Let’s say you’re on a month-long road trip around the United Kingdom and you find yourself in a small, unpronounceable town in Wales. And let’s say that while you’re wandering around this vowel-deprived town, you stumble across this poster on the side of the road:
;)
What would you do? If you are wandering Lustin, there’s really no choice to make. You know where you need to be, even if it means modifying your entire travel itinerary for the next few days so that you can be there.
And so, Dustin and I found ourselves wandering around Betws-y-Coed yesterday, trying to kill time until the enigmatic Ferret Derby commenced. What would it be like, we wondered. Would there really be live ferrets? Were we naïve in thinking this would be an actual RACE in which those beady-eyed weasels beloved by hippies around the world would actually compete against each other? We were so excited, but we feared we might be setting ourselves up for disappointment. As the minutes ticked by on Sunday, we found ourselves oscillating between excitement and anxiety. It was like waiting for senior prom, only in this case the prom queen would be a footlong hairy rodent.
We entered the church grounds (this was a charity event after all) around 12:45pm, and with some quick detective work, we spotted the athletes as they were warming up and going through their various pre-race rituals. The fact that they looked moderately terrified by the random children who were poking at them and asking to hold them, and the fact that the race “course” was actually just five long PVC pipes that the ferrets would have to squeeze through blindly, did not take away from the pomp and circumstance of the sporting event about to take place. This looked to be everything we hoped it would be and more.
Rather than try to put into words what followed, we’ll let the photos in our Ferret Derby album tell the story for us. Needless to say, like all great sporting competitions, this one was not without its share of heartbreak. Some ferrets discovered the thrill of victory, but many more of them experienced the agony of defeat. In the end, though, I think we all walked away from the Betws-y-Coed Ferret Derby feeling like we’d been part something pretty special – which is more than I can say for my senior prom.