Free Range Mama

a week in whitefish, mt

I was too lazy to blog while I was on vacation this past week, so I am going to try to compress the entire thing into one post. That’s efficient, right?

This isn’t our first trip to Montana this year. We went a few months ago for a fiber show, but we were invited to come back this fall by my husband’s parents, who thought it might be nice to have a vacation with the grandkids. They rented a little condo in Whitefish, a town in the Northwest part of the state, near Glacier National Park. They took the train, but we made the long drive from Western Washington, which proved to be much easier than last time – probably because we weren’t pulling a trailer full of wool.

I had originally planned a little excursion into Canada to go along with this trip, but the night before our departure I pulled out my passport and realized it had just expired. Doh! So we stayed entirely on the US side for this one.

Whitefish is a popular area for resorts/ tourism, but we were firmly in the offseason here. Too late for a lot of the summer fun, and too early for ski season. We did, however, enjoy some gorgeous weather and spectacular fall color.

We also got to take advantage of some very interesting and uncrowded restaurants. This one was particularly memorable…

One place I was very excited to visit was the Great Northern Brewing Company, as they had been clients of mine back in the dark ages when I still had a tech career. I had helped them run a webcam in their tasting room, and make a virtual brewery tour, but had never set foot in there myself. I have now!

Note the construction out front. The whole town was pretty much torn up with road construction, which made parking and getting around a bit of a challenge. I would love to go back to Whitefish, but I am seriously going to wait until this project is finished.

We took a few local hikes like this one. I thought we were very brave to go up something called “Lion Mountain” in an area known for cougars. Here’s Alex admiring the view with his Grandpa.

Of course we also visited Glacier National Park, but most of the “Going to the Sun’ road was closed for the winter, so we didn’t explore it too deeply.

 

We were pretty happy with what we saw, though.

Of course we couldn’t forget the tacky souvenir stops on the way home.

The drive home from whitefish was full of surprises – I started out in the wrong direction and ended up heading North instead of West out of Whitefish. I was almost at the Canadian border (with no passport, remember?) when I realized my mistake. I stopped and asked one of the locals for advice, and she pointed me in the direction of a lesser-known route to Idaho, and got me back on track. Turns out my little side trip didn’t cost us too much in time, but it definitely upped the adventure factor. The northern route was reeeeally remote. Not a car, not a house, not a single sign of human life for an hour as we wound our way through the Kootenai National Forest along Lake Kookanusa. It was almost surreal at the end to stumble across this enormous dam.

After the dam, we hooked back up with our intended route, and we were back on track until we got to Cle Elum Washington and saw that traffic on I-90 was at a dead stop. I didn’t have the patience to just sit and wait there with no idea what was going on, so I decided to cut North and come in on Route 2. This was probably a stupid idea because 1) It took forever. 2) I ended up driving through the mountains and over the pass in the fog and in the rain and in the dark. I should count myself lucky that there was no snow up there, but really all I needed when I was that tired was to be careening around mountain roads with horrible visibility at 60 miles an hour. Ugh. But we made it home in one piece and I can totally laugh about it now, so there’s that.

offf 2011

We all drove down to Canby, Oregon on Friday for the Oregon Flock and Fiber Festival. It was a bit of a miracle that we got out the door at all considering how totally unprepared we were, but somehow we got the trailer and all our stuff packed in the morning and were on the road not too far behind schedule. It’s a long drive, with traffic, and we were all pretty tired when we got to the fairgrounds, but we wanted to get as much of the booth set up as possible so that we wouldn’t have to rush in the morning. The kids were not very excited about this, however, so we only got as far as having the tent up and the tablecloths on before we called it a night.

Saturday was fantastic. We arrived early (minus the kids who stayed with their grandparents), and got everything completely set up with about 3 minutes to spare. Here’s what the booth looked like when we opened…

The weather was perfect, there was a great crowd of customers and old friends coming through, and we had a really fabulous time. The only dark spot was hearing about some shoplifting occurrences in some of the booths. It just sickens me that anyone could shoplift at an event like this. It’s not even like they are taking food to feed their starving children, they are stealing luxury / artisan yarns from hardworking independent (and undercompensated) business owners, and there just isn’t any excuse for it. Ugh.

In the evening, the kids were at Autumnal Equinox party with the grandparents, so Chris and I went to the Cornelius Pass Road House on the way home and had a lovely dinner.

Sunday I got out of the booth a bit more, made it to the fleece sale, the barns, visited the other vendors and watched a few demos. The kids were with us, so they explored quite a bit – especially the visiting the animals, which are their favorite. Our booth is nicely located under a shady tree, and right in front of the big lawn, and the musicians tent, so we got a little entertainment right in our ‘front yard’.

We knew some rain was coming, however, and we had done a bit of prep for it, but we had no idea. Basically around mid-day the skies opened up and we had a torrential downpour, with thunder and the whole bit.  It drenched me completely just in the time it took to get around the tent and put the tarps up. We got rained on last year at this event too, and it was such a drag. The rain drips through the tent, splashes mud up from the ground, and of course drives the customers away so nothing gets sold, either. 

So there I am, soaked, looking like a drowned rat, just shuffling from corner to corner in the booth (which is now a total mess) trying to protect things from getting ruined, and sending the kids off on errands so that we don’t have 5 people huddled in the same tiny space. Here’s Chris amid the chaos…

Shoppers fleeing for the shelter of the indoor marketplaces…

Yes, it was funny at times, but not exactly what we came for. Fortunately wet wool will dry (though we had to reprint some labels) and we didn’t damage any paper products. It was also fortunate that the rain stopped by the end of the show, so we didn’t have to get soaked packing the trailer. After the packing and the drive, we got home around midnight. Wiped out!

big four ice caves hike

We took a trip with some homeschool friends out to the Big Four Ice Caves in the Alpine Lakes wilderness. It is a pretty quick and easy hike, but a fun treat to see a big pile of snow on a hot summer day.

 

Z took a nasty fall and scraped up her leg pretty badly on the way down, but fortunately she brought her Girl Scout first aid kit, and we managed to get her bandaged up enough to limp out of there.

oregon trip(s)

Last Friday, Dh took the kids down to Fort Stevens on the Oregon coast to to a bit of camping with an old friend and his kids. I could have gone too, but instead I elected to stay home and have the house to myself for a few days, which was really nice and relaxing (and surprisingly productive). 

On Sunday, Dh dropped the kids off at my mom’s beach house so they could stay down in Oregon for a few more days, and he could get a some office time in before we were to head back down there for my Grandmother’s memorial.  The kids had a great time with my mom – playing at the beach, making jewelry, and even doing some abstract art.

On Tuesday afternoon, I loaded up the dog and the car, picked Dh up at his office, and we drove back down. I dropped Dh and the dog off at his parents’ house on the way to the beach (where I would meet up with the kids), and then continued on the beautiful drive through the Coast Range, arriving just as the sun set. 

I had to snap a few pictures, because the beach looked so dreamy and lovely.

lake dorothy hike

Today we  took a beautiful hike with a group of friends up to Lake Dorothy - an alpine in the Cascades near Stevens Pass. The trail was very well-maintained, with lots of stairs…

…and though the area wasn’t old growth, there were still quite a few very big trees around.

The lake was gorgeous, and very pristine, since it is only accessible on foot.

We had lunch by the lake  (what we packed, along with a few wild blueberries we found), and of course the kids did some clowning around.

On the way back, we stopped at the natural water slides for a swim. The water was a bit cold for me (this is snowmelt, after all), but he kids loved it.

sock summit

I’m not sure I can adequately describe my weekend at Sock Summit, and unfortunately I was so busy that I didn’t really get enough pictures to tell the story for me, either.

Wednesday

We were originally scheduled to load-in on Wednesday, but then we had the brilliant idea that if we could possibly get away with loading in on Thursday (the show’s opening day) Chris could get in a full day at the office and avoid using up yet another vacation day. So Wednesday was spent at home, packing everything up, prepping the pets, and hoping that the sun would come out long enough to get the last bit of fiber on the racks dry enough to take with us.

This was was all done in the shadow of the fact that my grandmother had passed away the night before, which pretty much sapped me of every ounce of my previous enthusiasm. It was a day I would have gladly spent quietly somewhere, rather than running around like a crazy person, but you can’t really stop a moving train, so I just kind of kept going down the checklist and putting one foot in front of the other.

It bears mentioning here, that my grandma, Mimi, was a wonderful lady with a sharp intellect and a strong personality. She has been a very big influence in my life, is a big part of my childhood memories, and will be terribly missed. Isn’t she lovely?

Also wreaking havoc on my mental state was the strange coincidence of it all. You may recall that we learned of Chris’ grandfather’s death just as we were getting ready to open our booth at the Columbia Gorge Festival back in April, so this kind of brought that back for us as well. I’m afraid that if this trend continues, I may have to give up on shows entirely..

In any case, somehow I managed to get completely packed, only abut 10 minutes behind schedule, and headed over to pick Chris up at his office. We rolled into Portland around 10:30pm – not too bad really, considering the time of day and the traffic and all that.

Thursday

Thursday, bright and early, Chris and I drove into Portland from his parents house (they live about an hour West of the city and were kind enough to watch the kids for us) and prepared to set up our booth. I wasn’t sure how hard it would be to get into the loading dock and all that, but everything went like a dream and we were loaded in and had the booth completely built with quite a bit of time to spare.  We tried some new stuff with the display (namely a whole lot more gridwall) and I really like the result.

I was able to get every bit of fiber I had brought with me out onto that display, which was a huge relief, because choosing which lovelies to hold back would have been agonizing for me.

All day long there was a bit of a buzz going amongst the vendors as people began to notice that the line outside was growing to truly epic proportions. The number of people waiting to get in (for a very short session of shopping) was truly staggering. It didn’t disappoint – as the doors opened, there was a huge wave of people (some running!) and the marketplace was saturated within minutes. There were a few vendors in particular  (like GothSocks) with highly coveted products that were immediately swamped and cleaned out, which definitely added to the air of excitement in the room. I think it was a great day for everyone (vendors and shoppers alike) and definitely had us all looking forward to Friday.

Friday

This was the day for the kids to come to to the show. Z came with us at opening, and Alex came in a bit later with his grandma, and we all left together when the marketplace closed at 6. I won’t say it was a bad idea to bring the kids, because I like them to see the booth and the shows that we do, and I think they do too - but I think it was a mistake to have them there for the entire day. They got pretty bored after a while, and were reluctant just to wander around and look at stuff. They wanted to be with me in the booth, ultimately, but you can only fit so many people in such a tiny space, so I felt like I was constantly chasing them off.

After we left the convention center, Chris dropped me off for the night with a good friend who lives downtown so that we could have some fun and catch up a bit. We had a delicious dinner at Justa Pasta (my favorite lunch spot from back when I lived in Portland), and then hit up some late night bar/restaurant places in Northwest until the wee hours.

Saturday

Saturday morning, I woke up at my friend’s place at 6am. I was a beautiful morning, and I felt fabulous and wide awake, so I got myself dressed and decided to walk to the Convention Center rather than wait around for  Chris to come pick me up. The walk was lovely and I was feeling fairly smug that I had managed not to get a hangover after all the wine I’d had. It was only a bit later that I realized that all of this good feeling had possibly been due to the fact that I was *still drunk* rather than being in such fabulous condition.  After a couple of tylenol and about a gallon of green tea, I was as good as new, though.

Another fun day – I can honestly say a fiber show feels more like a social event than a day of work. It can be tiring, but it is so energizing at the same time to get to hang out with all of these interesting and creative people. I loved seeing all of the fabulous knitwear that walked into the booth, and talking to people about their projects (though it also makes me realize how much I have to learn). I was so glad that many of the participants were wearing nametags, though – there are so many people that I have met in online situations (Ravelry, Etsy) and I have no idea what they look like, and this really helped me identify a lot of people that I might have missed. My husband is awesome sauce and helped enormously by doing a lot of the businessy stuff so that I could do the fun chatty part and walk around a  bit.

Sunday

Sunday was another busy day – the marketplace was humming once again, and everyone (including me) was zeroing in on those last minute purchases. You know, the ones you have been thinking about all weekend and now need to make a final decision about, lest you be kicking yourself on Monday that you don’t have it? I didn’t go too crazy – the main thing I wanted had already been secured – the elusive Jennie the Potter Sock Summit Coffee Mug.  I already have one of her mugs and it is just the most perfect mug shape ever created, so how could I resist this?

Did I mention this show was super fun? I hope so, because the next part is going to sound really grim. I’m not sure where we got the idea that we could pull this off. Running the booth until 4pm, packing it all up, driving an hour west of town to pick up the kids and the dog (and get them packed) followed by a five hour drive home.

The saving grace was that the trailer was way less full on the way home, so it wasn’t quite as challenging to fit everything in as it had been on the way down. We also sent a box of rovings to Linda at Northwest Wools so that she could re-stock her shelves, further lightening our load.  We pulled into the driveway just shy of 1am.

camping trip

The weather has been so cold and wet around here, that I almost cancelled this trip. I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around the possibility that we wouldn’t be huddled in our tent, shivering and waiting for the rain to stop. At the last minute, we compiled a bunch of local weather reports and decided to roll the dice, and go.

This trip falls into the category of “do something relaxing and familiar” rather than “try something new” - we have camped in this same park every year for 5 years in a row now. This year is the first year we haven’t gone in the off-season, however, so we were expecting it to be a bit more crowded. We also decided to share our campsite with some friends, so again, not exactly the same as in previous years.

Day 1

Moran State Park is on Orcas Island, in the San Juans, so a ferry is required to get there. We made it just fine, but our friends unfortunately missed the boat and had to wait around for 4 hours to catch the next one. The first part of the ferry trip was ominous – dense fog (we got to hear the fog horn) but soon gave way to nice, sunny weather.

We got to the island, set up camp, and waited for our friends to arrive. The kids went swimming and floated around on the inflatable raft a bit until it was dinner time.

Day 2

Apparently there was a great deal of activity overnight in the campsite. I slept through it all, but my friend’s husband was up bright and early, woken up by a raccoon assualt on their plastic food bins. The raccoons had opened the bins and stolen a bunch of snickers bars, and then skulked around looking for more goodies.  He said it was almost like the racoons were counting the zip sounds to figure out when he had gone back inside the tent and back in the sleeping bag. every time he zipped the bag, they come back out again.

I really wanted to do a hike, so I rounded up a crew that consisted of everybody except for Dh and Z and we all went up to Mt. Constitution to hike the trail down from the top. We parked a car at the lower trail so we wouldn’t have to hike back up, because I (correctly) assumed the kids would be too tired.  It was a bit cloudy at the top, but not so cloudy that we didn’t get a nice view.

Of course we climbed the tower, too.

The trail was lovely, and pretty easy, though it was plenty steep in certain places, and had some cliffs near the top without barriers of any kind. I remember doing this trail once when my kids were much younger, and pretty much freaking out  at these parts. to be honest, I still freaked a little bit, because Alex kept wanting to walk right to the edge, and it’s not like he never trips or loses his balance.

Most of the rest of the day was spent with the kids playing in the lake and around the campsite, and looking (unsuccessfully) for a geocache. Later in the afternoon, Alex and I did another hike – a short but very steep walk up to Sunrise Rock, a viewpoint that overlooks Cascade Lake – very lovely.

Another beautiful sunset, campfire, kids’ attempts at fishing, and a quiet night.

Day 3

I was up early, reading and enjoying the quiet, but with rain clouds looming overhead, I was pretty much all about packing up and getting out of there once the rest of the camp was awake. I hate packing up a wet tent. We (just barely!) made the early ferry and got home at a reasonable hour.

goodbye big sky

The last day at the Fiber Fest went more or less according to plan, except that it didn’t. We finished up breakfast in the hotel, only to find that we had a flat tire, probably due to the horribly rough / under construction road we had passed over on our way into town.  I had to power-walk over to the fairgrounds to get my booth open in time, while Chris called around to find a place that could repair a tire on a Sundy. No luck on the tire repair (apparently they won’t help you on a Sunday unless you are a farmer) so he put the spare on. At the end of the day, we had to pack up our booth, so he brought the trailer to the fairgrounds with the puny spare on. We didn’t dare pull a full trailer with the spare (my car has enough trouble with it on regular wheels), but fiber people are wonderful and the lovely Tara from Rain City Fiber Arts took time out of packing up her shop to pull our trailer back to our hotel for us.

Monday morning, Chris took the car down to the tire place and got it fixed up and ready to roll. We took a detour to avoid the rough road as we were leaving, and were on our way. The drive was actually pretty fun

Spotted in Hamilton, next to the fairgrounds – file this under “things you’d never see in Western Washington”

We couldn’t resist stopping at the local tourist trap just before the Idaho border. There was a lot of tacky in that gift shop, which billed itself as the largest gift shop in Montana. Of course, we picked up a few choice items.

We love our oddities, so next stop was Wallace Idaho, where the kids took a few minutes to play in a UFO.

The town was really cute, so quaint and retro that it looked like a movie set. We passed on their “Bordello Museum” but maybe we’ll get to it next time.

Of course there were plenty of other interesting items along the way, like the milk bottle buildings of Spokane.

We got out at the Columbia river to stretch our legs and walk around a bit, and the wind was crazy strong, which was pretty entertaining.

Though it was a bit of a challenge from a driving perspective, when you are driving a toaster pulling a breadbox. We felt like we were going to blow right off the Vantage bridge.

At least it was working out well for the wind farms on the other side, which were humming along at full speed.

After that it was a wide stretch of dry sunny flatness, a climb into the mountains, and back to the familiar grey weather. We realized as we got up into the pass that they were planning to close it for rock blasting at 7:30. We cleared it at 7:10, thanking our lucky stars that we didn’t make that last stop for coffee. We pulled into the driveway exactly 12 hours after departure, so not too bad.

more big sky

Guess who else can rock a cowboy hat?

Yep, here’s Alex checking out the Yaks in the animal barn.  And outside (before he got the hat) …

I spent most of the day minding my booth in the fiber show, so I didn’t get out much. Just a quick jaunt around with Alex at lunchtime to get a BBQ sandwich, check out the animals, and get a peek at the Mule Days vendors and the other Fiber vendors.

I always love seeing the animals – and there were some gorgeous ones…

Of course, while I was working the kids got to see a bit more of it. They also watched the mule show for quite a while, which apparently was a lot of fun.

Chris took these pictures, including some of the “Mulettes” which are basically men who ride mules while wearing fancy dresses. I’m quite sorry I missed that one.

The fiber show was good -  not terribly busy from a sales perspective, but I still had a nice time chatting with folks, and getting the good word out about the awesomeness of spinning and fiber.  There were a lot more people today, but there wasn’t a particularly high concentration of spinners. I picked up some luscious Cormo roving, so it was definitely a successful shopping day.

The weather was full of surprises – sunny and warm one minute and then a thunderstorm would roll in, dump some rain, and roll back out again. Never a dull moment.

big sky country

Thursday morning (early!) we packed up the kids and a trailer full of wool and headed East to Montana for the Big Sky Fiber Arts festival. The drive wasn’t too bad. Straight shot, fairly painless (though slow with a trailer in tow), and plenty scenic. Of course there were many beautiful vistas crossing the vast expanse of Washington, not to mention a whole lot that looked like a basic Windows™ desktop.

It only took an hour to cross Idaho up there at the panhandle, but it was gorgeous and a lot more like the scenery we see in Western Washington. Lake Coeur d’ Alene was as beautiful as it was reputed to be.

I definitely would have liked a little more time to check it out, but we were in a hurry to get to our destination in time to set up our booth. Crossing into Montana over a mountaintop, we could definitely tell we’d entered a new place. The quality of the road went from normal to a mess of potholes and deep trenches, and the speed limit went up to 75mph. Yee-haw! Gorgeous, though, winding our way down through the forest, past still snow-topped mountains and into a valley of wild and very swollen rivers.

The western ambiance of Montana is definitely still in tact. Old silver mines, historic buildings, casinos and liquor stores, pickup trucks and cowboy hats -  the whole thing.  Love it.

We got to the fairgrounds too late to set up – they were trying to close the doors, but they let us unload the trailer at least before sending us on our way.  We capped off the evening at a local brewery with some loud music, buffalo burgers, and some of the house brews.

Bright and early on Friday morning we were at the show when the doors opened at 7:30, in a panic, trying to get the booth ready for business by 9. We (barely) made it, not without a few glitches, but I’m happy enough with the results.

The show was pleasant – many nice vendors, though the foot traffic was a bit light, possibly because it was Friday morning.  We are lucky enough to be sharing the fairgrounds with Montana Donkey Days which added an element of fun to the mix –  BBQ booths, Rodeo Queens, vendors selling saddles and Western stuff. I *had* to pick myself up a cowboy hat. Here is Z modeling it, because I’m having a hard time getting her to give it back:

The vendor was understandably a bit skeptical of my cowgirl street cred (I didn’t try to fake it), but was kind enough to sell it to me anyway. I was so enamored with my hat that my husband decided he needed one too (and got his own) and the kids probably won’t be far behind.

Dinner this time was at one of those local “home cookin’ kind of places that serves breakfast all day, was full of older guys in work boots, and had good pie. We enjoyed our omelettes, our pie, soaked up the ambiance (dogs playing poker!) and went back the room for a DVD (for the kids) and wine in a paper cup (for me). Looking forward to what tomorrow brings :)