ENGL 210

First Critique -Travel Experience

One of my best traveling experiences I had off campus while living at Longwood was visiting the BrightEyed Alpaca Retreat for my World Vision Citizen 110 class. This alpaca retweet is about nine minutes away from Longwood’s campus. The reason we went to this retreat was not only to visit the alpacas, but also for us to also learn how loving and caring alpacas are towards humans and how useful alpacas fur can be used. When arriving at the farm, the first thing you see is a beautiful house with tons of land, and next to the house is their giant alpaca farm. The owners of this farm then greeted us all with big smiles and took half the class to visit and pet the alpacas, and the other half went to make homemade soaps with alpaca fur and explained to all of us how gentle and sweet their alpacas are. 

My group was the first group to go and meet the alpacas. When I first saw the alpacas up close, I noticed the alpacas had many different colors to their fur ranging from brown, yellow/whitish, white, or mainly yellow. Before we stepped into the fence where the alpacas were, the owner of the alpacas explained to us that alpacas are really sociable animals, but that they can be skittish when you first come across them unless you have food in your hands. He then gave us all food to feed to the alpacas and once we all enter the fence and the alpacas smelled food in our hands, they all came running up to us and they were one of the friendliness animals I have ever met. The alpaca I was feeding the most was brownie, and brownie was very sweet and while I was petting him, his fur was very thick but fluffy at the same time.

While learning about the alpacas at the farm, they explained to us that since alpacas are prey to other animals, they must need a guard watch dog 24/7. The owner then led us up to a large barn on top of a hill not far from the alpacas, where three Great Pyrenees dogs live and sleep. The owner of the farm showed us how these dogs enter the alpaca fence if they sense that the alpacas were endangered.

After meeting and petting the dogs and alpacas on the farm, we then headed to our last station, which was making bars of soap out of the alpaca fur. It was quite interesting making soap with alpaca fur because we had a small bar of soap and then with the alpaca fur we had, we would wrap it around the bar of soap, put it in water and rub the fur on the bar of soap until the fur was fully condensed onto the soap. After the exciting day of meeting the alpacas, I can defiantly say it was one of my coolest traveling experience I have had living in Farmville.