Summer Travels and the Sock Summit

It has been an amazing summer. I have had the privilege of returning to one of my favorite countries, Spain; I visited Morocco, France, and Guatemala for the first time and I ended my two months of travel at the Sock Summit in Portland, Oregon.
There are so many pictures and so many stories so at the risk of boring all my readers :) I will just talk about the Sock Summit and return to the other places in the future.
It has been a week since I returned from Portland and I still feel "homesick." Portland has been added to my list of favorite cities and the Sock Summit is a yarn event I am determined to do again.
Six thousand knitters, crocheters, and spinners attended the 2nd Sock Summit. The picture above is just part of the line waiting for the marketplace to open on the first evening. Lovely yarns and fibers from large and small companies, mostly indie dyers, tempted us in each aisle. I was so overcome with excitement I forgot to take pictures. It was awesome and overwhelming.
I not only bought this gorgeous yarn , I expanded my Signature needle collection.





In addition to the marketplace there were 50 or more different classes on knitting, dying, spinning, designing and anything to do with fiber and socks. I took a Darning class in hopes of repairing some of my handknits, a class on sock design with JC Briar (very infomative) and a class on "beginnings and endings" with Ann Budd (fun!).


Many of us made and brought stitch markers to swap. My dear husband helped me make 91!

Here are some of the stitch markers I collected in the swaps. Many of the markers represented the knitter's state or country, some were just creative and pretty. I almost don't want to take them off the holder and use them.

The Sock Summit was an amazing experience made even better and more memorable because I spent it with my daughter. We found great places to eat, toured the International Rose Gardens, saw a little of Portland and oooed and ahhed over the yarn. She's an incredible knitter and a lot of fun.
More about Portland next time.

Marrakech to Madrid - First Stop - Morocco

On May 27 we took off from Richmond International Airport. I think it's "international" because it has two direct flights a day to Toronto. What we know was the size of the plane. Our boarding passes listed our seats as 7 window and 8 window. How could we be sitting next to each other and both have window seats? There were two seats across, probably seated 22 people, had propellers, and no flight attendent. The c0-pilot/navegator greated us, went over the usual safety instructions and then went through the curtain, put on his head phones and we took off. Less than two hours later we landed in Toronto.

From Toronto we flew to Franfurt, Germany. We spent our two hours there, going through customs, passport check, security and hiking about a mile and a half to our gate, just in time to board our flight to Madrid.
After spending a night in Madrid, we caught an early departure to Marrakech on Ryanair. A description of Ryanair is a good subject for another blog post.
Marrakech Airport is small and modern. We took a cab to our Riad (guest house) which was located down an alley in the old section of the city. This is what we wanted, to experience Marrakech and experience we did. The Riad was very nice, the people helpful, the room clean. We spent the rest of our first day exploring the Marrakech museum which really didn't tell us much and the souks (marketplace). The souks are mostly located on winding alleys, full of noise, people, motor scooter, donkey carts and did I mention, motor scooters? . The sellers/merchants tried hard to interest us in their goods. If we stopped to look at our map we were immediately approached by a boy who offered to show us the way, for a price, of course. It was hard to concentrate on the merchandise because there was a constant traffic of motor scooters (did I mention the motor scooters yet?) coming for both directions. In the big plaza they come at you from all directions and there is no escape! I learned to stand still and pray they would go around us.




Our second day was spent on a private tour of the nearby Atlas Mountains. I need to post more pictures. Our guide Philippe is French and has lived in the Marrakech area for over ten years. I didn't ask him why. The mountains are beautiful! We offroaded a bit, had tea with a Berber family, walked through a field of sheep and horses, ate lunch at a lovely restaurant, and learned a lot about an area I didn't know existed before we started researching for our trip.



On our third day in Morocco, we spent our time trying to find some tourist sights, avoiding the souks and buying some souvenirs for people back home. We did find one palace, the one synagogue in town, and a lot of alleys. This is a picture of the Khoutoubia Mosque. As we are not Muslim we were not allowed to enter but we could walk through the gardens.

I have more pictures for another day. Though our three days in Marrakech were interesting, I was glad to return to Spain and the rest of our trip.