Here are a couple of photos:
Any guesses? OK, here’s another clue:
Last but not least:
Oh, OK. We’re in eastern Canada for a couple of weeks. We started in Toronto visiting friends. Of course we had to go to Niagara Falls. We’re in Montreal now for a few days, then it’s on to Quebec City tomorrow, then the Maritimes. Posting from an iPad leaves something to be desired, but I’ll try to post a few photos along the way.
Oh dear. Not again. I’m apparently hopeless at keeping this thing current. How about I just post a few more photos of our June trip to Montana? Some of them even have to do with knitting.
The car, ready to go. We’re light packers, what can I say? After we got all loaded up it dawned on us that we needed to pick up my sister Diane and her husband at the airport in Kalispell on the last leg of the trip out to our cabin. We hoped they were traveling light.
First stop, Spokane, at the historic Davenport Hotel.
Mr. Davenport interrupted his newspaper reading for a sock knitting lesson.
Our cabin on the river in Montana.
The family!
View across the river to Glacier National Park. It really sucked to have to look at that all week.
Polebridge Mercantile, a hopping place out in the middle of nowhere.
A nice little knitting spot.
There’s just nothing to say about that. We took about a million photos, and every view was spectacular. It’s just difficult to capture the magnificence of the park in photos.
I did find a few yarn shops along the way.
Some tough competition.
Just a little snow.
More crappy views.
Finished socks, just in time for Father’s Day.
I don’t really need to do a Finished Project post, do I? Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Sock yarn, color name A River Runs Through It. For John, same old pattern. I did a bit of modification around the ankle, doing the gusset decreases every third row for awhile so he can get them over his instep. I usually do my socks on 72 stitches, I did these on 76 stitches and they fit him perfectly.
Flute playing in a roadside campground! I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here, but I started taking flute lessons back in March. I used to play a million years ago, then it sort of fell by the wayside over the years. I bought a new flute in February, then found the Community Music Program at the University of Puget Sound here in Tacoma. I take a private lesson once a week, and yes, I did practice on the trip. I had to be a bit creative on the road trip back since playing in a hotel room probably would annoy people. We stopped at this campground which was totally deserted, and I practiced until the mosquitoes threatened to cart me off.
Enough for now. I’ll leave you with a photo of Lewey.
He wishes he could have gone along.
We are close to the end of our lovely vacation. We spent last week in our little cabin on the North Fork of the Flathead River in Montana. The deck of the cabin was about ten steps from the river, and directly across the river was the boundary for Glacier Park. It couldn’t have been a more lovely spot to spend the week with my two sisters and their husbands. I’ll get around to posting more photos later, but here is just one.
After we left the Glacier area yesterday, John and I headed home. We drove here from western Washington, and we’re taking a couple days to drive back home across northern Montana, Idaho, and Washington, just to see some parts of the states that we have never been to before. We stayed at the Lodge at Sandpoint last night, where that photo was taken, and had a great martini on the deck. In case you didn’t know, June 20th was National Martini Day. We did celebrate it properly on the correct date, but figured this was too beautiful a spot not to extend the celebration.
I did find some yarn shops, by the way. There was a nice shop in Kalispell, and another lovely little shop in Whitefish. There was one listed in Libby, but like a lot of storefronts in Libby, it was empty. There must not be many knitters there.
We’re headed back into Washington this morning, and then home tomorrow. I’ll post more photos later.
This is going to be a very short post, since our internet access here is slowwwwww. We’re in a cabin outside Glacier Park for a week with my sisters and their spouses. It’s glorious, we’re having a blast, but the photos will mostly have to wait till later. Here’s one:
I did finish John’s socks the day we got here, just in time for Father’s Day. He put them right on and wore them for three days straight, so I think he likes them. I’ll post a photo later. That’s the new sock up there. It’s Lorna’s Laces sock yarn, the color name is Live Long & Prosper. It’s the colors of the Star Trek uniforms. What can I say, it amused the geek in me.
That’s all for now. The thing to do when the internet is slow is to take it as a sign and turn off the devices. I’ll post more photos when we get home.
And that pretty much says it, right? I only have crummy phone photos for you, and not many of those. Yes, I brought the “real” camera, and yes, I’ve taken lots of “real” photos. I just forgot to bring that little extra piece that lets me upload photos from the camera to the iPad. So you get a few phone photos instead.
We’re on the Big Island, which I’ve never been to before. I think it might be my favorite of all the islands. We’re staying “upcountry” on the hillside overlooking Kailua-Kona, with a terrific view of the bay, well out of the traffic of the main town. The cottage that we’re in is part of a small coffee farm, and we have noisy chickens and tweety birds instead of city sounds. We don’t have air conditioning, but it’s been quite pleasant without it. We have wall to wall sliding glass doors along the ocean side, and it’s been nice enough to sleep with the doors open at night, and it’s been cool enough that we’ve needed blankets. And wool socks at night.
Here are a few photos.
Yes, I found a yarn shop. I only bought one thing. The shop had a surprisingly large inventory, with a great selection, but my vacation yarn buying goal is to try to buy stuff I can’t get at home. Here’s what I found.
It’s from local alpacas, hand spun, natural colored. There are 400 yards of it, I might try dyeing it with some of my natural dye stuff that I have at home.
Being upcountry in the tropics, you might guess that there is a bit of wild life here. Our hosts warned us about mongoose, and the rare wild boar that wanders in. Last night’s fauna was a gecko that we found in one of the kitchen cabinets.
Last but not least, a Finished Project! This was one of my January goals.
I’m not going to do a whole Project Details thing with these. The yarn is Frolicking Feet, from Done Roving. The color is Pot o’ Gold. I used size 0 Pony Pearl double points.
I’ve already started another pair but that’s for a different post. Blogging from the road on an iPad sounds lovely, but the WordPress dashboard interface with the iPad browser is less than ideal. That’s it for today, we’re off on another adventure!
We are back in Amsterdam, and will fly home tomorrow. It took 14 days to get down the river to Budapest, and a little under two hours to fly back here! Here are a few more photos. Even I’m getting tired of them…
The town of Melk, where there is a magnificent Abbey and a very cute little main market area.
Then we came to Vienna. Neither of us has been there before, but it is a city I could easily return to for a week’s vacation. Here are a few highlights:
That’s the town incinerator. You might wonder why I would find that fascinating. It was designed by a man named Friedensreich Regentag Dunkelbunt Hundertwasser. Those of you who are knitters know that the sock yarn company, Opal, used several of his designs as inspiration for one of their sets of sock yarn. I knitted a pair myself, and might just have bought some more on this trip.
ABC in Vienna:
That’s the Hotel Sacher. We had to stop and eat a Sacher Torte. Yum!
I’ll bet you’d like to see a close up. Here you go…
That was in a bakery window. It’s a baked replica of the imperial crown! They wouldn’t let me try that one on, either.
We also saw the summer residence for Maria Theresa and the rest of the Hapsburg gang.
I suppose they needed a big house, since she had sixteen children. Only eleven survived to grow up, but still, that’s a lot of bedrooms.
That’s a photo taken in Bratislava. I missed that stop, since I finally caught the respiratory bug that swept through the cruise boat for the whole two weeks. I still feel like I have ebola or something equally as dire.
Next up is Budapest, but I’m saving that one for its own post. Both John and I agreed that it was our favorite place on the trip. We were on the boat overnight there, and then stayed on another day and a half, and could have stayed another several days at least. I’ll show photos later when I get them sorted.
Last but not least, new socks in the making:
The yarn is Frolicking Feet sock yarn, by Done Roving, color Pot O’ Gold. I got mine here. There might be some left in the shop, though I tried to remedy that. This might be my new favorite sock yarn. The colors are splendidly intense, and the yardage is amazing. It might even be better than Wollmeise (shhhhh…don’t tell anyone).
We head home in the morning. I’m off to dinner; we’re staying in the same B&B in Amsterdam where we were on the first leg of the trip, and our hosts kindly offered to make us supper tonight. Since Petra is a chef and does cooking classes, we weren’t about to turn that down!
Which stands for “Another Bloody Cathedral”, or “Another Bloody Castle”. We’re now 16 days into our vacation, with three more full days of the cruise left, then we’re staying in Budapest another couple of days, then home. I can’t possibly do a blog post for each stop on the cruise, since I just had to dump a nearly full 8 GB photo card off my camera so we can finish the trip. That’s way too many photos to show you all. So here are the highlights. Get yourself a beverage before you start…
Cologne, or Koln. Magnificent cathedral. Of all the ABCs we’ve seen, it’s my favorite. Gothic excess out the wazoo.
It wouldn’t fit in one photo, so you get two.
We had a glass blowing demo on board one morning. He was a comedian as well as a glass artist.
Cruising through the Rhine Gorge. Lots of ABCs here.
That was taken at the Residenz Palace in Wurzburg. I’m not showing you a photo of the Palace, it looks just like a humongous castle and a church combined.
Teddy Bear shop in Rothenburg:
I found a new friend for Sweetpea. He doesn’t have a name yet, his ear tag says Fynn, but I think he needs a German name, don’t you? Any suggestions?
I had a birthday, and shared it with about 140 or so new friends!
This was in Bamberg. I wanted a photo of the guys in front, but pretended to shoot the monument.
Nuremberg. What can I say? This was one of the most sobering places I’ve ever been. That’s Hitler’s rally grounds, never completed. What he was planning to build there would have been terrifying.
That’s of course the courtroom where the Nuremberg trials were held.
On a cheerier note, sunrise off our “balcony”.
ABC. This one is in Regensburg, or RRRRrrrrrrreghghensburgggg, as Jan, our cruise director pronounces it. This has probably been one of my favorite of the cities we’ve seen so far. This may have had something to do with it.
John continues to be amazed at my ability to find yarn. I was like one of those people who won a contest and could take home everything I could pick up in five minutesl
Do you want to see a closeup of what I found? I thought so. Here’s Sweetpea and not-Fynn to show you.
Doesn’t Sweetpea look happy? She might have found her true love. I should ask her, she probably knows his name.
Next up was Salzburg. It was a lovely city, and I could show you lots of photos of castles, old buildings, and churches. Here’s a different one:
That’s a bridge in the city over the river Inn, which runs into the Danube. The tradition in the city is for lovers to pledge their commitment to each other by placing a lock on the bridge with their names or initials on it. I asked the guide if they have to take it away if things don’t work out, which sounded like a reasonable question to me. She didn’t have an answer.
Last, but not least, finished socks! I’m not doing the whole “Finished Project” thing. I started these eons ago (February 29th, according to Ravelry). The yarn is Unique Sheep Tinsel Toes, color Primary Ink, same old pattern, size 2 mm Ivore needles.
It’s cocktail hour, so I need to go find a glass of wine. We’re finally on the beautiful Danube river, we head to Vienna tomorrow. Stay tuned!
We’re already more than half way through our two week river cruise on the Ama Dolce, so I thought I should post some photos!
We have a pretty slow internet connection on the ship, so I’ll just post a short bit of the trip for now. We started in Amsterdam, of course, boarding our river boat last week. Our first full day on the ship we cruised the canals leaving the city, on our way to Dusseldorf.  Here are a few photos of the first day on the ship.
One of the many locks we’ve gone through:
After disembarking there the next morning, we took a bus to tour the Floriade 2012 Horticultural Expo. I’m not much of a gardener, and expected this to be more of a boring flower show, but it was absolutely fabulous! Here are some photos:
There were three of these creatures walking through the expo at the entrance. They were marvelous, and made me just laugh out loud.
Giants:
The Willowman’s building projects:
A fire breathing dragon:
Very big wellies:
Back on board for some knitting:
And of course, the requisite towel art, by our cabin attendant, Jack.
Next up is Cologne, but my internet is about to give out on me, since we mostly only have a connection while we’re docked in port. I’ll leave that to next time!
We’ve been having a terrific time in Amsterdam. We arrived Tuesday morning, and have been busy touring the city and nearby countryside for the past several days. We have friends in Manchester that met us here, and we had a jam-packed week trying to see everything there is to see in such a short time. Tomorrow we board the cruise ship for the river trip, but it already feels like we’ve had a great vacation! Here are some highlights:
Canal tour:
Where Rembrandt slept (actually where the servant girl slept, but Rembrandt’s house!):
Butterflies at the Botanical Garden:
Friends eating and drinking:
Tulip Museum:
Cheese Museum:
Oh look! A yarn shop! What a surprise!*
Churches:
A very creepy and crabby cherub:
Ceiling at the Maritime Museum:
Pirate ship at the same museum. It’s really not a pirate ship, but looked like one to me.
Knitting on the bus to Edam for a day tour out of the city:
Cheese shop at Edam:
More church photos, this time Edam:
“Wild” life of sorts. This was somebody’s back yard.
I wanted to barricade myself in this shop and never leave.
More wildlife. I took this as a good sign; where there are sheep, there must be wool.
More you-know-what:
Seashore at Marken village:
Another yarn shop:
And again:
The last yarn shop was Penelope’s. The owner has a bicycle in the front window with a knitted cover. If you’ve ever been to Amsterdam, you know how popular bikes are here:
Here’s the knitted version:
And here is the Holland Haul:
A better picture of the little snips I found:
And a better photo of that silk/wool blend:
Tomorrow we board the boat, though we don’t set sail until Monday evening, so you may see more Amsterdam photos!
*I’m pretty sure John has figured out that I don’t just “stumble in” to yarn shops without doing some research ahead of time. I think Humphrey was impressed though at my skill at sniffing them out. It’s the wool fumes, I suppose!
I could just stop right there and post the title. It’s been a busy month, between the Hawaii trip, and friends in town, and work. I think I’ve knit one or two rows on that Evenstar lace thing, and one or two rows on my poor neglected sock. I might have even done a few rows on that Faery Ring hood thing. But really, they look about the same, so I’m not dragging them all out and taking pictures of them just so you can snicker at what a lame knitter I am.
I did get an iPad, though, which has consumed countless hours of time playing around with it. I found the KnitCompanion app, which was worth the price of the device itself. It has the ability to import patterns and then lets you cut them up into manageable pieces, and import charts with row markers, highlighters, etc. You can even mark rows with lifelines, and add your own text or audio notes to sections. It is not a cheap app, but most definitely worth it, especially if you knit lace. The support from the software designers on Ravelry is tremendous. Here’s a photo.
Now if I would just spend more time knitting and less time playing goofy games.
That’s pretty much it for knitting news. I knew you’d be thrilled.
Oh wait, I forgot one BIG thing. I won the first ever Knitter’s Chick contest over at Kim’s, and won runner up for Knitter’s Hunk. I nominated Maggie Smith for “chick”, and she won quite handily. I nominated Benedict Cumberbatch (Sherlock, anyone??) for Hunk, and he was narrowly defeated by Liam Neeson. I won some cool prizes, but I’m too lazy to get up and take one more photo.
Last but not exactly least, we’re off on vacation again.
This time it’s just for us. We’re leaving in the morning to fly to Europe. We spend a few days in Amsterdam, where our friends from Manchester are meeting us. Humphrey and John have every moment plotted, including dinner reservations for all four nights that we’re in Amsterdam. They have a detailed itinerary sketched out, so all I have to do is grab the camera and my neglected sock and head out. Then John and I get on the Ama Dolce river boat for a two week cruise of the Rhine, the Main, and the Danube, ending up in Budapest. Any recommendations on yarn shops along the way would be welcomed.
As usual, the house and the yarn stash are well guarded by our two vicious attack dogs, our house sitter, and Lucy, who hangs out in the stash closet just to make sure none of you sneak in. Here she is.
I’m sure there will be wi-fi along the way, so I’ll try to keep you posted!
I figured I’d better post something to prove we’re really here! I was scanning through my spam filter this morning before deleting, and found this comment:
Its like you read my mind! You appear to know a lot about this, like you wrote the book in it or something. I think that you can do with a few pics to drive the message home a little bit, but instead of that, this is magnificent blog.
So here are a few pics.
First up, the Aquarium:
This is one wired family. Here we are researching lunch possibilities. Huck is on the phone with somebody important, I think.
And…the decision was the Rainbow Drive-In, for some local plate lunches.
The Dole Plantation. I didn’t get any photos inside the maze. Just imagine standing in front of your hedge. This is the world’s largest maze. A couple of us conquered it. The rest of us needed a rum drink after about 2/3 of the maze.
Plantation garden shots:
Cousins solving the problems of the world:
Shrimp truck! This was the highlight of the north shore excursion. Garlic shrimp!
Luau!
Sunset!
Malaekahana beach! This isn’t the calmest beach here by far, but the kids (older and younger) had a blast riding the waves, and we almost had the whole beach to ourselves.
Shave ice!
The end, for now; today is a pool/relax day. Tomorrow we tour Pearl Harbor and the Missouri. More great big fun!
Is that enough pics?
Boy, that week went by fast! All the same I’ll be glad to get home to the house and mutts. I do miss them when we’re gone, though I know they are all in good hands with our house sitter. In fact, I’m pretty sure that at least the dogs like her better.
We went on a sunset sailing cruise of Banderas Bay last night, and I had to leave you with these photos.
That was our sister ship.
We actually saw a mama and baby whale, quite unusual for a night time sailing. They circled around our boat for about 20 minutes, giving us a nice show!
Of course there was knitting.
This was one of the eleventy billion sunset photos we got.
And of course, a full moon! What’s not to like: terrific weather, whales, an open bar, beautiful sunset, and a full moon! And knitting!
And that’s us at the end of the evening.
We’re headed to the airport in a few hours, so I’m off to pack! See you on the flip side! Buenos dias!
So what have we been up to??
We went to church at the local cathedral:
We got invited to a nice lunch:
I found yarn, sort of:
We spent a whole day at the resort doing next to nothing:
Today we took a tour out of town, and went to a botanical garden:
We saw cheese being made in a tiny village (and tortillas though there is no photo of that):
Our tour guide, Sandra, gave us the rundown on how tequila is made:
I found a parrot that wasn’t very impressed with my knitting skills:
We bumped around the countryside in an open truck:
And we tasted tequila, of course!
We have one more full day here, then home. The latest report from the home front is that the temperature is below freezing, and there is an inch of new snow on the ground. Sheesh. I wonder if they’d believe me if I called in sick and just stayed here. Right. Not so much. Later…
Puerto Vallarta, of course! Here you go:
I guess I’m easily amused. 24 hours in this sunny place, and my seasonal affective disorder is all but a dim memory.
P.S. The boys making those mojitos and margaritas last night were quite fascinated by the sight of me knitting a sock. I’m pretty sure nobody knits here.
I guess I can’t just say Scotland, since the first leg of our trip was to Manchester England! Here’s the first installment of the Scotland/UK photos. John is still sorting through them. I was pleasantly surprised by the Manchester part of the trip. I knew that we would enjoy seeing Humphrey & Helen again, since they are delightful people, but I didn’t expect to be so captivated by Manchester and their little corner of England. Here are eleventy billion photos of our two days there.
Our first day, we took a walking tour of much of Manchester. The architecture, museums, shops, and restaurants are quite lovely and interesting. Here we are by the waterfront.
And Helen & I in front of the Lowry, a gorgeous complex that includes a performance hall, theaters, restaurants, and shops.
More of the local architecture:
That’s a plaque in a local hotel that commemorates where Mr. Rolls met Mr. Royce, and they agreed to do business together.
That’s the town hall building, on Albert Square. Here are a couple from inside the building.
We saw two lovely old libraries in the city. The first is part of a music boarding school, the Chetham library. It was magnificent. This is the oldest public library in the English speaking world.
Here’s a photo from the second library, the John Rylands Library, also splendid:
We stepped into the Museum of Science & Industry just for a few minutes, to see two things. The first was a replica of the first computer, developed at the University of Manchester. It was named Baby.
The second was one of the first mechanical spinning machines. Manchester of course was made wealthy due to the cotton industry, so this would have spun cotton.
Last but not least was Castlefield, the site of an ancient Roman ruin. The outlines of the fort walls are seen in the background here.
Books, computers, architecture, spinning…what can I say? Humphrey and Helen know us well!
The second day was an outdoor day. We explored the area outside Manchester, which is lovely.
There are many public walking paths throughout this part of England.
A highlight of the day was a trip to Lyme Park, which was stunning. This is the place that I mentioned yesterday where Pride & Prejudice was filmed. The grounds and buildings are gorgeous.
And I found my very own Mr. Darcy.
And here we are at the end of the day with our friends:
Enough for one day! The next step of the trip takes us to Scotland, and Edinburgh!