The Long Way Home

 While it is always great to be at a quilt retreat, it's always fun to return home. Again the weather cooperated, and it was one of the best days I've seen in a long time. How could you not feel happy and excited! 

I did go for a short walk in the morning and decided I'd better get myself back to the sewing machine to get something done! I managed to get the center of the flannel quilt done. 

Part of the flannel quilt done!

I still have MANY squares of flannel left, and I think I will make four of these and sew them together. Then I'll need to add a few more rows on the bottom, which should give me a decent-sized quilt. That's the easiest, and who will know that the stars are in the exact location within the four sections. NO ONE will be able to tell. NO ONE will even know! So that goes back into the retreat box. 

I did not take any rulers with me. DUH! I need to make a list of those things that I need to take all the time, or just take one of my duplicate rulers and put that permanently into the retreat box. I had to borrow Ronda's square ruler to trim some half-square triangles, and I thought I had better get those trimmed before she left. 

A bag of half-square triangles -- trimmed

I'm happy to report that all the half-square triangles for my Tula Pink butterfly quilt are done. Well, that's not exactly true. For some reason, I had a couple of miscut squares of white, and I thought I could sneak by with them, but NO -- they didn't work, so I have four more to make today, which won't take that long. 

We had lunch, tidied up, and we were gone. Since it was such a nice day, I was going to take my time coming home. The original retreat house that we stayed in wasn't far away, so I decided to go there to see what it looked like. 

OH MY GOSH -- NOTHING has changed. It looks the same. 

Our original retreat house

OK -- from that picture, you can't see a thing, but the barn beside the sign is for horses, and the new owners have about four that I could see. Some of them are little and were having a great roll in the hay. Am I allowed to say that? But literally, one of them was rolling in the hay. 

Here's the house. And how we managed to sew in that little house beats me. We are definitely spoiled now, and where the owners of the new houses expect us to cram 8 into the sewing space, we go with 5 or 6. It's not the bedrooms; it's the sewing space. 

Our old retreat house

Even the signposts for the house are still in place at the side of the road. 

The signposts are still there

So many memories in that house. I don't remember how many years we went, but it was quite a few and we went twice a year. And it was always the same group. No one from that original group comes on my retreat now and that's fine by me, although I miss several people from that group. I still stay in touch with several of them, but the others -- well, that's best left unsaid. 

Since I was now a bit west of the main highway, I decided to head into Bracebridge, where an Adventure Lab waiting for me. This is part of geocaching, and you just walk around answering questions, usually from historic signs. This one was easy and quick and the day was perfect. Here is one of my stops along the way. 

The courthouse in Bracebridge

Thankfully, I left my wallet in the car because there were all kinds of ice cream stops, and I KNOW I would have stopped if I had the money!!

Here's what the original quilt shop now looks like. It's a Mexican restaurant. I didn't know if I would remember my way around Bracebridge since I didn't drive there often, but often enough that I knew how to get out of downtown and back to the highway to make the trip home. 

The original quilt shop in Bracebridge

The rest of the trip home was uneventful. Chatted with my parents for a bit and then listened to an audiobook. I'm getting very good with the Bluetooth controls on the car and I am very happy with them. The navigation system? That's  whole different story which I'd prefer not to even talk about!

I've been to spin class -- I love that 5:30 class. It gets me going and it doesn't delay my routine much. 

I'll catch you up on the rest of the fun stuff tomorrow. 

Hae a super day!!!

Ciao!