Celebrated Christine’s birthday over the weekend. I enjoy planning out surprises and she enjoys letting me, ha! It works.
So at 6:15am I packed a picnic up (in secret!) and told Christine to meet me in the barn. I went down, cleaned off Llami as best I could (I know, his poor tail is full of wood chips and burrs–if any llama folk have advice I would love it! He gets so upset when we try to clean them out), and then I put his pack saddle on him and sprayed him down with homemade bug spray (ACV/water and several essential oils). Christine came down to the barn and we were off!
Now aside from the trainer who dropped him off putting the pack on that first day to show me he could wear it, he has not worn a pack, at least not with me. Definitely not a pack with gear in it (not that it was very heavy). And I really had wanted to practice ahead of time to make sure he was decent about it (picturing a llama running away with our picnic lunch is not much fun!) but I just didn’t have a good opportunity to do so in secret where Christine wouldn’t figure out the plans. And usually we are on the same wavelength anyway and so many of her birthday surprises over the years have not been actual surprises b/c she gets into my brain and knows things (without even wanting to know!).
He did want to walk briskly but honestly, oh my gosh, he was GREAT! Some of my plans had to change (I had a tie-out for him but Christine decided the ground was too hard to deal with that so we held him on his 25 ft lead the whole time). But it worked. I had mowed around some trees really nice in our second pasture and once we got there I took the pack off and Llami had fun exploring that area–he had never even been back there at all so I’m just very impressed by how well he did! Llamas are about 1,000 times better than horses if you ask me, which you didn’t but I’ll tell you anyway!
Christine was very surprised and I believe delighted by the morning. We had the most beautiful perfect weather (granted, we left with Llami at 6:47am) and the food was great too. I made blueberry muffins and because we don’t eat gluten or sugar sometimes (often) they don’t taste great. We also had a sparkling juice (we’re sober and coming up on our 4 year sobriety date in a few days!).
We can’t wait to be able to offer llama hikes and picnics to farm visitors. It really was special, and as I pointed out to Christine, how many people can say that they had a llama picnic on their birthday?