It was boiling hot at the show we went to in Holland, I was forced into the shade of the trailer and one day had a very pleasant little snooze. Leo and Marieke did the obstacle course for alpacas several times a day in the main ring with queues of children waiting their turn to take an alpaca through the slalom. Their trade stand looked amazing and was nearly always crowded. Most visitors did not know anything much about alpacas so Chas, Leo and Marieke spent most of their time in the alpaca pens explaining everything. The alpacas themselves were extraordinarily good allowing complete strangers to pet them and doing the obstacle course over and over again without complaint – such forgiving animals.
This was an upmarket show on an aristocrat’s estate with lots of stands selling expensive things, antique stuff, bulbs of course, loads of amazing outdoor wood stoves and so on. All the food and drink stands were run by the estate and you couldn’t use real money but had to exchange your coins for plastic ones if you didn’t want to starve to death. There was lots of carriage racing which I haven’t seen before. Every so often one of these rigs with either two or four horses would emerge from the woods and go hurtling round one of two water obstacles, a sort of slalom in a big pond. It was very noisy what with all the shouting from the competitors as they urged the horses onwards.
We stayed at a bed and breakfast on a fruit farm which was quiet and very pleasant, lots of fruit for breakfast, including their own apple juice and apple bread. And we were amazingly well behaved, drinking very little and early to bed, reformed characters eh?