Walking with goats

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There is a farm not too far from where we live that offers goat hikes.
My wife loves goats. No one knows why, it’s just one of those things…
But, it isn’t too expensive so I told her I’d book a day off from work and we could go on a goat hike: https://www.maplebrookfarmstead.com/goat-hikes-new

The website is clear: "Goats don’t like hiking in the rain. In the event of inclement weather, we will cancel the hike."

All week long I’ve been watching the weather report and it looked bad. It’s rained all week and said it would turn to snow on Friday.
And, this morning the snow covered the entire region.


And, it certainly had snow on the ground outside.


The woman who runs the goat hikes told us "it’s up to you. You drive out in the snow and I’ll bring out the goats".

So, off we went.


My father waited for a blizzard to teach me to drive, so the middle of a snow storm is literally how I learned to drive. It doesn’t normally bother me much.
Other folks…


But, assuming I can keep away from the folks not good at it, I do OK and we made our way down increasingly smaller roads until we got to the farm.




It was snowing a fair bit when we got there.


You meet at the farm stand and the woman brings her goats.


The farm has a wide variety of animals in addition to the goats. We walked by their bee hives and saw the worlds oldest cow. (I’m taking her word for it, I didn’t count the rings…)


But, it’s mostly walking goats through the woods.


The goats are fairly self herding. You walk along and they know you’re with the woman who feeds them, so they stay nearby. She did say that since it rained all week, they hadn’t been out too much and they seemed happy for it. Especially as the snow lowered tree branches to their range.


There was one point where you have to cross a stream on a narrow bridge. This seemed to concern the goats a lot.


I speculated that they worried about a troll under the bridge, as is traditional.
With the goat woman ahead and my wife behind them they did finally cross.




The goat woman actually thought that it was the snow highlighting the stream we were crossing. I guess the goats hate open water and don’t even like crossing it. Normally it is not in such contrast to the ground.


Personally, I thought it was very pretty.


Soon we came back out of the woods.



The goat woman took our photo for us at the edge of the woods. My wife noted how happy she looks in this photo.


The goats seemed happy to hav low hanging branches.


Then, back across the field to where we started. The goats were excited to be close to home and rushed ahead.


They also seemed happy to find that the grass was not snow covered under the wagon.


They seemed quite happy to munch on things near their house too.



As we got ready to leave, the goat woman picked up reluctant goats and brought them to their barn. I remarked it was good my wife didn’t know you could pick them up and put them places or one would probably have ended up in our car.


Then, back down the snowy roads.


There was a town near us that was flooded to make a reservoir. This church is about all that is left, and it was relocated.


We stopped at one of our favorite restaurants to get lunch to go. They do let you sit inside, but there aren’t a lot of folks who take that option these days.


Then, home to have lunch and be glad of where we parked.