Maine Llama Drill Team

We traveled about sixty miles farther in Maine than usual, past Augusta to Windsor and the Maine Fiber Frolic. I’ll start with my best lamb picture:

It was a cool (not to say chilly) drizzly day. We parked amidst lots of other Subarus — ideal cars for this sort of parking lot —

We were wearing our muck boots so we didn’t mind walking through mud, of which there was plenty, nor wet grass.

You can see from the line for food how people were dressed for the weather. This was June 10, people!

Most of the fiber was in two largish exhibit halls. Several vendors were in the sheep shed, and a couple, like this one and A Touch of Twist, were outdoors in tents.

I guess the high point of the event was seeing the Maine Llama Drill Team in action, in the pulling arena, the covered area in the background of the picture above. As soon as we got to the event we asked people at an information table what to do, and they said to be sure not to miss the drill team. It had shown up on the schedule at the web site as happening Sunday, so being there for the performance was an extra bonus.

When I googled “llama drill team” I found some besides the Maine group. It looks as though there are some people in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois who are into this stuff too. But the high page rank llama drill team is the Maine one.

Don’t expect the kind of precision marching that you see at the Marine parade grounds in DC. The llamas really couldn’t care less about keeping in time to the music, or in line with the rest of the drill team They good-naturedly put up with the silly humans, at least most of the time. A couple of times a llama balked and refused to follow the person leading it. In those cases, the person would walk around the llama, and it would turn around and then go along in the original direction after one complete turn. It was sort of “Oh, you want to go that way. Why didn’t you say so?”

Arlene was very impressed by the diversity of llamas in the group, as to sizes, shapes, and haircuts, and the age range of the humans, from a little girl probaby under 10 to middle-aged men and women.

The team first did some back-and-forth parading to “The Washington Post March,” then a routine with a lot of 4-person (plus 4-llama), 8-person (plus 8-llama), and a whole ensemble pinwheel to “Can You Feel the Love Tonight?” At one point of the 4-person pinwheels everyone hugged and petted their llama, and you really could feel the love. Then, like a university band at a halftime show, the people and llamas formed the word “LOVE”. I suddenly thought that it was a shame that Elton John would probably never get to see his song used this way. I was pretty sure that he wouldn’t have expected it.

And more of the sights:

— a whimsical back on an Adirondack chair at a table in the food booth

— a fraction of the fleeces. These were in the fleece competition; dozens more bags were on tables and the ground in the shed.

— I could have learned lots about breeds of sheep if I had spent more time in the sheep barn. This breed, I think it’s called the Jacob sheep from the Bible story of Jacob getting the spotted sheep from his father-in-law’s flock, tends to have multiple horns. This one has four horns, one low on the other side out of this picture.

We stayed until the show closed at four. In fact, I think we took a last look at the  A Touch of Twist booth after four. On the way home, we filled the tank up at a general store down the road. When’s the last time you saw a gas pump with mechanical dials instead of an electronic display for the price?