Change o’ Plans…

For several years now, your loyal (if lately less frequent) blogger has sabre-rattled about skipping the Futurity Show, in favor of spending our kids’ April break together, doing something other than driving 40+ hours round-trip and showing alpacas on the same weekend that more often than not has coincided with our elder son’s birthday. Now, after initially thinking that we were in fact going to make the trek out to Kansas City, MO (which remains far and away our favorite show city in 19 years of playing this crazy little gig of ours) this year, we have now elected not to. We will instead be taking the opportunity to make some college visits that week with our soon to be 18 year old. Anybody got some favorite restaurants they’d like to share in the greater Daytona Beach area?

It’s worth noting, in all fairness, that up until about 5 or 6 years ago, yours truly hadn’t ever even gone to the Futurity as an exhibitor in person at all. I was spoiled rotten. With Jennifer gung-ho to attend what was and is undeniably the toughest show in North America, I had instead convinced my better half that she and an assortment of our friends, could take our show strings out there without me. Meanwhile, the boys and I stayed home and spent their vacation week doing cool things like catching (ok, deflecting and then recovering) David Ortiz’s grand slam ball while sitting in the Green Monster seats, on the occasion of Sam’s 10th birthday. Ahh, those were the days. You knew that was way too good to last though. A year or two after that, Jen experienced some occasional bouts of vertigo, and the boys not only learned how to show alpacas but started to enjoy and get pretty good at it as well. All of a sudden, my long haul driving skills were required again. C’est la vie.

In any case, it’s highly likely that this hiatus from the Futurity show is only a one year thing. The upside of this shift in our show schedule too, is that for the first time in years we will again be attending the Mapaca Jubilee in person with alpacas, instead of just mailing in fleeces to the show whose Thursday check-ins have almost always commenced less than 72 hours after the Futurity concludes on a Monday. For what it’s worth, Harrisburg, PA is almost certainly our 2nd favorite show city, and will represent a fun return to the scene of the crime, in the best sense of that term. Granted, even with our impressionable teenagers back in school that week, at our ages, chances are that the booze-fueled jaunts around the bars of the Keystone State’s capital city late at night, and the head-splitting hangovers that followed, are strictly a thing of the past. At least for now.

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