We were at a museum in northwest Virginia for a few days last week, and I was surprised by what drew my attention the most:  a "Contemporary Embroidery" exhibit.

We went to the Durham Orange Quilters Guild's "The Threads That Bind Us" show a couple of weeks ago.

Mark and I have mentioned South Carolina's Upcountry History Museum before.

It all started when I was about 14.

Starting again on a mountain-top walk that Mark and I took while in San Francisco:

45 years and three days ago, Mark and I went on our first date.

We started our Bay Area vacation yesterday at Eats on Clement Street.

Another esoteric post that maybe no one will care about, but I can't help myself!

Mark and his dad took off on their own today, so I wandered towards downtown.

A friend tells me that she and her husband have a don't-talk-politics-with-friends rule.  If you have a similar rule and it extends to social issues, you'll want to jump to my third rave, about the book Nothing Much Happens.

A couple  of days ago we posted about Lewisville, Arkansas.  I wanted to add more pictures, focusing mainly on the seemingly abandoned print shop and the architecture of the buildings surrounding the town's primary intersection.

To be sure, this is more like connected stories I might tell during an afternoon, while piecing a jigsaw puzzle with you, rather than evidence of a close connection . . .

Photo credit:  John David Mercer - AP

My absolute favorite stop here was the Laurel Mercantile Scent Library.  This map was behind the cash register.  We all remember the Astoria Settlement (Oregon) and the Florida Treaty . . . don’t we?

A while after Mark and I moved to North Carolina, I thought about which state felt like "home" to me, and I came to a similar conclusion:  home is where Mark is.

This has been a good year for revisiting the early 1970’s in media.

Photo credit:  Starz

I started reading the cookbook Mi Cocina, in which author Rick Martinez says that he could happily meander the neighborhoods of Mexico City in nine-hour stretches, which reminded me that I never posted the last of our San Francisco curiosities.

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 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.

I believe this is excellent advice!  More about the bookstore later in this post.

One of the hardest things for me to leave when we moved from the Monterey Peninsula was Gail Abeloe's Back Porch Fabrics.  I tried to talk her into selling the shop to me, but she said she was just having too much fun to quit yet.

Today was the first day of the All Carolinas Shop Hop, so we took it as an excuse to head out on a jaunt, to a quilt shop and more.

More than one person has asked us what the Fourth of July is like in the South.  We didn’t get out to celebrate – both of us came down with the flu – but it’s certain to be a crashing success wherever you head.  Year-round, if you turn your head while traveling a freeway in any relatively unpopulated area of the states we’ve traveled, you are certain to see a massive fireworks warehouse . . . and an adult lingerie emporium.

Despite the fact that I will almost always get something from the library if I can do that instead of spending money, we had a pile of books to offer up for sale, so we went to the biggest used-book store in town today.  Here's what we got for $2.93, after selling the books back:

We had a great time last Wednesday, at Bonnie Raitt's concert in Greensboro.

I wish I had been able to get a picture of this ornate framed poster that didn't reflect the lighting, but it is still beautiful and representative of the many instruments at the Sigal Music Museum in Greenville, South Carolina.

Greenville, South Carolina has several small but truly impressive museums. Down the line I want to see the Shoeless Joe Jackson Museum and Baseball Library, the Center for Creative Arts, and I'm sure Mark will be interested in the two or three military history museums.

Yesterday we made it back to the Upcountry History Museum and the Sigal Music Museum.  The are right beside the Children's Museum and the architecturally-striking main library.

Since we had been to the Upcountry History Museum before, we focused on the photos that student photographer Stephen Somerstein took of the Selma-to-Montgomery march that took place in 1965.