An impromptu getaway

Wow, is it really the middle of June already? You would never guess it looking at the weather here this past week. It's been damp and chilly - typical Newfoundland spring.

However, May was unseasonably warm around these parts, and I had a great opportunity on very short notice to take a few days off work for a little holiday. Nick and I pulled out our road map and the tourism guide, and started looking at possible destinations within a day's drive. We realized that neither of us had ever really explored the Cape Shore, at least not since we were old enough to remember it.

This coastal drive takes you along the southwestern part of the Avalon Peninsula. The roads are twisty and extremely hilly. Each little settlement along the coast, some no more than three or four houses, is tucked into a cove with a barachois beach, and the surrounding cliffs are so steep in some cases that it's like driving down into a fjord. I recommend checking your brakes before you go.

Our first stop was Castle Hill National Historic Site. This was the site of a fort, built for defence of Placentia harbour by the French in the 18th century. It was later occupied by British forces in the 19th century (the back-and-forth battles between English and French fighting over fishing rights on the Newfoundland coast has been an enduring theme throughout our history.)


They have a small museum, short hiking trails, and audioguide tours, but the most impressive aspect of the fort is the view that it offers of the town of Placentia. The long, rocky beach in front was used by the earliest fishermen as a place to preserve and dry their salted cod. On the back side of the town are sheltered sandy beaches facing the harbour.


We spent the night at Rosedale Manor, which is located on the back side of the town, facing the harbour.



This place was a real find. The garden is lovely, and the restoration job on the cottage was very well done. Add to that the fact that one of the co-owners is a pastry chef, and well, it is certainly a place that I hope to return to one day! Being the only guests there mid-week, we had the dining room to ourselves to enjoy a gourmet dinner of lobster pasta and partidgeberry chocolate souffle. Heavenly. (Can I just say that although I extend my heartfelt sympathies to the local fishermen that the current extremely low price of lobster is making it hard for them to earn a living, I am personally doing my very best to keep the local industry going!).

Our second day dawned sunny and beautiful, and we headed out to Cape St. Mary's, an ecological reserve that hosts very large seabird colonies.



It's a long drive out to the cape on a narrow road over the barrens. The landscape is kind of otherworldly, just broad expanses of nothing but peat bog, and then you reach the coast and the view over the steep cliffs is just amazing. The cape is populated by a lot of local sheep, sadly raised mostly for meat. (I say sadly, not in PETA kind of way, but rather in that I wish there was more local wool production going. Personally, I think lamb is very cute while alive and baaaing, and also very tasty on a plate.) The farmers just let them run wild, and although domesticated, they are quite happy to scramble up and down the cliffs, seemingly defying gravity. Hmm, I can't seem to find my sheep pictures...

But back to the reason we came. The birds.


The large white birds flying there? Those are gannets. They're one of the larger seabirds along that live on our coasts, and I think one of the prettiest. But the smaller white fleck that you see it the background? They're all birds too. Common murres. This time of the year, they spend a lot of time bobbing in the waves.

At the end of a short hike, you come to the main attraction. You can hear the squealing and skwarking long before you see the rock.




There's no mistaking it, that's a lot of birds. Over twenty thousand pairs each of gannets (mostly on the main rock), murres, and kittiwakes (mostly nestled into the surrounding cliffs). This huge rock is really a small island, separated from the surrounding cliffs by a very deep channel. It's covered in gannets, two to a nest, clinging to the smallest little bits of real estate you can imagine.



We sat for a long time, just taking it all in. The sky above was alive with birds, swooping in with fish, or seaweed for their nests. Occasionally someone would overstep his territory and a fight would break out. Pecking order must be very important when you live in such tight accomodations!

On the way back home, we stopped to do a little fishing. This is another thing I love about living in Newfoundland - you can pull your car off the road at just about any lake or pond along the highway and fish away. If you're a resident, you don't even need a permit. I caught the only trout on this trip, but it was a fairly large one (Really! Why didn't I take a picture?). It's been fun exploring the areas that are a bit off the beaten path. We may not get much of a vacation this summer, but it's great to know that there's really lots to do and see locally, even over the span of a weekend.

I realize that there's been no knitting in this post. I promised you quilt pictures too, didn't I? We'll have to rectify this situation - hopefully this weekend I'll get around to documenting what I've been working on lately.

End of Summer Catch-up

September, huh? How did that happen?

Here's a brief review of recent activities in photos.

Finally, after many months of lying in hibernation, I finally pulled out the Blu baby jeans, bought some elastic for the waist, and finished them off:

Blu jeans, in "Real Indigo" cotton yarn, size 6-12 months, knit on 4 mm Denise interchangeables.

You can't see the embroidery of the pockets too well in these photos, but they are extremely cute in person. I didn't have a lighter colour to do the fake rolled-up hems, but I think they look alright as is.

Over Labour Day weekend, Nick and I took a short trip to Trinity, on of my favourite towns in Newfoundland. We spent two pleasant days taking in beautiful scenery...


(the fog burned off before the morning was out), visiting lots of historic sites...


and doing a little sea kayaking.


It was great, and I hope to get back again next summer to explore some of the surrounding communities. Nick has decided that he wants to move there and buy an inn or a restaurant.... retirement project maybe?

During the car ride I worked on Helena, which I'm knitting for the first of the rush of babies, my cousin's little girl who arrived last week.


Alas, I ran out of yarn with one sleeve to go. Worse yet, my LYS ran out of the dye lot. I ran out on my lunch break yesterday and bought a ball of a different dye lot, but it is very obviously not the same shade.

Luckily, with the internet to the rescue, I managed to locate three different online yarn shops with the right dye lot for me. Strangely, they're all in Britain. I tried at least a dozen retailers in Canada and the US, but nobody had the right number. It makes you wonder about yarn distribution, doesn't it? (Or maybe that's just me.) Anyway, the important thing is that one more ball is now winging its way across the Atlantic to me so that I can finish this off and get it to the new mom. I'm glad I decided to make size 6 months!

MoSI-ing along

(Note - This post was written a couple of weeks ago while in Manchester... but I lost the internet connection before I managed to get it posted.)

Back in Manchester yet again, on a very short visit this time.

I did knit in public on WWKIP day on Saturday, in several different airports and in international airspace. Unfortunately the sock that I started and knitted on for most of the journey was too big and has been ripped back to start over.

On Sunday, after trying rather unsuccessfully to sleep all night on an airplane, I stumbled over to the Museum of Science and Industry - MoSI there on this trip. - in Manchester. As the museum is not open in the evenings, this would be my only chance to get there on this trip. It is a huge place, with more to see than one person can possibly take in in a day, and happily, with free admission. I only had three hours, so I beelined it to the Textiles Gallery.


Luckily, I got there just in time for the daily tour and demonstration of all of the working machinery - old restored carding machines and machines that draft out cotton fibers, and spinning machines, and bobbin winders, and automatic looms. I learned about block printing and trademarks and how Manchester used to be a world centre for textiles manufacture. Cotton was certainly king here.

Knitting has been scarce lately, as I have been just stupidly busy with work and other commitments. At least this one will be a very short trip - just one week.

Chester

Today was the big day, the day of the quest for souveneir yarn.

Since I have a few free days in northwest England this trip, I asked the folks at the Manchester office to suggest somewhere to go on a day trip. Chester came up repeatedly, described as a beautiful city with lots of history and fantastic architecture. York was also considered, but my very short Google search did not turn up any LYSs in York's city centre, so the decision was easy (I'll save York for the next time I'm over).

Chester is only one hour from Manchester via the Arriva (north Wales) rail system. To be honest, hearing all of the Welsh place names announced on the train made me wish that I was venturing a little further on, over the border. But I'll save north Wales for another future trip. So many destinations, so little time!

Chester has ancient stone city walls and Roman ruins all over the place, including an amphitheatre that is still under excavation. The core shopping district has these two-tiered shops, with an upper walkway running along the second storey. So many fabulous little treasure troves, mixed in with fancy designer shops, pubs and cafes. I bought a couple of kitchen gadgets at Lakeland, found a fantastic deal on a trench coat at an end-of-season sale (alas, the end of the season for needing a fairly warm rain coat will not be ended yet when I return to St. John's, even if it is springtime in England!)

And then finally, I made it to Stash Fone Yarns, tucked in a little alleyway.

You can see just a smidge of Chester Cathedral in the background there - it's just around the corner. I totally forgot to take a photo inside the shop. As I'm sure you can understand, I was a little occupied with admiring colours and petting various skeins of fluffiness.

The store is actually very tiny, but I am told that they will be moving to a more spacious location in the near future. You probably wouldn't be able to fit more than 7 or 8 people in the place at one time, but luckily I had the place to myself this afternoon for full maneouverablity. They have full collections of Louisa Harding, Debbie Bliss, and Rowan squeezed along one wall. Notably, the Rowan yarns and books are far cheaper than in Canada, even considering the exchange rate. I'll have to keep that in mind for future projects.

In the end, though, I stuck with unique yarns that would be hard to find anywhere else. Here's the haul:

A set of those cute little 5" brittany sock needles, Knitglobal bulky alpca in "blue twist" (this line is naturally died), Fyberspates 100% silk laceweight (hand-dyed in northern Wales), and two little 50g skiens of four-ply from Clwyd Vale Alpacas in northern Wales. I spent a while trying to decide on a couple of colours of this last yarn, but then realized that the skeins were labelled with the individual alpaca's names. I couldn't resist - my two skeins? Hansel and Gretel.

All in all, it was a great day. I got very tired after all the walking and carrying my loot around, so I appreciated the solid hour of sitting and knitting on the return train journey. Now that I mostly understand how the rail system works here, I'm seeing a lot of possibilities on the map for future jaunts.

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.

Travelling again

I'm back in England again for a bit, enjoying this thing they have over here called "spring". Lovely stuff.

As we have a long weekend coming up for May Day, I'm hoping to do a little touristing, and maybe get out of Manchester for a bit to visit other towns. Hopefully there will be some yarn-related touristing to report. I'll keep you posted.

Checking in

Wow, time has certainly been flying these last few weeks. There has not been much knitting - just a little progress on the Tofutsies socks while flying. That's right, I'm happy to report that while being the most confusing and least intuitive airport that I have ever had the displeasure of navigating, the Heathrow security staff had no problems at all with my 2.0 mm metal dpns. Just don't try to bring any killer shampoo onto a plane!

I had a productive work week in Manchester and got to spend most of the weekend exploring on my own. I toured the City Centre, checked out the historic canals (birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, so they say), visited the John Rylands Library, and saw a very good local production of West Side Story at the Palace Theatre.

The Gothic-style John Rylands Library

Manchester Town Hall

Peter Street, in the City Centre

The architecture is quite nice in Manchester, and I really enjoyed the short visit. I didn't manage to make it to any of the museums and galleries on this trip, but it sounds as if I'll be spending quite a bit of time in the city in the months to come, so I'll save them for another time.

Life has not slowed down much around here. I'm still trying to dedicate evenings and weekends to the last round of thesis revisions, so I haven't had time for much knitting or anything fun really. I had to register for one last semester as a part-time student, but I am looking forward to a thesis defense later this fall. It will certainly be nice to have it all done and be able to have some guilt-free spare time!

I have not been keeping up very well in blog-land lately, but I'll re-emerge before Christmas, I'm certain. Thanks for bearing with me!