Katie and I crammed a lot into two days and didn’t have to drive more than about an hour away.

We spent all day yesterday at the Shelburne Museum. There is too much to see in one day and, in fact, your ticket buys you two consecutive days.  I think it would be hard to absorb any more if you really spend time reading all the signs and looking at everything.

This is just one room of Shaker tools. Behind Katie there are more tools, wood stoves, and a lot of things that I can’t identify.

Here is the Jacquard loom in the weaving shed.

How about a two-handed spinning wheel? There are two bobbins and the docent told us that one person used this wheel to spin two bobbins at a time.

This is a portion of a reed from a loom–made with real reeds.

There is an entire house displaying weather vanes, whirly-gigs, and ships’ mast-heads.

The Museum grounds are full of incredible buildings. This horseshoe-shaped barn houses dozens of sleighs and buggies on two levels. Other buildings house a 1″:1′ scale circus train, blacksmith shop, printing presses, dental office, general store, apothecary, toys, dolls, quilts, wooden decoys. Can you imagine entire displays of glass canes, trivets, crystal glasses, hatboxes, embroidery samplers? The list goes on. At the end of the day when we found there was only about 35 minutes until closing we breezed through the Fashion exhibit and had to skip a couple of other buildings.

 We came home exhausted and finished the evening by making triple chocolate ice cream in Katie’s new Kitchen Aid ice cream maker and watching the DVD of Cavalia that I had given Katie for Christmas after having seen the show.

It rained last night and that was good, for I guess two weeks without rain in VT in the summer is considered almost a drought. Today we drove south and went to three more tourist attractions.

Living in California, I don’t know much about “sugaring” so this was an interesting exhibit. Especially fun was the tasting room. There is quite a difference between the mild and the stronger flavored maple syrup, but all are good.

We drove past and through picturesque  covered bridges on our way to the next stop.

The Vermont Marble Museum is fascinating. It is housed in what was once a huge mill/warehouse and has rooms full of exhibits and marble. Lots of marble. There is a poignant exhibit describing the construction of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The marble for the monument came from Colorado but was designed and finished in Vermont. There are marble portraits of all the U.S. Presidents up through Bush #1. Take a look below.

 This is a huge room full of slabs of all kinds of marble. I had no idea there was this much variety.

Our day wasn’t finished. We had passed a sign that said “Castle 3 miles”. Why not?

The Wilson Castle was built in the mid-1800’s for almost $1.5 million!

It is a spectacular building with an interesting history, but I think I liked the outside veranda best. Doesn’t the tile floor look woven?

More VT  tourism reports tomorrow!

Why Vermont? That’s where my daughter lives right now. I travelled all day Thursday (4 planes and 14 hours) to get here and spent today hanging around the farm. Katie had to work for a few hours this morning so her landlord, Carl, showed me around the place.

The road runs through the property.  The barn and arena are on one side and the houses are on the other. The property goes to the river that is at the base of the hill in the background. The forest on the hills on both sides of the property is National Forest.

This is the house where Katie and Kurtis live. The entrance on the right is a common entrance way. Katie and Kurtis live in the house on the left side and Carl and Leslie live in the back, and have an office on the right, but it is all attached somehow. Everyone shares chores and I don’t think Katie could have found a nicer living situation.

I took this photo of the bed I’m using because that is the blanket that I made for Katie after Christmas. I used a lot of my mom’s handspun yarn to weave it. I was unhappy with the size and the “ruffly” edges after fulling, but it works great on this bed and is quite soft.

Libby will follow Katie anywhere. I think Libby might even remember me.

Tomorrow we’re off to the Shelburne Museum.

This is our 25th anniversary. (Chris said “that’s longer than I’ve been alive!…oh, yea.) We decided to spend the day doing something beside working here. We headed west to see the Pt. Reyes Lighthouse at the Pt. Reyes National Seashore. It turns out that the lighthouse is closed on Tuesdays, but it was a beautiful day at the coast anyway. The only thing we missed was walking down (and up) the 300 stairs to the lighthouse.

The signs say that this is the “windiest point on the American Pacific coast” with winds regularly at 40 mph and reaching 100 mph. It is also often foggy in the summer. We lucked out. This was one of the nicest days that I’ve ever had on the coast.

That’s the Farallon Islands in the distance, about 20 miles from Pt. Reyes.

There are harbor seals on those rocks.

After visiting the lighthouse (well, the cliffs above the lighthouse), we drove back through the hills to one of the beach access trails and saw pretty landscape and wildlife on the way.

…and not so wild-life. Within the National Seashore there are several working dairies with signs that say the ranches were established in the 1850-s to 1870’s. We were thinking that it would have been a long way to haul milk to San Francisco unless there was boat transport across the bay.

There are 10 miles of beach in this stretch.

I took a lot of photos of waves–maybe not National Geographic quality, but the color is pretty nice.

To another 25 years!

I have just spent an hour trying to upload photos to Flickr so that it would be easy to share a lot of photos. Every time I do it then I get a message that says I’m deleting the album. Grrrr. So I’ll post a few here now and maybe more later.

Shelby, Mary, and Dona helped on show day. Shelby helped clean up and show sheep, Mary held down the fort at the display/sheep area, and Dona took photos.

Dan is showing Meridian Granite and I have Sweetgrass Clint in the Yearling Ram Class.

Here is what the rest of the class was like. Shetlands, Jacobs, and St. Croix (hair sheep). The Shetland at the front of the line in this photo won the class and, ultimately, Champion Ram of the Primitive Breeds Show. Granite was second in this class and Clint was 5th.

My entries in the ram lamb class.

Vickie and Hot Lips in the Yearling Ewe class.

Leaving Shelby with three sheep while Dan and I got two more for the Flock class.

That’s Granite on the right, two yearling ewes, and two ewe lambs. We didn’t shine in these classes, mostly placing in the middle. That’s a little disappointing, but we always tell people new to showing that it doesn’t really matter what the judge says. Many judges aren’t that familiar with Jacob sheep and it seems pretty hard to judge this kind of class anyway. On the other hand, if you win, you certainly tell all!

This is a view of the sheep pens…

…and the display area.

Notice the ribbons here. This is what I work hard to get. I have been trying for 4 years to win the Open Sheep Marketing Award. I got 2nd this year again (although placed over last year’s winner), but was awarded Best Program, Best Educational Presentation (Sheep Herdsman), and 2nd in Best Educational Presentation over the whole 3 weeks of the fair (including all the species shown). So I’m pleased with this and there is always next year to get to #1. Farm Club, are you ready?

We left only 1/2 hour behind schedule this morning to get the sheep and the exhibit to the CA State Fair.  I figured that was not bad after about 4 1/2 hours of sleep!

I went to the fair with much more of a plan than I usually have so I thought that set up would be easy. No! My 8′ x 2.5 sign needed better support than I had planned. Space was a bit different so I had more to fill . I left out some of the elements that I had planned to use because it was starting to look cluttered.

Thank goodness I have such wonderful friends who will help. Too bad that I don’t have photos of them but we were too busy to stop for photos. Thanks to Jackie, Chris, Mary, Dona, and Rick!!! And thanks to Tina and Alison for the design help!

Here is a young fair-goer drawing in the spots and horns on a sheep drawing we provided.

Faulkner, my new Blue-Faced Leicester ram, had a large swelling (about the size of a grapefruit and with no visible injury) behind his rib cage. I noticed it on the weekend and my veterinarian looked at him on Monday. The vet thought that she could feel an opening in the muscle tissue and recommended that I take him to the UC Davis VMTH to surgically repair it. Sure enough, there was a 2″ opening that required a much larger opening by the time it was done.

So what could cause this hernia? My vet and I had a talk about what she calls “veterinary practice builders”, one of which could be this:

Hudson and Faulkner have not been fighting, but it is my vet’s opinion that just a quick toss of this head could cause damage to someone else.  Most of my other 4-horn rams have had curved top horns so I wonder if injuries are more common when a ram has a set of spears on his head.