So! I’ve had one full day at home, never leaving the house. Recovering. Watched flurries fall for over an hour from inside my cozy house. And working on the Rhinebeck photos! So here’s the recap of the weekend.
On Friday I headed downtown not too early with my super little bag (the little hand luggage you get with a luggage set?) and was picked up by Andrea and Cheryl. Sonia, Andrea’s GPS, was along for the ride too – we love Sonia.
We took a couple hours’ stop in Niagara Falls and a little eastward to go to the outlet mall and the regular mall for shopping and lunch. I got a great little cotton robe at the Gap that came in rather handy later on! We arrived around 9 or so to our fantastic little rental house to meet up with the rest of our Toronto fibre buddies – Steph’s got great photos of the house (I sort of neglected to take any!). There was a bit of interestingness that evening, if you read up at Steph’s!
Saturday morning we headed out to the fairgrounds pretty early, getting there around 9:30 and snagging a pretty sweet parking spot.
Everything was so gorgeous! The trees, the yarn, the fibre.
It was pretty overwhelming on the Saturday, and I’ve been going a couple years now! It was seriously CROWDED, a bit claustrophic in some of the barns. I amused myself for quite awhile taking photos rather than actually fondling stuff, and met up with lots of awesome knitters. I headed over to the Ravelry meetup a little late, but still got to chat with caro, javajem, minty, and of course jess and casey (well, we said hi, anyway – he was a little occupied!).
I thought of Casey as being a little like Santa – people would wait until he was free, then go up, chat a little, take a photo, and then let the next person go.
We walked around until about 4 or so, then went to the huge grocery store next to the fairgrounds to secure some dinnerstuffs, drove back to the house to eat, and headed out to the Ravelry party. Sonia was a little confused that evening and told us to drive offroad…which we did not.
The party was crazy, and cold! We hung out awhile for the raffle, then headed home – I’m glad we went though, because I got to chat with gleek and skrilla, both of whom I’ve hung out with online but never met in person!
Our car had a bit of adventure of our own that night – when we got back to the house, frozen and exhausted, Andrea discovered that she didn’t have her phone! She figured she must’ve dropped it when we got out of the car (parked on the street) at the party, so she and Cheryl headed back to Red Hook to look for it. Not only did they find the phone, but they found my koigu mittens there too! I’d dropped them from my lap when *I* got out of the car, and hadn’t even realized they were missing. Whew.
Sunday was pretty chill and nice. We got to the fairgrounds around 10:30 and it was so much quieter. Of course there were some things that were gone (fudge, the cheddar I’d wanted to buy) but it was a lot easier to shop and to go back and check out things that we’d missed or wanted to reconsider. And take leaf photos!
After a rather goal-oriented dash around to find Andrea and Cheryl some inexpensive spindles and pretty roving to get them started spinning (heh heh heh), we finally decided that we were done and headed back to the house.
The evening was spent doing show and tell of all the fabulous stuff people had bought, eating pizza and drinking wine, and chatting – it’d been tough for all of us to hang out together since we were always so busy driving somewhere or shopping or whatever!
Andrea, Cheryl and I headed out really early on Monday morning (6:30 in the freezing cold) to get home before the rush hour kicked in around Toronto (it’s killer). So I got home in the afternoon and got to relax, unpack, and enjoy being back at home!
Rhinebeck is so much fun. The touching, the looking, the general wool fumes, the knitters. Who’s on board for the same house next year?
(Stay tuned for the goods, I know you wanna see them!)
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