🐐Time for some goat yoga!

In fairness there was very little 'yoga'ering' going on...

Now let’s be clear from the start of this post, goat yoga was not top on the bucket list of items to do before we die. Saying that, it was great fun and it probably should have been!

We have to explain why we ended up with having a post that includes ‘goats’ and ‘yoga’ in the title. I (Mark) have recently formed a self serve dog wash company with a friend and when Christmas 2024 came around it was time to swap gifts of joy to celebrate the season, of course it could not had been a pair of socks or the customary box of Quality Street. It had to be more unique than that! We gifted my business partner an hours pass in a local cold bath plunge facility, he gifted us an hours experience of goat yoga located in Newark, East Midlands.

This gave us a great opportunity for us to get Lillibet, our beloved motorhome, out of storage and give her a decent run out for the first time this year. Now getting a 1994 Niesmann & Bischoff motorhome back up and running again after being sat on a storage site for winter is not just the case of turning the engine on. We first had to deal with some squatters that had made their home in our van during the winter. Now, we can’t blame them, our van is cosy, but they had to move out before we settled back into van life adventures. With some friendly mouse catchers deployed and an overnight wait, said squatter was safely removed from our home on wheels. The next challenge we had was the battery.

Now the battery is not your standard car battery size, this battery is the size of a small fridge (I jest, but only slightly!) and is tucked right in a far corner of the engine compartment. It was like the designers of the van had forgotten that a battery was needed and suddenly had to get in wedged in somewhere. We had taken the battery out when the van went into storage and it sat in our utility room on trickle charge throughout the winter, now was the time to get it back into the van. All I am going to share at this time is that there were a few words spoken getting this battery into its position…video evidence can be found on YouTube.

Battery in place, an inside/outside clean down and a full tank of diesel of we were of up to the East Midlands for the weekend. Here we come yoga’ering goats!

We stayed in a motorhome and caravan park on the outskirts of Newark, a place called Milestone Caravan Park and it was stunning. The pitches were all hard standing and connected to electricity, surrounding a small fishing lake with an additional lake to the rear of our van. We could not have asked for a more beautifully positioned pitch for our first proper stay for the season. So with the van all set up and us all settled for the weekend, we enjoyed the slow pace of life ready for our upcoming experience.

Sunday afternoon came and we were booked in for the last slot of the day for the goat yoga, so with the van disconnected from the site, off we went on a 30 minute’s drive to White Post Farm. On arrival we headed into the reception area and got directed, along with about twenty other goat yoga virgins, to a barn that housed the goats. I have to share something at this point, full admission to being quite anxious. Louise was totally breezing it, I on the other hand was shall we say, ‘nervous’!

This is where my slight nervousness turned to slight panic. I could see goats in a pen near to where the group was being collected together…and these goats were big, and I mean full size goats. As we got allocated a yoga matt and given some instructions on what will be happening from the yoga instructor, we then got introduced to the goats in question that occupied the pen next to our yoga area. It was at this point that I let out a large sigh of relief, the larger goats were not going to be joining us in our yoga session. The goats that we had were a lot smaller in stature, some of them not so ‘small’ in weight category, and quite playful.

As instructed, we all put our loose items into buckets that hung on the sides of the pens so that the goats would not eat their way through our belongs and sat crossed legged on the matts. It was now time for the goats to meet the yogi’s (group of yoga people apparently) as the goats got introduced one by one into our yoga pen. As the yoga teacher got us limbering up, the goats started to eat their way through the straw that was left near each matt. It all started out so serenely, quite tame in fairness. Then the fun started…the childs pose was requested by the teacher. As instructed, we all went into our own version of the childs pose and this is when the goat handler started to ‘encourage’ these cute little goats into our personal space.

If you have met a goat, you will probably be aware that they like to jump on anything that has height. At that moment in time this group of people, including myself and Louise were that height, and as the goat handler walked around with goat treats in hand these goats were going to use anything they could to position themselves closer to those treats then any of their goat friends. That is when we got ‘goat mounted’. These goats were happily jumping on our backs, head butting their other goat friends off peoples back to get some treats. All this with our laughter erupting around the pen.

How would we describe having a goat jump around on your back, well, it was like having a goat jump on your back. They are actually quite light (apart from one named Janet, she was obviously the one that likes her food) and their dainty hoofs felt like being gently prodded by a wooden spoon. We had about 15/20 minutes with this group of goats and it was a right laugh. But then they got moved back to their pen to make way for the new additions to the farm.

Baby goats!

Baby goats, aka ‘kids’, were only a few weeks old and relatively fresh to the yoga scene. They did not care that there was a bunch of mainly middle-aged midlanders sitting on the floor of a pen surrounded by straw and goat poop, they were coming in for some cuddles. And boy did they get the attention they deserved! Cute or what!

On reflection…it was brilliant and we would highly recommend giving it a go.

Till next week, when I hand the next post back to Louise…have a great week 👋🏻