The trip to NY

Sarah, Joan and I drove to northern Virginia last Tuesday, ate dinner at Meg's - she had Tom and Karin there also, so we had time to visit briefly with them and give them some old family pictures for the wedding - then went over to Sue's. Joan and Sarah stayed at Sue's for the week, and I spent Tuesday and Wednesday there.

On Thursday morning I picked up Meg and her stuff, then we picked up Penny and her stuff. The van was packed and arranged to our liking, Randy snapped a picture of us, and we hit the road.

Meg and Penny provided us with shirts ("So you won't lose each other - like at Disney?" Steve asked) with a special logo:

Meg's sister, Wendy, embroidered the shirts. (We weren't bad, either - just sheepish.)

They also got each of us a charm for our charm bracelets. For this event it was a little silver suitcase that opens and closes and has a "New York" sticker on it.

Penny provided each of us with a plastic bin for our yarn purchases, and Meg made labels for the bins:

Our first stop was in Baltimore, MD.

Then we went to Bel Air, MD.

Our next stop was Lancaster, PA for two yarn stores. We met Jeannine at the first store, Oh Susanna.

As an added bonus, we got to meet Timothy, too. And Jeannine brought me three jars of dilly beans!

The second Lancaster shop was Kitnit.

We arrived there right before it closed. Afterwards, we went to a nearby diner, ate supper, then continued on to Allentown, PA, where we stopped at Tucker's.

It was pretty late by then, and we were tired. We drove on over to Bethlehem, checked into the hotel, and dragged all the day's yarn purchases up to our room so we could look over it and see what we had and what we still needed. Because we started our trip with two goals (visit several yarn stores we'd never been to and go to the NY Sheep & Wool Festival) we had lists. It's always more fun when I'm looking for something specific. At the yarn stores Meg and Penny were looking for yarn to make the Crayon Box Jacket and I was looking for yarn to make the Dancing Crayons Poncho. I was also looking for yarn to make the Lizard Ridge afghan.

On Friday morning we breakfasted at a nearby Waffle House, then went to Tangled Yarns in Bethlehem.

Kraemer's in Nazareth, PA was our next stop.

Penny found all kinds of treasures there, and I got a picture of her most uncharacteristically clutching a huge armful of yarn and roving:

We headed east into New Jersey and stopped in Morristown.

The ladies there told us that we needed to add Sheep's Clothing in Red Hook, NY to our list of shops to visit. We noted the address and headed to Boonton, NJ, where we visited this shop:

The shop owner, Marie, had a cute out-of-print book called Mr. Nick's Knitting that was not for sale. She also recommended Sheep's Clothing.

So we headed for New York and our last shop. The Catskills and the Hudson were gorgeous. When we arrived at the shop, it was close to closing time, but we had a very nice time browsing and shopping.

Penny was *very* happy and said many times that this shop was the icing on the cake for her. I think it was my favorite shop because it was so attractively laid out. It also carried only their own Morehouse Merino yarns, so it wasn't overwhelming, even though it was our last shop after visiting so many others.

We ended the day with supper at Red Lobster, then settled in at our hotel. Once again we emptied the van of all our yarn and spent the rest of the evening going over our considerable haul and did a bit of knitting.