Windmills, road work and more road work

Monday we stopped for the night outside Iowa city in a town called Williamsburg, at least that's what it said on the hotel bill. Each day started out with filling gallon jugs with water from the bathtub and topping off hay and water for the mules (it's an affectionate term) before hitting the road. Every two or three hours we would stop to water the animals and get gas. As the title of this post suggests there were lots of wind mills and lots of road work. It would be a theme all the way home, the road work not so much the wind mills. Fifty miles of open highway than fifty miles of road work or at least thats how it felt. Summer work season and stimulus money I suppose. The hotel in North Platte did not have the laundry facilities we had hoped for so we stopped at a Target around Des Moines for a few clothing items and snacks. Through no planning on our part, the hotel in Williamsburg was a "spa/indoor water park". It has nothing do to do with the story but I just thought I'd mention it. We ate some not very good dinner in the hotel eatery, did some laundry (thank goodness) and went to bed.

Cows & Road kill

We made it to North Platte that Sunday. Traveling along Route 80, a two lane highway with light traffic, what you see are rolling plains dotted with cows. Darting always across the road are Red winged black birds, some times called "Sargent Major" birds for their shoulder stripes. And yes, there was road kill, lot's of it, all the way and not just out west but the whole way home. The game of "guess the carrion" got old after just the first few hours as it was mostly raccoon. Mixed in were deer, opossum, various birds, skunks, porcupine and beavers; that's right, beavers. That was about all the excitement there was. Julia passed the time looking for National Public Radio shows on the terrestrial, satellite or i-phone radios. What?...we happen to enjoy most of NPR programs, but they can keep their opera, thank you very much. I don't like to drive at night as I have only one eye that functions for sight, due to a childhood accident, so as we neared North Platte we spotted a Comfort Inn right off the highway and checked in. Before leaving home Julia had found a "choiceprivileges"membership I had joined which is a group of eleven hotels that offers discounts to card holders, the Comfort Inn is one of those hotels. I have no idea when or why I signed up for this membership. As it happens the group, undoubtedly owned by the same corporation, was running a special; stay in two separate properties get a night free in a third. Sweet. After topping off the water and hay for the alpaca, we walked around the immediate area looking for food. A chinese restaurant (closed on sundays), a Taco Joe's fast food place (about to close) and gas station/convenience store/bank(go figure). Burgers in the hotel room microwave, a glass of scotch and good night.

Tardy Update

It's like this. The journey from Denver to Maine with ten alpaca was wholly uneventful, smooth as silk, nice like rice and dandy like candy. Oh yea, internet access is a bit sketchy across the vast country that is the USA. That being said here is how it went.

It was nice seeing cousin Andrew and catching up with our lives, some happy some not so much. I did not much care for the high desert plains but Andrew assures me the climate is quite pleasant. On Sunday we went to the Western National Complex to collect the alpaca. After arriving by taxi I phoned my boss, Ken, to find out if we needed passes or anything to get in. His instructions were to act like we knew what we were doing, so we did. I am sure the event was open to the public but it was not heavily attended, but to be fair it was the end of the last day of the show. The beasts were housed in an unadorned cinder block and cement low ceilinged space. Hundreds of alpaca both Suri and Huacaya held in small fenced-in temporary pens with a bedding of corrugated cardboard "straw, glitzy it was not. Many of the alpaca were being shorn, which involves tying them down for everyones safety, more on that later. We located the Suripaco Farm stall and I was handed an animal and instructed to accompany Ken into the ring to show three of our contestants, Adella, Dania and Eva. They are all about eight months old. As with much of my animal husbandry education it was sink or swim, I swam but it was not rocket science. We won sixth out of twelve and third out of six in a category called Get Of Sire, three offspring from the same sire(daddy) as a show of consistency in quality. Its all about the fiber baby. Suripaco farm also got an honorary award for longest distance traveled. Some time between 3:00 and 3:30 we collected the trailer, broke down the show booth, loaded up and rolled out. We had our original seven animals, two more that were purchased in Denver and we stopped to pick up Silken some thirty miles down the road.