Thursday, August 18, 2011

Failure to Launch

Last weekend Dale, Chey and I (Eli has been spending the past three weeks with Opa and Cary on Seawind V, cruising from Juneau, Alaska to Bella Bella, BC) decided to go on our first camping trip in two years. We had originally planned to leave on Saturday for one night at the upper campground at Kananaskis Lakes, but Dale arrived home early on Friday and we decided to pack up and go.......

We drove out to our intended campsite which took a little longer than I remembered and certainly MUCH longer than the website that I read stating "Kananaskis is only a 50 minute drive from Calgary".... Yeah.... 50 minutes from the very North West Edge of Calgary to the absolute edge of Kananaskis Park, maybe...... it was a 2.5 hour drive from our house to the campground.... We arrived at our campground at around 7pm.... and it was full.... we checked the next one... full.... the next.... same and the one after that.... ditto..... We checked EVERY campground from the Highway to the upper Kananaskis lake campground and every.single.campsite. was full....... that's a total of 10 campgrounds. Our camping trip was a total bust.......

All was not lost, however. We did have a LOVELY picnic at one of the day-use areas out there and we re-discovered how wonderful it is to picnic in the Rockies. Something we haven't done very much over the past couple of years with Dale working out of town so much........

Loaded up and Ready to go.... Kikx has the high ground


A girl and her doggie


teaching Chey how to roast the perfect Marshmallow


YUM

The absolutely gorgeous picnic site......


Eli arrives home tomorrow and I can't wait to try camping again with my whole family.......


On the crafting front, I recently finished a large spinning project. I had purchased 567g of Targhee dyed by Juliespins in one of her "unclubs" (I think I might have a Juliespins addiction) last December. I started spinning shortly after Christmas and finally finished the yarn yesterday. I think this is some of my best spinning yet. It is around 1,600m of 3ply, sport weight yarn (I'm guessing, I haven't done a wraps-per-inch or gauge swatch, but it looks sport weight.... I thought it was closer to fingering, but once it was finished with a hot soak and a light thwacking, it puffed right up), quite even for handspun (at least MY handspun). Each skein is almost the same length and weight (110g +/- 5g; 330m +/- 20m). I had thought about knitting Dale a sweater, but on reflection (and after a conversation about how often and where such a sweater would be worn) decided that I'm going to use it to knit myself a sweater..... coming soon.....








Nice eh?........

2 comments:

  1. I feel your pain re: the full camp sites. One of my camping pet peeves is how hard it can be to find a spot if you don't reserve ahead of time (where you CAN reserve).

    The other option is to camp in little remote places, but sometimes those can be sketchy, especially with little kids. (eg. no fun with a little one if the only outhouse within 20 km has fallen apart.)

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  2. Gorgeous spinning! Fantastic job!

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