Happy Campers?

 I didn't make it to Weaving on Tuesday.  I was busy getting ready to introduce my daughter and her family to camping, and there is a lot of prep work involved!  Well truthfully, the kids have camped with us, and her husband has been camping before, but not daughter #1.

We arrived at Elkmont campground early Wednesday afternoon, and had our camp set up, just in time to help them with their's when they arrived.  I only took a couple of photos of our trip, and they really do not tell the whole story!

 We had a wonderful time, hiking, biking and playing in the water.  It is just that every night around dinner time, the sky opened up with a deluge!

The first night we had just finished dinner when it started, so we nixed the campfire, and smores and we all went to bed a little early.

The second night, the rain started just a little earlier, and was finished soon after we had eaten.  We coaxed a fire out of a soggy fire pit, and we were able to enjoy those smores, and then something called funky fire.  You put it in the flames after you have finished with the smores, and they make all sorts of unusual colored flames.  Then we pulled out the glow sticks and watched the kids dance all over the campsite!

The next morning the kids took off for home, and Dear One and I stayed one more night.  Once again, it poured during dinner, and then tapered off.  I am glad I make sure I have options for meals.  What I had planned would not have worked with all that rain, so we went with plan B.

We are now back home, and everything is almost put away.   Sure it is true, those pictures don't say it all, or do they!  They do tell you that that family is a bunch of troopers!  Settled in around a roaring campfire, in the rain!

Until next time, Happy Weaving and Spinning, Tina

Kabobs for 24!

Just one more Camping post, and that is all, I promise!  The food highlight of the 3 night camp out is Shish-Kabobs.  Everyone was supposed to bring enough meat and veggies for their own kabobs, then we put all the meat together in a marinade early in the day.  At about 6pm we all gathered with knives and cutting boards to cut up the veggies: onions, peppers, tomatoes and mushrooms.

After that the meat was brought out, and we began to load up the skewers, lots and lots of skewers! All the while the coals were being made ready.  The fire pit was way too small to do the job, so the fire wranglers improvised a little bit!

 Some of the skewers were a little shorter than the rest, so it took a little adjusting to get them to stay put!  (That is me in the red shirt, knitting away, and Dear One beside me chatting away!)

Turning the kabobs with the fire glove.

Done!  We took them off of the skewers and put it all in a big bowl.  There was rice and various side dishes to go along with it.  It was fabulous!

To finish it all off was a peach cobbler cooked over the coals in a dutch oven with a special lid that will hold coals on top too!  That also was very good!

I was way too full at the end of the evening, but good food and fellowship are not to be missed!



Next time I will have some weaving to blog about I promise!

Until next time, Happy Weaving, Spinning and Knitting, Tina

Grilled Sandwich? (Picture Heavy)

Grilled Sandwich you say?  Oh no, this is not just any sandwich, it may well be the perfect sandwich!

That is just about the conversation I heard as I made my way from my campsite to my neighbors campsite.  We were in the Great Smoky Mountains, camping once again.  This time it was a large group of us, I think I counted 28 including the brief visitors that did not stay the whole 3 nights.
The grilled sandwich you see to the left, is not made in the normal everyday way, it is made on the campfire!  It is not made of normal ingredients either!

Okay, it starts out pretty normal, with really white bread, (the healthy stuff just doesn't do right according to the seasoned campers).

Oh, and Parkay, again the good butter I usually use is in disfavor as well!

Then they started adding all sorts of things, like scrambled eggs and precooked sausages,

Pimento cheese!

Tomatoes, peppers and salsa, were also on the table!   I really can't remember all the stuff that was there, they say the sky is the limit!

Here we go, start with 2 slices of white bread, squeeze parkay on one side of one of the pieces, be generous now.   Now, hold the 2 pieces together and transfer a bunch of that parkay to the other piece.  Place the buttered side down on the cast iron "Pie Irons", then you start adding ingredients at will.  I did not see any 2 that were the same!  I am not kidding!

Here they are on the fire, you may notice that there is a square one and a round one.  The Square pie iron lovers fan base was more populated than the round pie iron fan base, but the round lovers were very passionate.  The square pie irons are better for the environment, (the squares stated) because there is no waste and you are not throwing away pieces of crust!  The round pie iron lovers threw out that they liked the way that the round sandwiches were sealed so completely, and they said that it was a lower carb option!


Here is the Gallery of sandwiches.....

I had already eaten my breakfast when I had entered into the discussion, but I just couldn't miss out on this one.  I choose to do a square one using the traditional smore filling of chocolate and marshmallows.

It was gone so fast I didn't even take a picture!

That night there were several families that were going to do pizza's using their pie irons.   Bread and Parkay, sauce, cheese, and pepperoni or sausage.  It is all build your own, so everyone gets just what they want!

You learn something new everyday now, don't you!

Until next time, Happy Weaving, Tina

Unexpected Beauty

Dear One and I, have finally graduated to camping solo.  Last summer some friends of ours invited us up to the Smoky Mountains to visit them in Elkmont Campground.  I had grown up camping but Dear One had not!  Towards the end of that evening, when I came back to the campsite after a little stroll.  Dear One asked me if I would like to come back and stay overnight on the following Saturday.  I responded that if it was up to me we would return that very night!



We did return that Saturday, and we had a marvelous one night camp out, all we had to bring was a borrowed tent and bedding, our friends provided the rest.  If fact we had so much fun, we were back again the next month to a group camping adventure.  Same campground, a few more friends, and a different borrowed tent.  We had to borrow a bigger tent because I had made my first camping purchase, a queen size camping cot with attached air mattress.  ( I am too old to sleep on the floor!)  On top of the air mattress I added two egg crates, and a quilt, then our own sheets and blankets.  We were hooked!

We got a tent on sale last December, and I have slowly added the necessaries.  We were finally ready to fly solo!  And fly we did!  I tried to get a 3 night stay, but the campground is so packed that 2 nights was all I could get.   (Even thought the campground was pretty full, it was surprisingly quiet and restful!)

On our way up to the Smokies, we noticed that the Rhododendrons were in full bloom!  We have been saying for years that we wanted to get up to the Smokies to see them, and here we were seeing them, even though we had forgotten that they were  in bloom!


We got to our campsite in the early afternoon, made camp in just a short time, and went to explore the area a little bit.  We got back to the campsite, and even though we didn't need the little stove we had been given for dinner, I pulled it out to see how it worked.  Some friends had just borrowed it last week and they said it worked great.

 They must know something we don't know, because we couldn't get the thing to work at all.  It has a tank you fill with the fuel, and you pump this knob 35-50 times and turn this lever up, then you light the match and turn this other knob and let the burner burn for 1 minute, then you can turn the lever down.  The only problem was that we couldn't keep the burner going even one minute.

We looked at each other, looked at the stove, looked at the clock, and high tailed it to Walmart to buy a stove that uses those cute little propane canisters!  We got back, and were relieved to find that it worked wonderfully!  (We are going to gift that other stove to our young camping friends that thought it worked just fine!)  I whipped together the Chef Salad I had mostly pre-prepared at home, and we went to bed full, happy, and confidant that we could make coffee in the morning!

The next morning we were up early, and after a quick breakfast that included Cheerios with frozen milk on top, we hit the road to trek up to Charlie's Bunion.  It is an 8.8 mile (round trip), moderately strenuous hike, with a fantastic view at the top!    We saw oodles of mountain Azaleas along the trail close to the top.

We lunched at the top, and high tailed it home to the campsite to enjoy the afternoon, doing crafty stuff by the river that runs through the campground.  Dear One was drawing and I spent some time getting better acquainted with my favorite spindle.  I am learning to manage Silk Hankies on a Supported spindle.  I am getting ready for the Tuesday Weavers Spinning Retreat, the last Saturday in June.  So I have been watching videos, and brushing up on drop Spindling too.

We dined on pasta that night, the sauce I had made and frozen the week before at home, so it was quick and easy.  It was still light out so we were able to spend the evening with our crafty stuff, Dear One again drawing and I was finishing a pair of socks.  The end of another perfect day!

This morning, after breakfast, we broke camp and headed for home.  We were home and totally unpacked by 2:00pm.  We have made our reservations for July!  This time with grandkids for one of the nights!

Until next time, Happy Weaving, Tina

Summer!

There is something about this time of year that precludes my regular fiber like activities, weaving and spinning and knitting. (already a vast field!)  It can take several forms, like putting the garden in, or traveling to see family, or fun fridays for the kids at church, or new goats being born and needing that extra watchful eye that the adults don't need.  It can also take the form of what I like to call tangents like that tatted cap I posted about last week, on Farmstead Studio.  It is too hot to knit, you know and the tatting just slips right in my purse!  No extra bag to carry!

This week however there has been a new bud on the rose bush.  Some friends of ours are up at the Elkmont Camping Ground, in the Smokey Mountains, for the week and they invited us to come up for the day on Wednesday.  It was a perfect day, we sat and chatted by the campfire, we took a walk, we ate a great campfire meal, and before you know it, we are hunting a tent to join them for a Saturday overnight!  I totally did not expect that!

My family camped all the time, husbands did not!  I had mentioned it a couple of times but it never went anywhere.  I have great memories of a western USA camping tour that ended up at the family reunion in Texas, and  Summers spent camping on the bluff above a beach in California with cousins.  If all goes well, I think I might be able to start building some new memories of camping with kids and grandkids in the Great Smokey Mountains.  It is about as far away from my house now as the beach was from my family home then.

Here are the local grandkids enjoying a "swimming lesson" with Papa.   Grandson is really progressing, taking breaths as he swims, and he loves to glide, and scare his mama half to death.  Granddaughter is trying hard on her freestyle form.  This is their version of a Super Huge Cannonball at the end of the lesson.

It has captured their personalities so perfectly!  I wish all the grandkids were local, though I might have to get in the water myself if they were, right now I am an extra pair of eyes!

Until next time, be a Happy Camper, Tina