Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Travels

This past weekend, S and I took off for distant lands... southeast Texas, the land of my parents and sister.

The flight out and back gave me a few more hours to work on the cable luxe tunic, but how many in progress pics of that do you want to see? Instead, I'll share photos of some of the highlights of our trip.

Highlights? you might ask. What kinds of highlights.

Well my first morning there, we went blueberry picking!


There is a local blueberry farm that is open to the public in the spring/early summer. We went out bright and early. Now I'd never seen a blueberry bush before, let alone harvested any blueberries, so this was great fun. It was a large orchard with great pickings.


After all, how often do you get to pick your own blueberries from bushes containing bird nests? It definitely got a bit hot (understatement city here) but was lots of fun.


Buckets of fun were had and I brought 1 1/2 gallons of fresh blueberries back to California with me. Fresh blueberries for months!


Another highlight.... pouring, buckets of rain. I know this seems silly but, let me tell you, you spend a few months in California and thunderstorms start to rate high entertainment value.

The other really great thing we got to do was tour the Buu Mon Buddist Temple and gardens in Port Arthur. My sister has volunteered there for awhile and so knows the monks who reside there very well. They have an absolutely spectacular collection of lotus, lilies, and bamboos.

Just take a look at some of these little jewels.

Makes me want to put in a big water garden in the back.

We missed the lotus festival by a week, but we certainly didn't miss any blooms.

Their bamboo collection was not to be missed either. Several different types. Here's just two. A bright yellow,

and a gorgeous black.


These things were as tall as houses and just amazing. The temple was quite nice as well and the monks very welcoming and friendly. I was glad to have had a chance to meet each of them and to visit the temple.

Now with a centered soul... back to the knitting!

2 comments:

Linda said...

I love the flowers from the temple, one day I am going to visit a Buddhist temple. We do have a centre fairly near us and I will go to one of their open days one day.

turtlegirl76 said...

Mmm...blueberries.

What fantastic photos you nabbed!