What I did on my Summer Vacation (Continued)

Early June, brother Doug's birthday, with Amal cutting the cake that their daughter Serene made. It was Delicious! and we try to instill our Hastings' love of and obsession with FOOD into all the family members, even though we are frequently teased for this.

You know artists don't think or act linearly. You've already seen bits of what I did on my trip East to go back to scenes and friends from my past and new friends in Ottawa.

The next picture is from the ferry to Seattle, where Mt. Ranier is shyly peeking out in the first dip between the evergreens.



I fit my blogging in around my job and all the other tasks I take on. There are SO MANY interesting things to do and experience and SO MANY interesting people to see and experience, I do get overwhelmed and over-extended at times...but I'd rather, much rather, have Too Much to do than too little.



One of the things that keeps our Olympic Peninsula so relatively lightly-populated is that it takes a lot of work and usually a ferry ride to get back and forth. After work on a Tuesday in June, I drove to West Seattle, where my brother, Hugh and his wife, Connie, are located not too far from the airport. Wednesday I flew to Newark, NJ, where I waited several hours for the delayed plane to Burlington, VT, the scene of many happy years of my life, including the first three, and also friends and family whose love survives the years and miles.

Between the very special Welcome to Vermont from my Green Mountain Boy and staying up the rest of the night to catch up on challenging life events with my cousin, Holly, (whatever doesn't kill us will eventually make us stronger) I decided that there was no point in sleeping, and left for NY at 6 am Thursday in my cute bright yellow Chevy rental, which you can see reflected in the rear view mirror in one of my favorite scenes in the world...driving south on Route 7 to 22 along Lake Champlain and looking back up across the lake to the mountains of NY.

Patti (leaning on the car) and Annie (making funny) were ready to rock and roll. Patti's just a young thing, who teaches art to at-risk high school kids...a tough crowd...and was taking off for our adventure on her first day after the last day of school. You can see more of her collage, ephemera and blog at www.catskillpaper.com. She did a marvelous job of DAILY blogging

It's really fun traveling with other artists, who don't mind if you want to stop to take a picture or make a drawing. Annie has her sketchbook ready

at our first lobster roll sighting in Maine on Friday. Annie and I met at a class I taught a year before I left NY. We instantly hit it off, and have been corresponding via email almost daily every since. She's a Wonderful painter/collage artist/sculptor whose illustration business was hit hard by the world's trasition to clip art. See more of Annie's work at www.loelbarr@mac.com.

After the trip, I thought maybe I brought too many clothes and should have taken my camera battery charger instead...but then I often wonder if taking pictures separates me from being truly involved in the Events I'm experiencing. Next month I'll post some sketches from the journal I took in lieu of camera and computer.

We stayed the first night in NH, after a trip to the state liquor store, conveniently-located on a pull-off from I-91. After staying up all night Wednesday, the girls kept me awake with racy stories until we got to a motel. The second night we stayed in Maine close to the border with Canada and had a delightful lunch in Sussex, with the waitress telling us a sad story about being turned back at the border by US security guards who assumed she would want to immegrate to the US, and we started appologizing. I did a lot of that in Canada.

We were on our Trek to see my good friends, Margi Hennen and Kathryn Belzer in their native habitat, near Halifax. We had originally met at the first We Folk of Cloth doll conference in Maryland, when among the hundreds of doll enthusiasts, we strange ones, strangely gravitated together. We had met up in locations East and West, but never at their homes or with their husbands involved. More in the next installment.