I've been travelling with my husband and the kids -- and my socks. Wow! After one miserable attempt last year that involved a poorly maintained road and a cranky skein of Euroflax, I hadn't tried knitting in a moving car. I expected to maybe knit a few rounds on my sock when we stopped for gas, if none of the kids needed me to take them in to the bathrooms or change a diaper. But I pulled it out on a boring stretch of I-5 and the next thing I knew, it was an inch long and I was ready to do the heel, mostly with my eyes on the road. (And because there are other knitters out there who love to jump to the worst possible conclusion, I'll add that I was in the passenger seat, NOT driving, and I've heard all of the nasty speculation about what would happen if the airbags went off while I was holding sharp pointy things.)

There were some nervous moments when I had to ladder up a dropped stitch and figure out what to do with an accidental YO a few rows after the fact, but they were worth it because those boring stretches flew by. I'm not sure how just keeping my hands moving could possibly make such a difference, but it did.



We found a shoe tree! It doesn't show up well in the picture (you can click on it for the bigger version), but there are hundreds of shoes wedged up in the branches and hanging in big clumps. Bill doesn't think the multi-colored lump lying there on the dashboard looks anything like a sock, but I know that another knitter would be able to tell.

We kept driving and the sock kept growing. I wasn't to excited about the leg, because the broken rib pattern I originally had in mind would have meant counting, then I remembered what Bonnie posted to Knitting Mothers about alternating random bands of stockinette and garter and ribbing and suddenly I was having all sorts of fun.

I added three color repeats to my latest Mason Dixon warshrag while sitting in a Motel 6 parking lot at midnight with a really fussy baby on my lap, wondering why I was out there because no one in the place could possibly be sleeping through that thunderstorm, especially when one crack set off every car alarm in the parking lot. I got lucky and was only out there an hour before he finally fell asleep.



We made it to Utah and the sock sat neglected in my purse while we dug trilobites and hiked a bit and took the kids to every cheap or free museum we could find and drove a bit. Posion Spider Mesa was never a possibility because we don't have the axles or gear ratio or whatever else we need to tackle something like that. The stupid Durango kept overheating anyway, so we barely left the pavement at all. The one year I'm finally not pregnant and can handle some rough roads!



By far the best knitting on the trip was in the campground right before dawn when I finished another warshrag while watching the sun come up over the rocks. I was going to try to get up early again the next morning (hopefully without the raging migraine that woke me up the first time), but the hiking turned my legs to jelly and it was too much work to crawl out of my sleeping bag.

It was a great trip, but I'm glad to be home!