Wild Gears and a weekend in the wild

This past weekend Chris and I took off for a few days of hiking on the Blue Ridge Parkway. It was a great trip and I'll share a few photos at the end of the post. But before we left my latest (and final) order of Wild Gears arrived! These floor cloths that I'm going to make are getting REALLY expensive! I'm going to have to find something else to draw on when that project is done.

I wanted even bigger drawings so I bought the Enormous Hoops, Oval and Ruler. These photos are from the Wild Gears website because my sets are spread out all over the cutting table right now.

Since I was already spending the money I also got the Modular Gear set and the 3-way Connector Set. You can build custom shapes and tracks for the gears. Or as Mom says, "It's the Wild Gears Hot Wheels track."  I can't wait to play with this! But I did play with the ruler, ovals and enormous rings a bit. 

Here are some of the designs that I was playing with before we left. Keep in mind that these are practice pieces using Crayola markers on newsprint. The ultimate project is to do the good designs using a fat black Sharpie marker on a painted floorcloth. Well, on 3 floorcloths! 

We had a great trip to the Blue Ridge Parkway. We left Thursday and returned Sunday. We live so close that we had plenty of time to hike on Thursday and Sunday too. The first thing that struck us was the amount of tree damage along the parkway and in the forest. There were trees, limbs and branches down everywhere. We talked to a Park Ranger Thursday that told us they had a big ice event in November that has taken months to clean up. We saw several trees like this on trails. Nature will fix it.

There were fields of Mayapple. We have these in our yard and, thanks to the Ranger, I now know what they are.

We hiked 14.4 miles in 4 days and that was pretty good since it rained Friday and we only got in a 1.2 mile hike that day. We enjoyed lots of waterfalls.

We stayed on the mountain so we would have a great view and this place did not disappoint!  After driving in the rain Friday we were rewarded with this when we got back to base. The weather was perfect the rest of the trip.

I even hauled myself out of bed early enough one morning to see the sun rise over the mountains. Then I went back to bed. 
We were both exhausted when we got home last night but Chris still couldn't sleep because he watch Game of Thrones.