"I want one real bad..."

These pictures remind me of a time when Emily posted grandpa's goats on craigslist and someone sent her an email saying something along the lines of "Hi, I live in Hayward.  How big of a yard do goats need?  I want one real bad!"

 I'm also reminded of the time that a couple of yuppies (also from craigslist) showed up at Gma & Gpa's in their mini-cooper with a golden lab in the backseat.  They drove away with a struggling baby goat on the wife's lap in the passenger seat.  I still crack myself up with fanciful images of baby goat leaping to freedom through the mini-cooper window after a herculean goat-man-woman-dog struggle on highway 101.

But I digress.  Just a few blocks down from the Porvenir de los Andes Winery, there is a small goat cheese factory that gives tours.  Tours that come with a free wheel of goat cheese!  Which would be great, but is slightly less great when at the end you find out that they don't make soft chevre, but rather some sort of semi-hard variety.  It tasted good, but it was too soft to be a yummy manchego-like cheese, and too hard to be even a feta.  It left me unsatisfied.  But the goats were awesome.

Being springtime, there were LOTS of baby goats. And the only thing cuter than lots of baby goats is lots of baby goats in the same pen as chicks.

Some of the little guys were really friendly, like this one who immediately became my pet.

But it is a cruel, hard world.  Many of the baby goats were male and thus destined to be sold to butcher shops.  And as Pedro commented, "this one looks delicious."