For The Love of Mountains

This past weekend was a delightful one!  Amanda and I took an extended weekend trip to Banff from Thursday to Sunday.  I am just now getting back to the computer.  And it's One Flower Wednesday too!  ACK!  So much to do, so little time.

The weekend was lovely!  Thursday we left the city in the mid-afternoon and made our way slowly to the mountains - slowly because we geochached our way there.  Never heard of geocaching?  A great outdoor game for the entire family and for all ages.  Use you GPS to find hidden containers with small trinkets in them for trading.  Write your details in the log book that is kept with each little box, and move on to the next one.  For more information you can visit Geocaching.com.  Over the weekend I believe we found 15 of them altogether.  We were hoping for more, but the weather and our schedule didn't allow for it.

Once arriving in Banff we went to our hotel, unpacked our belongings and got down to business.  What business is that?  I was attempting to work on my double wedding ring quilt and while Amanda (due to a sprained and dislocated wrist) caught up on correspondence and other computer related posts.  A great way to spend 4 days in the mountains.

Image from www.canmore.com

Image from Knit & Caboodle website

On Friday we went to Canmore to visit the lovely quilt shop there called The Sugar Pine Company as well as the knitting shop - Knit and Caboodle.  The quilt shop is very dangerous, but I find the knitting shop even moreso.  I found a fabulous new book for sock weight yarns (my favourite type) and a fun book with all sorts of knitted lovelies for my pup.  Chloe is a tiny little pooch and needs warm things to wear when we go out in the winter.

Saturday was my favourite day out of the whole trip.  We attempted the gondola that travels up the side of Sulphur Mountain at the top of the town of Banff.  Not normally that big of a deal for me, but since Amanda is terrified of heights, it was a special trip.  She made it though, white knuckling the whole way, but at least there was no passing out or throwing up!  The view from the top is spectacular, even when the scenery isn't fully visible by mists and clouds.

Unfortunately I didn't get much sewing done because my machine decided to "act up".  The top thread was sewing beautifully, but when I turned the pieces over to look at the bobbin side of things, they looked like a draw-string bag!  ACK!  Gathering that the tension was way out and that I couldn't do much on the outside of the machine to fix it, I resorted to knitting.  The machine went in on Monday for service.

And now, back to reality!  We made our way slowly back to the city on Sunday afternoon (including some geocaching) and were surely missing the mountains come Monday morning!