Playing Twixt

On a gameboard . . .

and in person.

I can't believe no one posted this yet

A visit to the Ashfield Fall Festival

Last weekend, we picked up Great Murphy in Hadley, met Caleb, Kate and Jamie at Mary Link's and went to the Ashfield Fall Festival, where we found Art and Pat, Michele, Samantha and Ethan.  Jamie went fishing.

Great Murphy had a great time.

Painting pumpkins is more fun with cousins -- especially cousins with mustaches.

We found an unexpected old Ashfield friend: Pandora and her little girl, Freya.

Four generations of Murphies, in one Subaru!

Luke meets a doll

These were taken at Ashfield Lake.  That's our neighbor Sue in the background, and Caleb beyond her.  I don't remember whether the doll survived.

Saturday morning at the lake

Update on October 6, 2014: After I took this picture -- which didn't involve much artistry; I pointed my phone across the water and pushed the button -- I put it on my Facebook page and sent it to the US Weather Service in Binghamton, because they asked for fall foliage pictures.  Yesterday, they put it on THEIR Facebook page.  As of a few minutes ago, it had 1,756 likes and 56 comments and had been shared 250 times.  Now you can say you knew me when!

What is Luke up to now?

Pictures from the wedding

Almost ready.

Tables under Rob's tent.

Dad's not in the picture because he was doing this:

Peter is always chic.

Flower children.

Ana, Selena and Dad.

Wny we were there.

A wedding crasher.

The Ring Bear.

And the rings.

Aunt Kay and Cousins Mary, Ann and Kay.

Uncle Larry and Uncle Tom.

Gimbal.

It's too bad this is blurry, but Liz looks so happy, I had to post it anyway.

The Cool Cousins, or so they claim.

Trevor's toast.

Dancing.

Cousins.

Liz shows Aunt Kay her September 11 weaving.

The aftermath.

August 9, 2014

This would have been Grandma Frey's 86th birthday, and how she would have relished the fun and anticipation of arriving in Olympia and preparing for the Big Event.  

We picked up Caleb and Kate at Sea-Tac on Saturday morning and checked into our house on Totten Inlet, about 15 minutes north of Liz's house on one of the several spits of land that extend northward into the tidal waters of Puget Sound.  Here's the view from the deck:

Those are mussel rafts visible on the water not far off the shore.  That whole area of the sound is leased by a commercial shellfishing operation that farms oysters, mussels, geoducks and I don't know what else.  We saw the rafts tended by small boats each day during the week of our stay.

On Saturday night, we gathered for a night-before dinner with relatives and friends who were arriving from afar at Anthony's Homeport on the water on Olympia.  Visible here from the right: Rob's sister Bonnie, Tom, Rob, Liz, Liz's friends Deb, Robin and Marty, and Robin's daughter Emmy.   

In the background -- Cantys, Clancys, a Recktenwald, some Freys and Murphies, and glimpses of Misa, Olivia, Rob's mother Karen, and Luke, who got into Seattle on Saturday evening just in time to make it to the restaurant with Anna, Laura and Jason.

Ana, Alex, Trevor and Chris.

Aunt Kay Canty and cousins Caker Canty Deasy, Ann Clancy Lee and Kay Clancy.  (That's three out of four variants on Catherine, by the way, and not the only ones who were present.  This WAS a Frey family wedding.)

Cousins!  So cute!  And they both look just like their fathers did at their respective ages.

Fast forward to tonight, August 18th: we're in Fort Wayne, Indiana, with one day's traveling left ahead of us to get home tomorrow night.  This morning, we drove through a misty, overcast Minnesota and Wisconsin into Illinois and arrived in early afternoon at the St. James Farm Forest Preserve of DuPage County, where "I Saw a Child," a bas-relief sculpture of Grandma Frey's, is exhibited on the wall of the elegant brick stable.  I'll post pictures of that -- and of The Wedding -- tomorrow!

Day Two of the Epic cross-country Trip

Today is really Day Three, but I didn't do Day Two, so I'm catching up. Day Two started in Big Timer MT and ended in a very odd Best Western in Minneapolis. 900 miles in 12.25 hours. Mostly Montana and North Dakota. Then Minnesota. I'll do today tomorrow.

On the way home

I'm out of time sequence now, but I'll catch up when I can after we get home. Here's sunrise on the Crazy Mountains, from the parking lot of a Super 8 early this morning in Big Timber, Montana:

And here, not all that visible, is the signature of William Clark of the Lewis and Clark expedition, dated 1806, on Pompey's Pillar, a rock formation visited by Lewis and Clark, and covered with Native American pictographs and the signatures of pioneers, along the Yellowstone River in southern Montana on our way from Big Timber to Glendive:

We climbed the boardwalk steps onto the rock formation so early that the park office wasn't open yet, and the ranger that we met was buzzing around in a golf cart getting ready for the day.  We mentioned the mosquitoes swarming all around us, and he said yes, that was the real Lewis and Clark experience, which they complained about all the time. I looked it up tonight, and sure enough, their journals are full of comments on the "troublesome," "very troublesome" and "extremely troublesome" mesquestors, misquestors, misquitor, misquitoes, misquitors, misqutors, misqutr, missquetors, mosquiters, mosquitors, mosquitos, muskeetor, musqueters, musquetors, musquiters, musquitoes, musquitors, musqueters, and musqutors.  (That's every spelling in the journals, as enumerated by a scholar.) 

Pioneer writings on the rock:

These are the North Dakota Badlands, in the Theodore Roosevelt National Park along I-94 in western North Dakota:

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We passed more oil drilling in southern North Dakota, though not as much as we'd seen up near Williston. Then we rolled across the crop fields of the rest of the state, past the lakes of northern Minnesota and down near Minneapolis, where we're spending tonight. Tomorrow, with luck, we'll reach Indiana, then home on Tuesday night.