mayakka river

  

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Bill in the lead!

  

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This was simply one of my best experienses ever. Beautiful, relaxing, exciting, no people and lots of gators. I could have spend several days paddling here.

 

 

Paddling along the river and exploring plants, birds, insects, turtles and alligators. 

 

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The alligators are just sooo fascinating animals. And really respectful. Those gigant reptiles could just push the kayak and eat us alive if they wanted. But they didn’t want that, luckily. 😉

  

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Coming so close to all those alligators was a really special experience. I enjoyed every single second of the five ours in the kayak.

  

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The end of our kayak tour got almost a little bit too exciting when I got too close to a giant alligator (not the one in the pic) that was lying on the river bank. The guide had told us to be careful when the gators were on the bank because they could get angry if they felt they had no room between the bank and the kayak. So ok, there I saw a big gator laying there sunbathing, halfway in to the water. I steered the kayak toward shore and the gator and then I saw he waked up  and was on his guard. I will now tell you that a kayak is not so easily controlled and I realized I didn’t want to make any sudden movements with the paddle that close to him, so I decided to just wait and hope for that he would just slid down into the water… He didn’t slid. He got really annoyed because I came that close so he took a sudden, violently and powerful jump towards me so he’s angrily whipping tail tip touched the side, the water splashed and my kayak flew around in the waves after the apparently angry gator that disapeared under me. I will tell you my heart was beating more than twice as fast! The funny thing was that right there it was a bridge with quite a lot of people watching the gators and my little incident probably gave them the experience of the day. I heard how they terrified viewed my intimate meeting… 😉 That was a life time experience and my adrenaline level reached it’s absolut level!

  

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Our second day of we spend kayaking again but this time in the sea along the mangrove woods. It was maybe not as exciting as the gator tour 😉 but it was really interesting and sooo relaxing.

  

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Our guide Shane, native and he knew everything about the places, animals, plats and history. Really interesting!

  

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A huge conch!

  

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An other coach trying to open a shell. Shane told us the conch always wins but it might take a few hours.

  

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A horse shoe crab. This animal has been the same hundreds of millions of years and they are called a living fossil. Cool thing!