Vacation was great! I needed another couple of weeks. We went to Alberta to visit my husband’s and his family. The cooler, rainy weather in Ontario followed me to Alberta and now back again to Ontario. A storm we had last week snapped the head off one of my son’s sunflowers. They are remarkably resilient. I’m amazed this one survived given it’s head is very weekly attached to it’s stalk.
One of the things we wanted to see this time around was the Columbia Icefield. To that end, we headed toward Red Deer and camped there for a couple of nights. It was the first time the children and I had ever been camping. The icefield was breathtaking. It is very odd to have to bundle up in the middle of summer to go onto an ice field. We even drank glacier water!
I have absolutely no knitting pictures. It was another 200+ hour month and my daughter’s birthday in between. I haven’t touched the needles since my last posting; pathetic, I know. My garden has run amok. I’ve spent the better part of today trying to tame it again.
Last week-end was the first time we were able to do some harvesting. We dined on some zucchini, buttercrunch lettuce, and green beans that night. My daughter’s Nasturtiums are doing very well, too.
Today is the first day of my two week vacation. We’ll be flying out to Alberta this year as well. I won’t be blogging during that time but I will be spending some of my vacation knitting and catching up on other people’s blogs. I haven’t been deliberately ignoring you. I haven’t lost interest in your blogs. Thank you to readers who haven’t given up on my blog yet. Hopefully, I will get some interesting pictures to write about when we get back. It feels so strange to have free evenings again where I turn on the computer for leisure and not work.
What a wonderful vacation we had this year. It’s good to be home, but was so hard going back to work. The weather in Alberta was what summer should have been here - warm, dry and sunny. We had a miserably wet summer here. Anyways, here are some of the highlights from the vacation.
Bar U Ranch
The Bar U Ranch National Historic Site is located in Longview, Alberta by Pekisko Creek. We had a nice carriage ride around the site, visited the saddlery, cookhouse, post office, and blacksmith buildings (http://www.pc.gc.ca/lhn-nhs/ab/baru/index_E.asp). We had coffee and tea made for us around a campfire where the chuck wagon was and fresh out of the oven gingerbread cookies in the cookhouse. It turned out that the blacksmith knows my father-in-law and made us a souvenir on that authentic 1800’s forge to take home – what an honour! The plains of Alberta are beautiful. I love the green open land and clear blue sky.
I love long week-ends. They enable me to do a blog on a Monday. As of the end of the day Friday, I’m officially on vacation for two weeks!
We had a nice picnic in Stratford with some shopping thrown in on Saturday. Next Saturday, we’ll be flying out to Alberta to visit the hubby’s family. We’ll probably end up visiting Banff, the Columbia Icefields, and the zoo, amongst other things.
Now, on to the purse. I have both the front and back done now. I am currently working on creating the bottom and sides. I ran out of the medium shade of blue that I used in the purse and only have the darkest and palest shade left. I have other blues in my bag of blues, but the textures are very different and I didn’t think they would work as well. So I’m trying to make do with what I have. I used an open cast on (a.ka. provisional cast on) with the darkest shade so I could just pick up the stitches on the other side and start knitting again. Instead of using a different yarn to hold the stitches and help me cast on, I used a stitch holder. 
I was eventually planning on lining the purse and adding a zipper or two, but I don’t know if I can make it in time now. Oh well.
I have to figure out what knitting I will pack in the suitcase to take with me. Tough one; it has to be small, yet enough to keep me busy. The hubby’s family will probably keep us so busy, I won’t have time to pick up the needles (which is what usually happens on these types of family trips), but a week without yarn – unthinkable!
First, an apology for not posting on the week-end, but it was our first opportunity at a vacation since Christmas! We took an extra day off for the Canada Day week-end and went to visit my mother-in-law in Quebec; she just finished moving into a new house that could accommodate our family visits.
It was also the end of the school year. My hubby has a buddy who is a school teacher and had to throw a party to celebrate the end of the school year. Fine food (he’s quite a chef), fine wine (not getting drunk but pleasantly “happy”), and getting my ass kicked at a card game called Kung Fu Fighting (hilarious).
The kids were so good on the trip that I got to do some reading in the van. The co-op student working for me right now suggested two books by the author Khaled Hosseini; The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns. I finished reading the latter before the trip and got two thirds of the former read since. He is a fabulously talented author both for his moving stories as well as his ability to tell it beautifully.
In between relaxing, shopping with my mother-in-law, assembling furniture, and playing board games, I didn’t get much knitting done. I didn’t even get to paint the tea bag/spoon rest I made last week-end. Oh well, here’s a picture of the unpainted object on my son’s now broken clay canons.
We went to Jasper in the Rockies to camp that night. It’s bear country. Luckily, the only wild life we saw was bighorn sheep.
On the way back to High River, we stopped by Sunwapta Falls and saw a very interesting van.
The next day, we went to Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump. It’s a UNESCO national heritage site and has a fabulous visitor centre.
And here’s my favourite rainbow picture to date.
It was a good vacation but it was really good to be home again.
