Category: Travel

Knitting · Travel

Park Shawl

annbh3561 Comment
snow covered mountain in the distance against a blue sky with trees and craggy rock in the foreground
Glacier National Park – July 2006
two-toned taupe and speckled pink and green hand knit shawl on on wooden hanger
International Peace Park Shawl – April 2024

Just off my needles is Christina Campbell’s International Peace Park Shawl. Her inspiration for this simple asymmetrical shawl knit in two colors, came from Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park, the world’s first international park and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  The design begins and ends with solid segments representing the two bordering countries, color shifting stripes portray the mountain ridges, and the delicate lace segments depict the fragile nature of peace. 

My knitting journal usually documents December projects designed by Christina when I have joined 100s of other knitters participating in her annual Project Peace knit-alongs (KAL).  The delicate hand-dyed merino fingering skeins from last June’s Hand Dyed Happy Yarn Club are reminiscent of craggy peaks after snowmelt and spring flowers dotting high mountain meadows.  The pattern sat in my queue while I waited for that just right combo of yarns since, after three visits, Glacier National Park remains among my favorite natural places with these fond memories…

  • A mid-summer visit with nieces and nephews when thirteen of us hiked a glacier trail.  The sun sparkling so brightly off the snowpack there were sunburned calves, despite a slathering of sunscreen. 
  • When, despite a sunny June day, we could only venture as far as Lake McDonald Lodge as heavy, late season snowfalls blocked Going-to-the Sun Road.
  • And the thwarted plans to visit Glacier’s Canadian counterpart, Waterton Lakes National Park of Canada, due to lack of proper documentation.  We had incorrectly assumed drivers’ licenses were sufficient IDs and we learned (too late) that without our passports, US customs would not allow reentry.  Instead, we simply enjoyed rustic Rocky Mountain scenery on our side of the border.

Happy knitting on happy trails!

Travel

Happy Swiss National Day!

annbh3562 Comments
cake frosted like the Swiss flag with the German greeting beautiful 1 August

While this holiday always shows up on my calendar, it is special this summer as we have just said “Auf Wiedersehen” to ten cousins visiting from Switzerland, as well as an assortment of US relatives with Swiss heritage.  Leading up to their arrival, I assumed the role of travel agent and booked housing and offered sighting seeing suggestions.  Even though arriving in Chicago on different days, six on July 9 and the four landing on July 21, everyone’s destination was the micro-metropolis of Bloomer, Wisconsin, and the Kuster-Custer family reunion.  The last family picnic was held in 2013 celebrating my Great Uncle Vincenz’s 1913 arrival in America and my grandfather’s visit to his brother a year later.

The challenge of planning sightseeing trips for Swiss visitors is understanding and accepting that the Midwest specializes in subtleties.  We simply cannot compete with the panoramic vistas of the Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau, rather Wisconsin and Minnesota offer gently rolling green hills, tall corn, and the mighty Mississippi, albeit moving slowing along.

In addition to the picnic, my tour guide itinerary included two trips to the Mississippi River (one for each of the two travel groups) with stops at Lark Toys to ride the hand-carved carousel, the Alma lock and dam to watch a tow go through, a scan of the valley from atop the river bluff, and wood-fired pizza at the Stone Barn, as well as 17 people joining Momma for Sunday Mass.  Momma’s house was the gathering point for three dinners – lasagna for 9, a sandwich smorgasbord, and post-picnic snacks, enjoyed by 17, all served with a variety of red and white wines (moderately consumed) and gifts of Swiss chocolate in red and white foil wrappings.

In these few days, amid a great deal of laughter, a few tears for those no longer with us, and plenty of careful translation from Schweizerdeutsch (Swiss German) to English and back again, we, the children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren of August, Vincenz, and Willhelm Kuster shared the joy of family together.

Photo credit:  Swiss National Day graphic shared by Franz K. via WhatsApp

Travel

Up, up and away…

annbh3561 Comment
white airplane wing above the clouds with a Swiss flag on the wing tip against blue sky

While we may not be traveling very far from home these days, we are soon going to enjoy hints of Switzerland.  Six Kuster cousins landed in Chicago last Saturday, toured the Windy City, and are now heading north along the shores of Lake Michigan.  They will spend time in Milwaukee, Madison, Green Bay, and beautiful Door County before driving west to my hometown, Eau Claire.  Another four Kuster cousins will depart Zurich on July 20 for O’Hare and immediately head north for the all day Kuster-Custer Family Picnic on July 22 in the small burg of Bloomer (population ~3,700).  At last count during yesterday’s Zoom planning session, we are expecting 180 picnickers, including our 10 Swiss visitors.  Amazing to think what the two brothers, Wilhelm and Vincenz immigrating from Switzerland, created.

Photo credit: Marianne Deluca

Knitting · Travel

The Best Souvenirs

annbh3563 Comments
four skeins of multi-colored varigated yarn
The four seasons of the Smoky Mountain Collection: spring, summer, autumn, winter

I received the first skeins of travel yarn in 2016 from a friend who attended a destination wedding in Iceland.  She gifted three skeins of Léttlopi in a deep dark blue that, in turn, became a travel gift for a Swiss cousin.  But, even though I had been knitting for years, I did not purchase any yarn on our 2017 retirement road trip – Minnesota to Spokane to Seattle to Vancouver and home again via the trans-Canadian highway.  I am sure there must have been yarn stores along the way but none made our travel itinerary.

I corrected this omission during our 2018 European adventure – Amsterdam to Spa-Francorpschamps in Stavelot, Belgium to Ingolstadt, Germany to Switzerland and Italy – with purchases our first day in Amsterdam and on our last day in Zurich.  Now I make a stop at a local yarn store as a planned part of our travels, whether I am in Arizona for Cubs spring training (2019) or just two weeks ago while in Tennessee for a mountain top wedding. 

These most recent acquisitions to my stash were handdyed exclusively for Smoky Mountain Spinnery in Gatlinburg and represent the four seasons in their Smoky Mountain Collection.  Each colorway is based on a photograph that captures the location’s natural beauty:  delicate spring flora, the vibrant colors of summer twilight, cascading water amidst fall’s changing leaves, or the bright blue winter canopy over frosty hillsides.  With two skeins of each, the possibilities for future knitting projects are endless.

Travel

Reconnecting

annbh356Leave a comment
daffodils in the garden with raindrops

Having barely missed being snow bound in Minnesota by a winter storm that made the national news, the pops of spring color in Tennessee brightened my short visit despite rainy skies.  My unexpected trip was that bittersweet mix that permeates funeral days – sadness for a loss and the happiness of being together to celebrate a life.

Growing up there were very regular gatherings when this family of cousins drove to Wisconsin in a large gold Suburban to visit our shared maternal grandparents or my family ventured a bit to the east when traveling south to visit my Alabamian paternal grandparents.  But college schedules, jobs, and life (in general) intervened and years went by punctuated only by Christmas cards and infrequent letters.  A recent wedding and now a funeral has us reconnecting.  And, I am pleased to have an April trip already planned.

Travel

Pilgrimage to Massachusetts:  A postcard summary

annbh3561 Comment
Alcott house during a 7-month failed utopian experiment at Fruitlands

My first travel discovery was a shift in language; the journey defined not as a trip, or a vacation or even a history tour but as “pilgrimage.”  For the 15 of us, this was a time to immerse ourselves in stories; to amble the same path as Henry David Thoreau trod along the shores of Walden pond; to climb the same steep, narrow wooden stairs to the Arlington Street Church bell tower and ring the same bells that would have gathered people to hear William Ellery Channing speak; to saunter through Sleepy Hollow Cemetery and touch the gravestone of Louisa May Alcott. 

Some highlights of our days of pilgrimage:

New England stone wall on the Emerson-Thoreau Amble
  • King’s Chapel – touched the last bell cast and hung by Paul Revere
  • Arlington Street Church – tried my hand at ringing three of the 16 bells
  • Mount Auburn Cemetery – left memorial bouquets at the graves of William Ellery Channing, Hosea Ballou, John Murray, and Margaret Fuller
  • Walden Pond – walked the entire pond and left a Winona river rock at the stone cairn close to the site of Thoreau’s cabin where he lived for 2 years, 2 months and 2 days
  • Old Manse – saw the desks where Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter and Emerson wrote Nature
  • Sleepy Hollow Cemetery – discovered that as they were neighbors in life, so too they are neighbors today as we visited Authors Row and the family plots of the Alcotts, Thoreaus, Emersons, and Peabodys leaving pencil homages for Louisa May Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, and Elizabeth Peabody.
First Parish in Concord after vespers on the evening of our departure

Our days were filled visiting churches, graveyards and cemeteries (learning these two are different from one another) and touring the homes of literary giants.  All the while hearing concise history lessons laced with anecdotes that put flesh and bone to revered names and made them quirkily human.  We benefited from bookstore visits, invigorating conversations, time for quiet reflection, and the recitation of poetry.

The Road
The road waits. 
... when it invites you
to dance at daybreak, say yes.
Each step is the journey; a single note the song.
-	Arlene Gay Levine

P.S.  And six of us hopped the green line to Fenway for a Red Sox win.  The green monster is really monstrously tall!

Reading · Travel

American Bloomsbury

annbh356Leave a comment

I have a copy of Michael Holroyd’s definitive biography of Lytton Strachey.  A gift from a friend, the two-volume boxed set serves as a bookend anchoring a shelf of history titles.  My friend was a Bloomsbury aficionado.  He read everything he could about these post-Victorian intellectuals even waiting patiently to purchase The Letters of Virginia Woolf published in six volumes; book-by-book over 10 years.  He also gifted me his extra copy of The Loving Friends: A Portrait of Bloomsbury by David Gadd.

When the Pilgrimage to Massachusetts reading list (yes – an actual two-page bibliography of primary and secondary sources) included American Bloomsbury by Susan Cheever, I thought this title could be the primer I needed (just as The Loving Friends had been) to better understand our American literary giants.  As the subtitle describes, American Bloomsbury focuses on the lives, loves, and work of Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau. 

These profoundly talented people moved among each other, sometimes living together, sharing books, reading what each other wrote, and relishing in deep philosophical discussions.  In the introductory “Note to the Reader” Cheever describes her intent to work chronologically but to do so from each of her primary character’s perspectives thus her timeline moves back and forth as she describes overlapping incidents and conveys the stories of their lives life in Concord and the surrounding environs during the 1830s – 1890s.

Their individual accomplishments – Little Women, The Scarlett Letter, Walden, Or Life in the Woods – create for us a tableau of 19th century life; a young country, a growing divide over slavery; and women’s rights still but a wishful glimmer only in some minds.  But, taken as a whole, these hearty New Englanders defined a literary, philosophical, religious, and political movement that we call Transcendentalism with its core belief in the inherent goodness of the individual and nature. 

I leave early (4:45 am) tomorrow to see their homes and haunts.

Travel

Pilgrimage to Massachusetts: To blog or not to blog

annbh3562 Comments
graphic depiction of a chalice and flame surrounded by 2 circles

One week from today I leave for Boston.  My flight out of Rochester (RST – MSP – BOS) departs at an inhumane hour that requires leaving home around 4 am.  Admittedly, this was my decision as there are other departures with connections heading east but I opted to use already paid for Covid miles/dollars held in escrow by Delta for canceled trips to Phoenix, Providence, and Denmark.  2020 was to have been a travel-cious year.

I considered using Knit+ Librarian as a daily travelogue so you could join me vicariously as I visited historically important sites in Boston, Cambridge, Concord, and Gloucester but then re-thought this potential commitment.  As with most guided tours, our August 9-15 itinerary is full enough to make me wonder just how much time I will have to write; there is no guarantee of strong Wi-Fi needed for posting; and, while I know technically it can be done, I lack any desire to blog on my iPhone.  Plus, I have to wonder if you really want to read about the minutia of my days.  Rather, I’ll give you a succinct postcard summary complete with an appropriate selection of photos (no – dinner plates, I promise!) after I return to Minnesota.

A sampling of anticipated highlights may include:  King’s Chapel, Old North Church, Harvard Square, the Sargent-Murray House, Walden Pond, and Sleepy Hollow Cemetery but you will have to wait until the end of my trip to know for sure.

Graphic:  © Greg Wimmer

Travel

Crossing the River

annbh3561 Comment
Mississippi River with lock and dam mid-frame
The Mississippi River at Lock & Dam 4 – August 2005

Every time I cross the river, I take a quick glance upstream and down through the blue bridge girders.  With the season for barge traffic and pleasure cruising long since complete, I check ice buildup along the shoreline.  Knowing only later, after deep-freeze temperatures, will the ice floats appear in the main channel.

When you go “over the river and through the woods” as often as I do at Wabasha it is easy to see this small segment of a massive watershed as simply another sight along the trip.  But the Mississippi is anything but commonplace.  It is a river that people from around the country, from around the world, wish to visit; simply to claim they have seen, or crossed, or boated on the Mississippi.  And while the scenery may not be as dramatic as the Matterhorn, numerous Swiss cousins (once – fünf Frauen am Fluss) have enjoyed a day spent along the river, watching barges work their way through Lock 4 at Alma.

Starting at the confluence of the Mississippi and the St. Croix Rivers (Hastings, MN and Prescott, WI) the Mississippi becomes more than just a navigable waterway, it takes on the monumental task of separating governmental units, state-by-state, as it flows south to the Gulf.  But, before Hastings, west and north, the Mississippi wends its way through fields, prairie, and forests to humble beginnings at Lake Itasca.

While history books, written from the perspective of the white immigrant, attribute the discovery of the headwaters to the Henry Rowe Schoolcraft expedition in 1832, this small beginning of a massive waterway was known and sacred to Indigenous People for millennia.  And, it must be noted, Schoolcraft reached his destination only with the aid of an Anishinabe guide.

Poet Mary Oliver, whose poems always present the perfect blend of words to describe our world, offers us this observation:  “It is the nature of stone to be satisfied.  It is the nature of water to want to be somewhere else.”  Each time I stand on the sandy shore where a small stream flows into Lake Itasca there is a sense of awe.  Regardless of the number of people laughing and splashing from one side to the other, I recognize I am in a holy place.  My 21st century, rational mind knows that the droplets sprinkling in the sunlight may cease to exist as flowing water; diverted to human consumption, agricultural irrigation or simply becoming part of a natural evaporation – precipitation cycle.  But there is also the real possibility that the very water that I see flowing over the CCC-placed stepping stones, water that will touch millions of lives before a wide river slides muddily past New Orleans, will finally blend with the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico.  That connection with an entire continent transforms each visit to Lake Itasca into a spiritual experience.

Travel

Pink Dashes for Dogwoods

annbh356Leave a comment
lavendar mums

You will have to imagine (as I didn’t snap a pix) large pink dashes in the center of the lane not the center line but in the center of each driving lane.

During a Labor Day weekend visit to Tennessee for a family wedding, I learned these “road blushes” mark Knoxville’s famous Dogwood Trails.  The trails date back to 1955 (nearly as old as me) and cover more than 85 miles, winding through 12 different neighborhoods.  A portion of the trails is just steps from my Aunt and Uncle’s front door.  For those visiting in early spring, the dogwoods are plentiful on the rolling Smokey Mountains and intermixed with azaleas, flowering crabapples, Japanese cherry trees and a myriad of Planting Zone 7a blossoms.  Riotous color after dreary winter days to be envied by gardeners in our hardy Zone 4b. 

But not to be outdone by southern cousins, Dad’s Mums are just starting to bloom as I returned to the North Country.