Stressful outings and a kiss goodbye

Eek another week has been and gone since I blogged, that wasn't supposed to happen!

As usual things have been non-stop, we have had human visitors, alpaca visitors, been out and about, sold some girls and managed all this with a very sick car.

Thursday last week we had three girls head down from Scotland to stay on farm for matings to Loki, Sunburst and our new grey boy Boulevarde.   As you can imagine the boys were rather pleased about this.

Leaving her three girls here Alison obviously thought it would be a shame to head home with an empty trailer so managed to somehow get me to agree to sell one of our grey girls, Midnight Star with her female cria now called Cerys (sired by Sunburst).

Alison has been trying to get me to agree to sell one of my grey girls for a number of years now, so it was about time I agreed and what better birthday present could a girl want - hope you read this Paul it's my birthday a day before Alison's!!

We had an eventful day on Friday, I was waiting for a delivery of camlibra which was very late, when it did turn up the driver had been forced to take avoiding action on the A69 from a car driving too fast round a bend and my feed had ended up shewn all over the back of the wagon.  Not only were we already late for mobile matings we now had to unload every bag by hand individually.

Things were just set to get worse!  Off we set with three boys in the trailer and going up one of the big long hills over at Rothbury there was a pop and hissing noise, fantastic; a puncture, or so we thought.  Changing wheels is a pink job in our house!  When I got out the car all the tyres were in tact and fully inflated, umm so what was it?

Off we set again but with something not quite right however by this time we were on the downhill section and got to the A697 ok, but on the flat it was obvious things weren't right, smoke and not much power is never a good sign even less so when you have the trailer attached.

It turned out to be a split turbo pipe, thankfully Jackie & Joe from Rivenherd Alpacas (where we were heading) offered to come and get the boys whilst Paul waited for the AA who kindly did a temporary fix until the garage can replace the pipe.  The trailer now has recovery cover!!

Unfortunately the garage (the car is still under warranty) couldn't get the car booked in or provide a courtesy car for the weekend which wasn't great as we had outing booked for Sunday & Monday with the alpacas. So it was off to another garage for a stronger temporary fix to allow us to tow the trailer this weekend until we could apply more pressure to the dealership!

Saturday we had a number of walk and talk visitors who all thoroughly enjoyed their alpaca experience, even if the last couple did get well and truly soaked.

Sunday we were off to Nissan in Sunderland for their family fun day and Monday was our annual outing to the Glendale Show.  Both events were fantastic and the alpaca were a huge hit as usual as was out knitwear and alpaca goodies.

This morning Paul has headed off  down to Bozedown Alpacas with a couple of girls to be mated, Im staying home because we still have a few girls due, including Marne who is now on 393 if she is actually pregnant and Pressure who is on 347 and looking like she wont be long.