THAT is what I call a good weekend!
So as readers of this blog know by now, we spent this past weekend up at the Green Mountain show in Essex, VT. Perhaps just as important to us as having a show that we only have to drive 1.5 hours to get to though, is the fact that Essex is located right next to the city of Burlington. Burlington is home to UVM and is also inarguably the most interesting and diverse city in the state of Vermont (read: they have more good restaurants within a five minute walk than we have within a half hour drive down here in the sticks). We always have a great time going up there, not just for the show itself but perhaps even more so for the fun we have meeting up with our friends from the alpaca community — away from the venue itself — that we don’t get to see otherwise all that often.
On Friday Jen and Jason, shanghaied for the day from his normal duties here on the farm, headed up to Essex early to take the animals and to set up our stalls at the show. I stayed behind here to do a few things on the farm and to take Maxy to an afternoon soccer game before then heading north ourselves. After arriving up there in time for a wonderful evening out with our friends Neil and Bari Padgett of A Paca Fun Farm (aka CCNF Elixir’s co owners), Saturday morning dawned all too soon. We did arrive bright and early at the show venue though, excited to be heading back into the ring for the first time since April. All told we had 28 animals of our own with us, plus one more very nice yearling male, Brontti’s Eaton Legend, that belonged to some clients of ours.
Now mind you, after almost 17 years of breeding and showing alpacas, we have some pretty high expectations for ourselves whenever we hit the show circuit. One could argue that we are the victims of our own previous results over the years. That being said, it may be some time before we get 2 day results quite as mind-numbingly good as the 2013 Green Mountain show. On Saturday alone, when most of our animals were shown, the CCNF show string won 15 blue ribbons, the vast majority of those recorded by offspring of one Snowmass Matrix Majesty. Huh. Maybe those results from the Futurity earlier this year weren’t a fluke after all? 😉
All told by the end of the show, our animals had amassed 4 Color Championships (Fawn Male & Female, White Female, and Brown Male), 4 Reserve Color Championships (Brown Female, Fawn Female, White Female, White Male), 22 1st place ribbons (including a Get-of-Sire win for Majesty), 5 2nd place ribbons, 1 3rd and 1 4th. And of those 2nds, 3 of them had other members of our team standing in 1st place above them! Not a bad weekend’s work in the least.
Green Mountain was also Max’s debut show as a solo handler and to say that he did well would be an understatement. He did so well…it was almost like he’d grown up his entire life on an alpaca farm or something. I have to say that even with our winnings at what is essentially our home show, I think that watching our youngest child handle the animals we gave him like a seasoned pro was probably the best part of the whole weekend!
Last but not least, I want to thank all of our friends that helped us out last weekend stepping in whenever we were shorthanded. We simply couldn’t have done it without them. After all, you do essentially have to be suffering from some sort of deficiency to think that taking 28 alpacas to a show with only 3 official handlers is a good idea. Special, special thanks also to Kevin Brown and his husband Marc (Eaton’s owners) for coming up for the weekend and being such good sports! Whether it was going into the ring itself, or just playing human hitching post when all of us (Ian, Jen, Max) were in a class already, they did it all with eagerness and a smile. They had said that they were looking forward to seeing what this show stuff was all about (it was their first time ever showing), so hopefully they didn’t get more than they bargained for…
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