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.