A little time in the woods.

Life has gotten too busy lately. And time in the woods, which is very important to me, has fallen by the wayside. In desperation, I begged my family to go car camping over Labor Day weekend... and they weren't too hard to convince.

Four days in the high country of Colorado with a toddler, my hammock, a bag of knitting, and assorted wildlife did me good. I wish I could have stayed another couple weeks though. I wasn't ready to come home.

On the way out the door early Saturday morning, on a day which I knew was going to involve a stop halfway to my sister's house to transfer the contents of the carefully packed Volkswagen to my brother-in-law's old diesel Toyota 4 x 4, picking up lunch in Alamosa which was uncharacteristically packed with people attending a car show, picking up an 18 month old and her parents, and driving another couple hours to find a campsite as far from the ATV-driving Texans as possible (my apologies to all Texans who don't spend their summers tearing up the Colorado mountains on ATVs. I am sure there are some of you out there)... I turned around, grabbed anther skein of yarn from the stash, whacked the swift onto the dining room table, and wound the skein I suddenly was sure I would need in case the project I had planned but hadn't started didn't work out. Emergency yarn. Knitting in the woods is important. I did try to hide this activity from Emily, fearing ridicule. But the large cherry swift is a hard thing to hide. (It turns out if after passing the fields packed full of RVs pulled by massive pickups you keep driving far enough to actually need the four wheel drive you painstakingly transferred all your gear into, the camping opportunities are wide open.)

I knitted about half of a baby sweater... some by the light of my headlamp.

The baby was adorable. She learned approximately one million words over the weekend and used them all appropriately the minute the neurons connected. I'm sure she is going to win a Pulitzer Prize for fiction one of these days soon.

She was especially impressed by the bull we encountered soon after setting up camp and walking up the road. She was even more impressed the next morning after hearing the story of how the bull woke me up in the middle of the night standing just outside the tent. He left a huge calling card and as she is learning about the potty right now, she was very intrigued by the large pile of bull poop left 10 feet from my head while I slept. Two days later as I sat in my hammock reading a hiking book (not, you might notice, actually hiking), that same bull sauntered right through camp pretty as you please. Walked right through the middle of all of us without a glance to either side. I think we were camped in his toilet quite frankly.

The signs of fall are undeniable. I love the fall. But I hate the end of the hiking season.