Blast from the past – Quiltbus Travels

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Here’s a blog post from my old blog, dated August 26, 2003.

I have been asked to tell about the places we go in the bus. We DO have an awful lot of fun, and meet an incredible assortment of very nice people, but it does get tiring traveling all the time. Still, the good times more than make up for sleeping in strange beds from time to time:-))

This past month, we have been in and out of the Thousand Islands region of New York State. This is a very quiet area whose main attraction is the pristine water of the St Lawrence river. It is a very rural area, with an active quilting community. Our most recent visit was to an antique quilt show at the Stone Mills Museum. They were having a combination old car and quilt show, along with a tractor pull. They had us park the QuiltBus near the museum, but it also happened to be at the end of a long line of antique cars, so we sorta looked like we belonged to them as well. More than one man climbed on the bus hoping for a tour of a vintage school bus, only to be disappointed! My husband John finally gave up and opened the hood. He stood outside and talked about the bus while I stayed inside and talked about quilts.

Poor John, he was so disappointed in the first day. A group of women who had come to the fair with their husbands to look at cars had come on the bus, all excited, saying, “Finally! Something for us women!”. John, standing there, of course thought they meant HIM but they did not:-((

The next day they had a tractor pull. Now, I always thought that a tractor pull was the same thing as a rope pull, only using two tractors. WRONG. It’s tractors – farm tractors – pulling this sled with weights on it. The weights slide up an incline, getting closer to the hitch of the tractor and thus increasing its weight as the tractor goes along. The tractor keeps going until it can’t any more, usually with the back wheels spinning desperately and the front wheels six feet up in the air. Then the distance is measured, the winner being the one who could go the furthest. There were a lot of neat old tractors there, green and yellow John Deeres, red and white Internationals, solid red Ferguson Masseys with headlights that made them look bug eyed and even one called Cockshutt. (I’m not going to touch that.) The winning tractors were almost always Cases, which had the colors of a peach sorbet. Go figure.

We are heading out again next week for Saugus MA, (where our picture is going to be taken for American Profile magazine), Coopersville MI, Flint MI and Cincinnati OH.

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