Travels with Marjorie

Forgive me for starting on a negative note, but I must once again voice my displeasure at the incomprehensible lack of logic displayed by the folks who run Air Canada. Air Canada, the airline that aside from having no concept of the meaning of customer service, no longer thinks that Newfoundland, the farthest eastern part of Canada, actually needs an air link to Europe. The details of the story are maddening, and I won't get into them here, but suffice to say that I travelled to Manchester this time around via London and TORONTO. Now nothing against Toronto. Toronto is a lovely city with a plethora of beautiful yarn stores, that I would be happy to visit on any other day. But I actually calculated the distances (believe me, I had plenty of time on my hands while I was flying over St. John's, a city that I had departed from only 9 hours before!), and figured out that this is approximately the same as flying from New York to England via Minneapolis. Ridiculous, no? Ah, but what can you do when you live on an island?

The upside to this inanity is that I am making excellent progress on my sweater, Marjorie. A 17-hour journey will do that for you! I took the one-and-a-bit sleeves out onto the balconey of my flat for a photo this evening.

I left the completed front and back at home, and will probably finish the second sleeve on the flight back (mercifully, connecting only through London and Halifax this time). I think that for the first time ever, I will need to find an alternate yarn with which to sew up the seams. The Silke Tweed is very nice to knt with, but it is fairly loosely plied and it breaks easily when you yank on it, so I don't think that it will stand up to the abrasion of all that seaming. I'm thinking I might be able to find a similar colour in a sturdy sock yarn to use instead.

Manchester truly is a lovely city. I feel safe here walking around by myself, and there's lots to see and do. Here's the view up and down the Rochdale Canal from the balconey:

Manchester is a city of canals, much the same way that Ottawa is (although the history goes back so much farther here). The locks in the photo above actually look just like those on the Rideau Canal in Ottawa, probably dating from the same era.

I hope to bring you some yarn-related tourism over the weekend, when I have time to get out and about a bit more.