Yesterday we stopped at a local coffee shop before answering the call of area quilt shops.  The owner has a sense of humor, or at least a strong point of view.

If you are good at reading blueprints you might be able to tell how these two pages of patent application paperwork led to issuance of:

About a mile from the town of Windsor is the Cashie Treehouses and Campground.  Wonderful quiet place to park the trailer for a couple of days and explore.  Cheri had to do some actual work this morning, TAXES [insert frowning face] and other minutiae.  I drove into town to get a feel of the place.  At the end of town I saw this:

I saw the girls alighting from a limousine for the Quinceanera that Mark talked about while I was reading in the truck, and tried mightily to get a quick picture, showing them through the open window, with the side mirror as a point of reference.  My finger skills failed me.

Most of my time in town was spent at an antiques store.  Mark said that this pet, found on the second floor, was a musk ox.  I thought water buffalo.

Otis Redding died in a plane crash on December 10, 1967.  Three days earlier he recorded the song (Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay.  He wrote the lyrics and music sitting on a houseboat in Sausalito California.  It became the first ever posthumous #1 hit in the USA.

Mark and I had an off day from our Shop Hop today . . . a day before we move to a new "base camp," having seen all of the participating quilt shops in the area.  We hit the blue highways and happened upon a source for all things "junque."

So I've mentioned that one of the hardest things to leave on the Monterey Peninsula was Gail Abeloe's Back Porch Fabrics.  A couple of days ago I visited two shops on the All Carolinas Shop Hop.

These shops got my "Gold Star of Desire."

So we were surprised to learn that the population of Charleston is only about 150,000.  I had expected it to be roughly the size of San Francisco, which has a bit more than 800,000 residents.  What I am sharing is a reflection of losing pictures from my phone, however, rather than a lack of subject matter!

Founded in 1670 and named to honor King Charles II, Charleston sits on the confluence of three rivers and the Atlantic Ocean.  It has been very significant historically from its inception.  As we were visiting just days after Hurricane Ian passed through we were not sure what we might see.

I know, the picture doesn't match the title, but I had to put one of Mark and me up top, since our first date was 38 years ago today.  This one was a few years ago, in San Francisco's Yerba Buena Gardens.

Soon I'll do a post on how we met, or "Why We're Living This Life."

We had an unanticipated delight today, as we happened upon an extensive, and truly delightful, display of quilts on Hilton Head Island today.

I was at a quilt shop on the mainland, in Bluffton, South Carolina, when I saw a very high quality postcard publicizing an exhibit by Art Quilters of the Low Country at the Coastal Discovery Museum.  Art quilts are my favorite, so I looked up the Museum's web site when I got back to the truck.

Oh!  A lecture in 45 minutes?  Let's go!!!

As Mark mentioned, we were in Camden, South Carolina yesterday.  My day was divided between “shop-hopping” and antiquing.  Over 80 quilt shops are participating in the All Carolinas Shop Hop this September and October, and I aim to get to about half of them.

“Barn quilts” are very popular in North Carolina, but yesterday was the first I have seen a “door quilt:”

We are camped - though in the trailer it is more "glamp" than "camp - in Sesquicentennial State Park.  Nice and quiet, surrounded by lots of tall trees.  Cheri was on a mission today to see quilt shops and architectural salvage shops.  She will have to fill you in on her day later. 

She dropped me off in a parking lot on the side of the road and drove away.  I had my camera, and the parking lot was the Revolutionary War History Center of Camden, South Carolina.  107 acres of history; I was set for the day.

Bonus points if you can tell me before looking at the picture below what these four men had in common.  Arthur Middleton, Edward Rutledge, Thomas Heywood, Jr. and Thomas Lynch, Jr.

Yesterday's post didn't show any actual quilting, but I nearly finished my project.  (Didn't hurt that I was working on something that had been started at least four years ago.)

As soon as we arrived in North Carolina a year ago, I started joining local quilting guilds.  One of them is extremely casual:  no shows, very minimal dues, and meetings at the Winston-Salem Dash baseball stadium.

This week we had a five-day retreat in Valle Crucis, a hamlet about 20 miles from the Tennessee border.

I spent the last five days at a quilting retreat on the edge of the Blue Ridge mountains, but I'll tell you about that tomorrow.

As we travel, I am always sending myself email messages about potential blog post topics and other stuff.