rhinebeck! (part one)

Yesterday was a gloriously beautiful day, perfect for a drive and then wandering through a sheepandwool. We (Jill, Laurie, Sean, and I) got started a bit later than we'd intended and thus arrived a bit late, but there was still plenty of time for fiber overload. Our late arrival did mean that I somehow missed the entire bloggers' meetup, but I still ran into Parker and saw Chantal and Anj and Sue.

And I saw lots and lots of fibery and fiber-associated animals. I spent a lot more time in the animal area at Rhinebeck than I did at Maryland...

border collie puppies, which were in an enclosure in the vendor area

no, I'm not sure why the rabbit stayed in the cardboard box, or, for that matter, what it had to do with fiber

goats

another goat

an angora rabbit--that black shape to the right of its face is its left ear. so fuzzy!

an alpaca

Jill, attempting to pet a pair of alpacas

a llama with great markings

Anj with her bag of fleece

the view from the parking area. check out the beginnings of fall foliage!

the billboard as you come off the highway on the way to the fairgrounds

I didn't take pictures of the vendor areas or the food building, but we spent a fair amount of time in both. The cheese was tasty, the wines tasted really odd after the half apple that was a late afternoon snack, but the maple cotton candy that we all shared was great. It looked a lot like a batt of undyed silk... We skipped the Gem and Mineral building and the Halloween Tunnel in favor of trying to catch all of the fiber stalls. (I'm not sure how accurate this impression is, but it seemed to me that Rhinebeck had more nonfibery stuff than Maryland did.)

Anyway, at around 5:30, we finally left the festival for the car, where we had dinner, and then set off for home. Sort of. We had been admiring the scenery so much on the way up that we decided to drive over to one of the nearby large hills/small mountains (toward a decent-sized mountain, but I don't think we quite got there). And then we drove up it, and most of the way back down, and partway back up, and then back down. At which point we realized that we didn't know how to get back to the roads we'd used to drive up, and the maps were in the other car. So we took a nice, roundabout route home that involved going southwest on route 209 and somehow approaching Stroudsburg twice, and didn't get to West Philly until about 12:30am. But we got to see mountains and deer and stars (whole constellations, even!) and some much nicer scenery than is visible from the throughway. And, hey, I wasn't driving, so I managed to nap for a while.

Next post: what I bought.

Comments

[Juno]

That's a marvelous picture of Anj - just marvelous. And the puppies were dangerously cute.

I didn't see you - but I'm glad you had a wonderful time.