We left last Saturday at 5 am for our exciting trip to….Colorado! We settled the boys to sleep in the backseat, and before long we were out of the city and driving underneath more stars than I’ve seen in ages. I worked on Charlie’s sweater – I can knit in the dark now! – and I anticipated getting a lot done on our really, really long drive. The sun came up – beautiful! We were out in the hill country, with rolling hills (what else?) and trees, open spaces – beautiful! We were on vacation!

Unfortunately, it wasn’t long after the boys woke up that they got tired of riding in the car. (If they had only known what was in store for them…hahaha…) We had to make more stops, our progress slowed, we got tired of driving…bleh. As we ducked through New Mexico on what was, as far as I know, my first visit to the state, Max threw up. He has a tendency to get carsick, we’ve discovered!

It was like standing in a wind tunnel. After we got him out of his nasty clothes and into clean, dry ones, Max thought the wind was awesome. He giggled and jumped and waved his hands around – although, some of that could be because he actually got out of the car for a few minutes. It was near here that we actually passed a volcano, believe it or not, and we were tempted to drive up it, but we were already pretty far behind schedule.

After that there wasn’t much excitement until we made it to the mountains. We got in after dark and saw some family, then headed straight for bed. In the morning, though –

Check out the view from the house where we stayed! Just gorgeous. We went up into the mountains to see some snow:

and felt almost embarrassed to take pictures of it. On Monday, I coerced Greg into taking me to a local yarn store:

where I had an absolute blast. I told the friendly woman working that morning (I think her name was Karen, but I can’t be sure and now I feel badly for forgetting, as I asked her her name) for help finding good souvenir yarn. She was happy to help me out: they had buffalo yarn, which was quite expensive, but actually turned out to be a bargain compared to the qiviut. ($70 an ounce, erk!)

Buffalo yarn is on the right, qiviut on the left. I actually put one of the little green balls of qiviut in my palm and stared at it intently, trying to imagine the act of purchasing it. Nope. Couldn’t even imagine buying it, much less what I would do with my seventy dollar plum of yarn. Someday, perhaps.

Fortunately there were others to choose from: yarns handspun and/or hand dyed by ladies living in the surrounding mountains –

also a bowl of heavenly soft angora yarns (of which I did not get a picture) spun by a local woman who raises her own bunnies. There was another section of cushy merino hand dyed with natural dyes:

I don’t know what the blues and purples are from, but the red yarn is dyed with cochineal and the yellow there is dyed with – get this – aspen leaves. I almost bought that, as you can’t get more Colorado than ‘aspen yellow’ yarn dyed with actual aspen leaves, but I’m not a big fan of yellow. I finally settled on a beautiful rose merino with just a bit of heathering (you know how I feel about heathering), dyed with cochineal and walnut.

I’m thinking I might make a hat from it. Pretty! Here is one more picture from the visit before I leave off blogging for the day: first is one of Karen (I hope) that I just had to take, in no small part because of the spectacular entrelac vest she’s wearing.

Click on the pic for a much better view. She knit it herself (of course) from a special hand-painted yarn that had been in her stash for 6 years, resisting all attempts to become something satisfactory. She said that she got about ‘that far’ (indicating a coaster-sized area) into the vest and said “Yes! Yes!” because the yarn works beautifully with the pattern. I asked if they had a knit night and was invited to join them on Thursday morning – sadly, I missed it, but I’m sure it would have been fun. I’ll be sure to stop in the next time we go to Colorado.

Stay tuned for part two of the great mountain adventure!