Miss T's Mystery House of Yarn & Horrors

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That was the view from our hotel room in downtown Chicago last week. 

What?  You didn’t know I was gone?  These things happen.  Anyway, we were at the top of the Chicago Sun-Times building.  The lower floors are Sun-Times, and the eight floors at the top are a very nice hotel.  Right on the river, where we could watch sightseeing boats going to and fro, and somebody taking wedding pictures on the bridge, and barges with nothing in them being pushed along. 



We could see the train tracks, too, and loved watching the Metra and the El going by.  If we weren’t scurrying around to museums, we were glued to that window.  Which is why I got so much knitting done.  Exactly this much:



That wee portion of the M.E.’s sock shall forever be known as The Great Chicago Trip Inch of Sock.  Too bad we can’t go back long enough for me to finish the rest of the sock.  I could stand that view for several months years.  Oh, who am I kidding.  I could live there, if I didn’t have to drive in the insane Chicago traffic.  I do love a city with trains.  And great restaurants, googobs of them.  I’ll tell you about one on Friday.

Things I Learned in Florida

You may have deduced that I’ve been away.  I’m back now, and wondering why none of you stopped over and did the yard work. 

Well, despite your falling down on the job, I’ll share some revelations with you.  See, the M.E. and I went on a long drive.  A very long drive.  To Florida.  And you can’t take a drive like that without learning a thing or two.  This is what I learned:

1)  Florida, since the last time I visited, has not improved.  It is still ridiculously hot, steamy, buggy, ugly, and full of crooks, seriously crappy antique malls and people who have never tried out the turn signals in their cars.  Nevertheless, it is possible to have a good time there.  And we had a very good time.

2)  Good knitting intentions go straight out the window when I am on vacation.  I packed five projects.  I dabbled with only three of them, and accomplished a pathetic amount despite the fact that the M.E. did most of the driving and all I had to do was sit there, chat, dig around in the snack bag and study the map.


3)  Poker is more fun than I thought it would be, particularly with my in-laws.  We cleaned their clocks and won back our gas money.

4)  Florida yarn shops (actually, “shop”) just don’t get it.  I expected that, since they have little need for wool in such a climate.  But still.  There’s just no excuse to stock that damn much eyelash yarn, even if you are located in West Palm Beach.  There’s also no excuse to jack prices up far beyond what I’ve ever seen in any yarn shop, anywhere, ever.  And if a customer asks if you stock laceweight, please do not attempt to give her a lecture about how crochet cotton is the best thing to use.  Really, it’s not endearing.

5)  If, however, a store happens to put all wool on sale for 40% off on the very day that I visit it, Koigu and Jitterbug will still prove to be great bargains, even if the regular prices at the store in question are downright preposterous.


6)  The South (I’m talking Kentucky, Tennessee and Alabama, now) is full of great places to have ribs, fried catfish, fried okra and greens.  I knew this, of course, but took great pleasure in being reminded.  We stumbled across this amazing place, the Bootleg BBQ, in Louisville:


I even tried fried chicken livers at my new favorite joint, Green Acres, in Birmingham.  (Sorry, didn't get a picture.  It's a little green box of a place.)  I’m smitten, and eternally grateful to the hotel desk clerk who fessed up to his favorite place to eat and didn’t try to send us to some damn chain restaurant.  The M.E. has now been charged with the task of learning how to make fried chicken livers, since we can’t drive to Birmingham again before I become desperate.

7)  Birmingham also has an excellent art museum.  Well worth a visit.  I’d say that if you’re anywhere within two states of Alabama, you should veer in that direction, see some art and then pick up catfish at Green Acres.  I miss that catfish already.

8)  A Porsche is really not the best vehicle to take grocery shopping at Costco.  Those two little trunks fill up far more quickly than a grocery cart does, and then the passenger (that would be me) winds up sitting under a massive box of potato chips.

9)  Grouper is fabulous.  I could eat grouper every day.  Unless I was eating catfish, fried chicken livers or ribs.

10)  I still do not like boats.

11)  A really cool lizard that lives behind the rocks around the pool at my in-laws’s place will not make an appearance if he knows you are coming to visit and are dying to see him.  Any other day, he appears like clockwork about 9:00 am and puts on a show by running across the pool.  Evidently, he has an aversion to being seen by visitors from Minnesota.

12)  Ashburn, Georgia has a Fire Ant Festival every March.  Who knew?  I’m so bummed we missed it.

13)  The Bourbon Trail, in Kentucky, is one of the very, very coolest things to see in the South.  Particularly the tour of the Maker’s Mark distillery.  That place smells so good I could move in.  This is what the fermenting mash looks like.  The yeast goes so crazy that small waves and explosions actually develop in the tanks:


We learned the proper way to taste bourbon, and may have had a wee bit too much fun in the gift shop.  I signed up to be a Maker’s Mark ambassador, which means that my name goes on one of the barrels and in about six years when that batch is ready, we’ll make another trip to Kentucky.  Why?  Because we’ll be able to buy two bottles of single barrel sippin’ bourbon.  From my own personal barrel.  Obviously, this was irresistible.

14)  I only need to eat Cheetos about once every five years.  I may be ready for some about the time we go pick up that bourbon.

15)  It’s worth it to pay the highway-robbery-level tolls on the Florida Turnpike, because the road is better and the restrooms are much better than on I-95.  Costs nearly 15 bucks to drive from one end of Florida to the other.  In Illinois, however, the tolls are really and truly highway robbery because they charge you a lot of money and then provide roads so crappy they should have to pay you to drive on them.

16)  I’m lucky.  I knew this -- just like I knew the South is full of fabulous food -- but it’s nice to be reminded.  I have such a great husband that I miss him because he’s at the office today, even though we just spent every minute of every day for the past ten days together.  (Unless one of us was in the bathroom.)  I have wonderful in-laws whom I adore and who adore me, even though we weren’t so sure about each other when we first met.  My life is good.  I might bitch about Florida (Because really?  Florida is ew.), but I’m happy that we went, fortunate that we were able to make the trip, and lucky that all went well, we had a blast, and got home safely.  So even though much of what’s on this list is about other places along the way, I still learned it all in Florida.  And I wouldn’t mind going back.    
     

Pink Rampage

I did give you fair warning that my pink jones was acting up.  Warned the M.E., too, so that when we wound up taking an unscheduled trip to Madison in the middle of last week, he wasn’t surprised that I did some advance research, found a yarn shop and printed out maps and directions.  A pink yarn raid was brewing.

Lakeside Fibers--unlike many places which have names such as “Oceanview,” or “Forest Trail,” and which turn out to be near neither oceans nor forests but are instead plopped down in suburbs which look just like all other suburbs--actually does have a gorgeous view of Lake Monona.  You wouldn’t know it when you drive up and park and walk inside, however, unless you know the area.  Nor would you have any idea how much yarn is inside--the shop looks tiny from the street.  So tiny that the M.E. figured I couldn’t get into too much trouble.  We’d surely be out in five minutes flat and he’d have no need to bring along his twelve-pound biography of Stalin.  Big Joe stayed in the car.

Well.  Weren’t we wrong.  What you think is the whole shop when you first come in the door is only the front room.

There’s a middle room, too, which is sort of corridorish, and a big, open, sunny room in back.  With a coffeeshop and huge windows that look out over the lake.  I wanted to settle in and stay there all day.  Wish I could have.  The M.E. was probably wishing he’d brought Stalin.  Coffee, sandwiches, knitters knitting, rain pattering on the roof...mmm.  But it was not to be--we had many miles to travel before the day was done.

Lakeside has more yarn than you can shake two or three sticks at.  And a basement, too, with big looms and hundreds of cones of yarn.  If you are not a weaver and you want some of this yarn, all you have to do is grab a cone and run upstairs and the very helpful staff will wind off as much of it as you’d like.  Zephyr wool/silk is $3.75 an ounce.  An ounce is about 310 yards, more than enough to make this.  (Or something.  I could change my mind at any moment.)  I wouldn’t know this for any particular reason, of course.  No reason at all.

Nor would I know how this bag found its way into my office.

Hmm, let’s see.

Pink!  Look at all that pink!

I must have been overcome by yarn fumes.  Astoundingly potent stuff, yarn.  Not only is there a cake of the aforementioned wool/silk, that ball on the right is 825 yards of extremely fine, very soft Chinese lambswool.  Someone around here thinks she’s going to make pink lace.  And three balls of Millefili cotton.  Someone’s not quite sure what she’s going to do with that, but it’s quite a luscious pink so its true purpose will eventually become clear.

My pink jones has (I believe) been satisfied.  At least, we made it all the way home without my needing to find another yarn shop, so I'm good for the moment.  And in case you’ve been worrying about the M.E., he did not go unrewarded.  Lakeside Fibers, though, could be a problem.  I keep finding myself thinking Madison and the basement full of cones are only five hours away.

In Which I Did Little Knitting, But Had Much Fun

Long post, with many pictures.  Come back another day if this ain’t your thang...I got only a teensy amount of knitting done on our recent trip to the North Dakota badlands, and all of it happened in the car on the way there.  Lorna’s Laces in Motherlode, with a slipstitch rib, shot on the wooden sidewalk in front of the Rough Riders Hotel:

We were having too much fun during the daytime for me to take time out to knit, and at night, well, the lighting in our hotel room wasn't conducive to knitting.

I loved this hotel.  Built in 1883 to accommodate the boom in business when the Marquis de Mores opened a meat packing plant in Medora (the town is named for his wife), it was a big deal in its day--nine rooms!  It’s been gorgeously restored and is run by the Theodore Roosevelt Medora Foundation.

Perhaps because it’s run by a foundation, it’s also a wee bit unusual.  As in no desk staff.  You check in at the Badlands Motel up the street.  We arrived on a Thursday, and as I lay in bed that night it became apparent that after the kitchen staff cleaned up and departed we were the only people in the hotel.  No other guests that first night--not a door opened or closed, no water ran, not a single peep.  Quite a unique and nice sensation.

The rooms don’t have some of the amenities that you find in the big national motel chains--no hair dryer, no iron--but they’re comfortable, charming and lovingly cared for.   This is the "closet":

And this sign...

Directs you here...

And then here...

I was quite prepared to burn up rather than go down that ladder, believe me.

We’d brought an iron, and solved the ironing board problem during an emergency foray to Walmart.  Um, Amy?  Check this out, Girl.  This is how to make ironing a less heinous task.  Take careful note of the glass of Jim Beam Black on ice next to the ironing board.  No pain, seriously:

The emergency Walmart run I speak of wasn’t the one involving the flat tire.  That was the second emergency Walmart run.  We had one each day.  The first one was because of this:

Go ahead, get all “one of these things is not like the other” about it.  There was a packing malfunction.  Boots were grabbed from the hall closet.  Boots were packed in the duffle bag without actually looking at them.  Boots were removed from the duffle bag on the morning of our first hike, and I quickly determined that I would be unable to climb up and down hills very well wearing one of my hiking boots and one of the M.E.’s size 12 steel-toed work boots.  Call me fussy.

I’m no fan of Walmart.  I hate their corporate policies, hate the way they beat up on employees, vendors, small businesses and communities.  But in little towns out West there are often no other options when one finds oneself suddenly in possession of only one boot.  Off we went to Dickinson.

We made it back with new boots in time to hike the Painted Canyon, the Ridgeline Nature Trail, and Buck Hill.  I got lucky.  The $30 Walmart boots did surprisingly well--not as nice as my beautiful, professionally-fitted Lowas, but I ended the day without blisters, sore feet or broken ankles, and for that I am grateful.

My favorite thing at the end of a dusty, rugged day is a bit of elegance and some good food.  The Rough Riders Hotel may not have desk staff, but it has a kick-ass kitchen.  If you are ever in Medora, make it a point to stop in and let Herman S., the executive chef, feed you.  I regret that I’ve forgotten his last name.  It reminded the M.E. of Subaru and reminded me of Sudoku, so it’s something in between.  Whatever his name is, he’s brilliant.  Trained in Germany, he’s the sort of chef who comes out from the kitchen, greets each table and makes certain everyone is happy with the food.  And everyone's happy, because every bite is precisely cooked and beautifully presented.  Given the location in tourist country, this is not cutting-edge, headcase sci-fi cuisine, but who needs that after hiking the badlands?  Ribeye with a mysteriously wonderful sauce and duck l’orange did us just fine.    

Some things we saw:

      

Yes, that's a horny toad.  We'd never seen one before.

There must be literally millions of prairie dogs in TRNP.  We drove past miles of prairie dog towns.  It's incredible how close to the road some of them dig their holes.  Then they stand up and fuss at you when you drive by.

This guy appeared out of nowhere to make use of the convenient post by the side of the road near Buck Hill.  He stood there scratching for the longest time, allowing us to safely get pictures.

Prickly pear are everywhere.

The next day we hiked the Petrified Forest.  This was my favorite part of the park, despite a rather funky beginning.  The ranger at the visitor center gave us the secret map which promised to lead us there.  This map is entirely useless without additional instructions from a ranger, and just this side of useless even with the instructions.  See, there are supposed to be these Teddy Head signs marking the proper road (through private land, courtesy of an agreement with the Park Service):

(Yes, he looks like a pirate.  Yes, the rangers know that.)  Of course, there are no Teddy Heads at several critical points in the route.  Points where one could logically turn and find oneself staring down an oil well rather than a hiking trail.  The helpful Teddy Heads are missing or knocked down or who knows what, and it quickly became apparent that the ranger giving us directions hadn’t actually been near this part of the park in ages. 

The side road to the trailhead was dreadful.  Steep, rutted, badly marked, a complete nightmare.  (Hmm, perhaps this had something to do with our flat tire saga later that afternoon...)  Once you get to the “parking area” at the bottom, you have to squeeze through this:

That’s no normal doorway.  It’s about three feet high and maybe a foot and a half wide.  Then you hike in a mile or so and up a grassy hill before you can see anything, but then suddenly there it is at the bottom of the valley:

Enormous petrified logs everywhere you look.  Once we made it down the steep and rather treacherous hill, it was so eerily quiet and ancient there that both of us found ourselves certain dinosaurs would come thudding by at any moment.  We were shocked to later see a few other hikers appear, believing it was only us and the dinosaurs sharing this by-gone forest.

There are hoodoos all over the Petrified Forest, but they're made of hardened mud, not rock.  It's strange to see them from a distance and think you're looking at rock and then to go closer and discover otherwise.

You can see why I didn’t get any knitting done.  Later, I thought about how nice it would have been to sit in the Petrified Forest with knitting or a sketchbook or both, breathing in the ancient silence, the wind and the faint birdcalls, and dreaming.  Maybe next time.

No Yarn for Me

This was a hiking trip.  Hiking.  Not yarn buying.  But I couldn’t help but check into whether there might be a yarn store in the vicinity of Medora, North Dakota.  We couldn’t hike 24 hours a day, could we?  Surely there would be a free hour to poke around a yarn shop if I just sort of happened to accidentally run across one.

Well, there is a yarn shop in Medora.  Right--as the Master Engineer reported while perusing the map of town--across the street from our hotel.  Right across the street:  Bandannas & Bows.  Okay, they also carry clothing and gifts and a bunch of other stuff, but yarn!  Yarn was on the list!  I made great plans to return from our trip with yarn and a new LYS to report about, along with the usual collection of cool rocks and antiques which always seem to make their way into the car anytime we venture beyond our own driveway.

Silly, silly me.  What made me think that the yarn store would be open? 

We arrived in Medora last Thursday evening.  Not a late-night town, all the stores were closed.  Even the convenience store rolled up its sidewalks at 5pm.  (Note to convenience store owner:  The word “convenience” typically means being open later than 5.  Thank you.) 

A distressing number of signs stated that the stores were not simply closed, but closed for the season.  You see, the M.E. and I are devotees of travel during the off-season.  We hate crowds, hate doing things at the exact same moment when everyone else is doing them.  In Medora, the season starts after Memorial Day.  A town of only 100 permanent residents, the population swells by 5000 during the summer months.  Off-season, bunnies sit unbothered in the middle of traffic-free streets.  In season, the 115-room Badlands Motel stays fully booked, and people line up to get into restaurants and the immensely popular Medora Musical.  Traffic, I imagine, transforms from bunny-friendly to quite unpleasant.

Now, the M.E. and I don’t give a prairie dog’s patootie

about the Musical and all its hopping up and down in cowboy hats and ruffly skirts.  We were staying in Medora because it’s the closest town to the stunningly gorgeous Teddy Roosevelt National Park. 

   

In fact, the main entrance to the South Unit was less than two blocks from our hotel.

But it never hurts to do a bit of shopping, even when the scenery is beautiful.  The sign on Bandannas & Bows didn’t say “closed for the season,” it said “closed.”  I held out hope.

After our hike on Friday (hiking stories in my next post), we trundled through town, dusty and disheveled and dying for a shower.  It was about 4:55pm.  Could it be?  Yes, lights were on in the yarn shop!  It was open!  But with only five minutes before closing and me so filthy that no sensible LYS owner would let me near her nice, clean yarn, I decided to wait.  After all, if the shop was open Friday, it would be open Saturday...right?

Fortified with a completely excessive breakfast at the Chuckwagon buffet, we left early Saturday morning for a long, marvelous hike through the Petrified Forest.  It was just after lunchtime when we made it back to town.  Perfect, I thought.  Plenty of time to get cleaned up and visit the yarn shop and look for souvenirs.  Perfect except for this, that is:

That’s the M.E. changing a flat tire.  He was so focused and cranky at that moment, I don’t think he even realized I was taking a picture of the drama.  The gravel road out of the park had been so bumpy that neither of us realized something wasn’t quite right with the car until we were all the way back to town.  Not happy.  Not, not happy.  A flat meant a 30 mile drive to Dickinson on the temporary spare--Medora’s too small to have a tire store or even a garage.  Off we went.  Bye bye, yarn shop.

If you should ever have a flat tire in western North Dakota, the place to go is Dickinson Tire.  Even if it is closed because it is after noon on a Saturday, that is the place to go.  This is what we learned after trying the door at Dickinson Tire, finding it locked and going, in sheer desperation, to the megalithic Walmart up the street.  Walmart has a Tire & Lube department.  They do not, however, have the right tire.  Trust me on this one. 

The really nice guy at Walmart, knowing that they don’t have the tire, will call his buddies at Dickinson Tire and ask if they do.  The Walmart guy will then sneak you outside and will, in a low voice inaudible to boss radar, point the way to the back door of Dickinson Tire.  Because even if the sign at the front of the building says “closed” on a Saturday afternoon, the back of the building is hopping.  The employees are there fixing up their own cars, and they’re the kind of cool guys who are more than happy to take time out to help two total strangers by selling them a tire (above board, on the books) and doing an excellent job of putting it on the car.  Ray was the guy who helped us.  Ray was such a stand-up guy he actually refused a $20 tip.  "Just come back and buy more tires," he said.
 

I wish I had a photo of Dickinson Tire.  I thought about it too late, as we were turning the corner to get back on the highway, and the stupid thing about digital cameras is that they're slow.  (A camera shouldn't have to boot up!)  What's interesting about this place is that it's a very rare thing--a business that's actually doing better by virtue of having a Walmart nearby.  See, as I hear it, Walmart doesn't have the right tire most of the time and when they do, they tend to do such a crappy job of installing it that unhappy tire buyers have to go elsewhere to get things fixed properly.  Guess where they go?  Yup.  To see Ray and his buddies--their business has increased dramatically since Walmart moved in with its Tire & Lube.  Score one for the little guys!

Something tells me that Ray doesn’t read knitting blogs, so he’s unlikely to know that I’m thanking him again here.  He did us a huge favor and did it expertly and fast.  We were on the road again and back to Medora by 3:30, elated because we still had time for souvenir shopping and...yarn!

At that point, the M.E. was happy because he was getting me to the yarn shop on time, and I was so happy at the propect of being able to actually walk into the yarn shop that I would have bought a skein of Red Heart Wintuk, if that’s all she had, to show my gratitude.  Yarn, yarn, glorious Medora yarn!

So.  This is what I found when I traipsed up to the door of Bandannas & Bows, at an hour on Saturday afternoon when most merchants would have been open:

Um, don’t thank me.  I wasn’t coming back on Sunday.  We had to leave town no later than about 9:00am in order to have any hope of getting home at a reasonable hour.  And that’s just what we did.  The only yarn I brought home from this trip was the yarn I brought with me, some Lorna’s Laces which is going to be birthday socks for my mom.

      

And Medora’s yarn shop lady?  Perhaps she thought I already had too much yarn.