The Story of the Broken Windmill
(and how we came up with the name)
This whole thing, llamas included, started out as a joke.
We were career federal employees (one of us still is), working in downtown
Washington, DC, one of us at one end of Pennsylvania Avenue and one at the
other. In 1994, we went to Reno, Nevada, to visit my brother-in-law and
his family. We didn't have anything particular to do one day, so they
suggested we go to the Nevada State Fair. While walking around, we saw the
local 4-H groups there for a llama show. We walked around the llama barn,
looked into those dark and beautiful llama eyes, and started to joke about
quitting our jobs, moving west, and raising llamas.
After a while, the joke became semi-serious. We began to
visit llama ranches around the Maryland and Virginia areas, asking questions,
taking photos, and learning more about these incredible animals. We were
starting to think this was something we really could do. By 1996, we were
looking around back there for property which was affordable and on which we
could have these animals. Some stuff happened (specifically the Oklahoma
City bombing) and we decided, just for fun, that I should look on the internet
for a job out west. There were only a few interviews before I received an
offer to move to Denver, Colorado, and return to the private sector. We
moved in early 1997 from the big city to a small town here on the eastern
plains. We bought our first three llamas sight-unseen through Bruce Ellis
(http://lazyb.com), a friend I had made here who
was brokering a deal for a family needing to sell three llamas. We set up
shop on our 10-acre ranch and suddenly, we were in the llama business.
So How Did the Ranch Get Its' Name?
Bruce had advised us that a bottle of wine was a good tool to
use while naming a llama ranch. So we looked out around at all we
had....and all we had, at that point, was a broken windmill at the west end of
the property. We laughed about that at the time, but the name stuck.
I liked the Quixotic reference about the whole thing. Besides, we weren't
likely to duplicate anyone else's ranch name with that one!
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