Ah...spring! Time to dust off our beauties... .and prep them up for the upcoming season. As the expression goes: "In spring, a young man's fancy turns to thoughts of love...or baseball...or..(why not?) goats. Yes! The VEA's first official outing of the year 2000 was at the scenic "L'Angelaine." For those of you not familiar with this... L'Angelaine is a goat farm located just south of Trois Rivieres on highway 132 in Becancour. Opened in 1980, its owners (Michele and Donald Lanteigne) sought to specialize in breeding and raising goats for mohair and angora wool.

So here we are at our usual meeting/departure point on Rockland road. A little spice was added with an invitation given to Le Club d'Autos Italiennes on this particular outing. And of course those of you who are familiar with my particular automotive fetishes, know that I never get enough of Italian cars. Every outing always brings out the usual assortment of cars, but there is always one car that is the attention-grabber. This time around it was a 1973 Porsche 911, that was in immaculate condition. Its' owner mentioned that he was 2 points shy of perfection at a concours d'elegance. Impressive...even more impressive (for me of course) was the fact that the car was exactly my wife's age. I asked myself "are the cars that old or is my wife that young?" Given that, I'm noticing that with each outing, maintaining a closely knit caravan is proving to be quite an endeavour. Are we losing our touch or are the number of cars just wonderfully overwhelming. None the less, off we were in clusters.

Like all good auto enthusiasts, getting there is half the fun... even if your Fiat spider is back home nursing an ailing differential and touring duties are given to your 1991 VW Golf (as some of you noted that day). Highway 132 took us through some very scenic rural landscapes of this great province of ours. And roughly two hours later... terminus. Luckily by the time we got to L'Angelaine, the clouds broke, and like the song says... here comes the sun.

Ours hosts gave us a very meticulous tour of their establishment, and enlightened us with the finer points of their profession. I never would have imagined raising mohair goats could actually be so elaborate, but our hosts demonstrated to us just how much work (and money) goes into their trade.

Once the tour was over, out came the picnic tables, the food and of course the wine (and not a moment too soon I deduced). We were also given a sample of goat cheese and goat sausage. I can only assume that the sausages were delicious seeing that all of you forgot to save some for yours truly... thanks a lot guys!

I should mention that our host Donald Lanteigne is also an auto enthusiast, and was delighted at the numerous and diversified cars that showed up. To add to that, a number of english cars that had gathered just up the road, also made an unscheduled pit stop at L'Angelaine.

All in all... a wonderful afternoon was had by all. Thanks goes out to Gaetan and Nicole Ruel for organizing the event and a heart felt "Merci" also goes to our host Michele and Donald Lanteigne.