el paca pastures

We didn't know what to expect in visiting El Paca Pastures - no one in my family had been to an alpaca farm before. We talked about whether this would be a 15 minute, 1 hour or half day visit and when we pulled up and saw the place, we all though 15 minutes - but we were totally wrong. We enjoyed a full hour at the farm learning all about alpacas and llammas from the enthusiastic owner operator Eric. His passion for raising alpacas is readily apparent and entertaining; he was able to answer all our questions and more. We were lucky to have his full attention and we learned a lot. (There were no other guests at the time we visited, a weekday morning in February.)Eric introduced us to each of the animals and we were able to feel the alpaca's wonderfully soft fleece and feed them grass, too. My 8 year old animal-loving daughter has come away adoring alpacas. The animals themselves are very docile and cute. None on the premises spit at people or made any noise. Alpacas aren't like llamas; we didn't know what to expect before our visit.The farm has a small gift shop that has a good variety of fairly priced alpaca items - socks, toys, hats, shawls, etc. In case you don't know, alpaca is a luxuriously soft and beautiful fiber. The shop also has yarn that is locally spun from alpaca that live on the farm. Each yarn label has a cute picture of the actual alpaca that contributed the fiber, along with the name of the animal.Given that visiting the farm is free, this attraction is the best bang-for-buck place we visited during our month long visit to southern California. No, it's not better than Disneyland, but that's a whole different price range :) There is a donation box at the store, but Eric didn't point it out.