the Green Alpaca

For eebs the alpaca-lover's birthday, I took her for a night at the Green Alpaca yurt at Crown Point Alpaca Farm. Little did we realize the treat we were in for!!


We started out with a nice fall drive to Strafford, NH. I wanted to avoid tolls, so instead of using the Green Alpaca's directions from their website, I googled my own directions...and we ended up dead-ended on a gorgeous country lane full of friendly folk waving to us in our funny boxy zipcar. The dead-end did not have the address we were looking for, and didn't run into the street we were looking for. And did not have cell reception. We tried to call anyway, and ended up with a horribly patchy phone call that just didn't work. I tried to hold absolutely still in the one reception sweet spot I found, but it just never held long enough to get any full sentences out from either end but it sounded like the Green Alpaca folks were going to come look for us so we headed back to the last place we heard them say. Long story short, they rescued us from being hopelessly lost and turns out that road was never finished by the county, so some maps erroneously link it to the road we were trying to get to. OOPS!

You know you are in a good place when it has alpacas and yurts and a host who drives out and finds you, and we had further good presentiments when Val (the owner) loved our paint-by-number Vans and farmer Annie (her young daughter) helped us haul our stuff to the yurt with her hay muscles and explained the delights of autumn olives to us.

We got there at dusk, so we got a glimpse of turkeys and chickens and Lance the friendly alpaca before heading up to the yurt. Generally alpacas are very friendly but don't dig being touched, however, Lance was happy to let you pet him and he was so soft and wonderful!

(above front) Yurkey the Turkey

(above) Hank the dog and Pansy or Pearl (can't remember which) the turkey

The yurt was fantastic.

a double-seater!

They had a fire going in the woodstove so it was super cozy when we got there. It had no running water or electricity, but there were lots of candles and they sent an electric lantern up with us. There were some burners with gas hooked up so we warmed ourselves up some hot cocoa, made quesadillas and roasted cheese dogs and marshmallows for dinner. :)

There was this cool bean bag- you take the cover off and it spreads out to a huge fluffy square that you can lounge or sleep on!
So we slept on it. :)

There were a million stars out and it was such a great getaway from the city.


In the morning we had some farm-fresh free-range chicken eggs that Annie collected for us before we arrived and some local fresh breakfast meats. Super tasty! Oh, how I love fresh real chicken eggs.

our morning view

After we finished and cleaned up, we went up to the farm and Val and Annie took us out to the field where the alpacas were and told us all about them. It was so great!!! They were so friendly and wonderful. Val also has the alpacas as therapy animals and sometimes groups of say elderly or disabled folks will come spend time with them, and it sounded like a really neat program. We got to hear lots of stories about how some of them got their names and Erin got a custom tour from Annie of all the animals and their names, then she got quizzed. ;) The highlight was getting to meet baby Guthrie. He was born 2 days before we arrived. Because he's so young and the nights were starting to get cold already, they put a little jacket on him for the night, so when we went out there, they had to catch him to take it off.

Our first glimpse of cute-overload, heartbreaker Guthrie.

Little Guthrie is pretty much the all-time cute overload of anything. They let us hold him and he got all friendly and gave us baby alpaca kisses and nuzzled up to us and won our hearts forever in one delightful swoop.

There were some other cute little cria (baby alpacas) running around, and two more mommies were due any minute but didn't have their babies while we were there. If you check out the green alpaca website you can see detailed pics of an alpaca birth. I looked at the website before we spent the weekend there, but it was fun to check it out again after our visit because then we knew the people in the pics and had petted Lance and seen the babies featured on the site and had all of our fond memories of the weekend.

After spending the morning in the field with all the alpacas and chatting with Val and Annie, we headed back up to the yurt and boiled some eggs to eat. We took them down to the field again and just ate and hung out watching alpacas. They loved to walk right up to us and all around us.

Taffy (above)

(left) baby Taffy and Momma Shiloh

We had such a pleasant time- the Green Alpaca is definitely one of my new favorite places and I highly recommend it! I'm excited to go back sometime. :) Thank you Val, Gary and Annie!!!