prairie love-in

ok nothing else gets done this morning until this post is complete. you heard it here first. everest of laundry will have to wait.

so does that ever happen to you, you get a little wistful after a great trip or a great weekend? its not like i don't get to come home to a wonderful place, with a wonderful person, i'm still the luckiest girl on both ends, any way i look. but it was just a beautiful time, with a beautiful person. and people. and i get to look back on the whole thing and swoon to my little girl on the prairie hearts content.

here's (and heres, read it) how it went down

we left in the middle of the night and rain with a thermos of coffee, heading towards the tail end of a tornado that we only ever saw a few drops and clouds of. drove through a damn pretty sunrise and had to pull over sometime after 6 and a sasquatch sighting and take a nap beside a lake. aw rye i love your handsome sleepy face.

crossing over from ontario to manitoba after a much needed hearty breakfast in kenora, the sky was just beginning to part and we were wakin up.

"vwip" parking. kinda cool cause there were lots of old vw's parked in there, but mostly annoying cause they got to park a 2 minute walk from the gate and we got to park somewhere around thunder bay. also did we just give all that money to volkswagon? f that they don't need any money.

still i am still such a sucker for these beauties.

large music festivals, like ones that bring in over 70,000 people for example, involve lots of walking i learned. luckily i love walking.

papa bear bought a new cooler with wheels that we christened this weekend. we did our fair share of tailgating with the americans in between walking. pickup trucks rule. we already have so many memories in this truck and i love it. i love how it looks all trashed by the end of a weekend, i love my feet up on the dashboard and my old man driving next to me, i love the crack in the windshield i love that we saw the odometer pass 99999 together- i could go on and on really, but, on to the festival...

stay tuned on this guy


if you wanted to dance you could all up the centre and along the sides of the crowd. everyone sits at folkfest, and if you have a chair you have to sit behind everyone sitting on tarps. tarp city. map of tarps. iron & wine guy (who was awesome btw) was like "this is cool ive never seen so many people sitting and listening to quiet music before"

friday's main act was neko case, someone i've been dreaming emo girl dreams about seeing for a while now, big draw, big score. fuck i'm a lucky bitch. she was a bit cold i thought- in temperature and temperament, but omg she sang that teenage feeling and i was just in heaven the whole set. her voice is heaven. the fogies started clearin out early and rye grabbed me and brought me to the front of the stage for an awesome view.

my camera kinda hates nighttime

neko wishes she was the moon tonight

ok day 2. sorry about the gaps in pictures. like why didn't i take a picture of that amazing pulled pork sandwich. but lately i'm feeling cameras can be annoying- you start to get in this habit of snapping everything you see, and that starts to take away from actually experiencing something for yourself in the moment, as opposed to reliving it later. both are valuable but sometimes you just have to put the camera away. in my humble opinion.

took a break from the 7 stages to climb pope's hill and sneak onto the festival campground while the guards were busting some other skids for sneaking in. let me try and tell you about the festival campground, but i don't know that i can do it justice. its like a whole other world, separated from the music grounds by a road and a line of trees, you cross through security with a blue wristband if you have one, or over a flattened fence in the dark if you don't. you enter into a tent city spread out over three (?) massive fields, i have no idea how many people were camping in there i think rye said 6000? it seemed like more. fuck its so hard to explain what its like in there. people had like themed camps, with flags and props and stuff, this one crew had a small bar set up, it was all so fucking cool.

observation deck. "enter at own risk" sign at the top of the stairs. hahahha. we went up to take a look out and the wind picked up and rye's like we are in a hastily assembled observation deck in high winds. when we snuck back in at night there was this intense drum circle and dance happening in the bottom and rye's like wanna go back up there and i'm like are you fucking insane

the festival campground passes sold out basically in minutes, we heard, then they were going for like $300 on ebay. its a major part of the folk fest experience, i'm glad rye showed me what he could- we snuck in both nights, deked past security and over a fence with some other illegal immigrants and wandered around through the maze of lit up castles and tepees, constant hooting cheering strumming and singing, watched fire dancers from the hill, and even caught a mini country band playing in the castle. so. f-ing. cool. and i got the feeling that wasn't even the half of it.


you can't see this but its a 20 foot tall man made of glow sticks that walked around the festival campground almost falling on the acid trippers. insane and awesome. also at one point we were walking through a wooded path and ran into three grunting sasquatches. brilliant. i'll tell you, i've never done psychedelic drugs but i kinda WANTED to here. at the same time tho i was relieved not to have a load in my underwear.

bahahahahahaa ok rye just sent me this, may help explain to a degree anyway


next time we'll get blue wristbands and we'll go all out in this mecca of insane and rye'll hold back my hair while i barf.

aaaaaaaaaaahahahaa he sent me this too


we liked our little quiet campground all the same tho. campings still camping and i loved it. it was pretty damn romantic too, not gonna lie. the whole weekend was. prairie winds will do that to you.

just in case there was still any question what i look like stoned

so. back to the truck, gettin ready to folk and then later, storm the gates

somewhere around here i got blog-spotted! my first official time. why we didn't get a picture together is the fault of the beer but hi charlotte! also if your name is shelly or shirley or something completely different i'm so sorry but hi hi all the same. i told you i wouldn't remember much. email me! it was fun to meet you. and get mildly creeped out by you. JUST KIDDING. my eyelashes DO have that effect on people. we passed minnitaki on the way home and i was like, aw sharol was so cool.

okkervil river ruled saturday night. like they were super fucking good. look them up.

this post is taking so loooooooooooooooooong

sunday morning, heading to the beach before the fest. beach = manmade lake in the provincial park we were at, that we were too chilly to actually go swimming in. ate burgers, played no-dive frisbee in the water and lazed in the sun for a while before heading back to the fest.

my boyfriend loves cuddling. HAHA just kidding the suns in his eyes. everyone cuddles at folkfest. no really- everyone hugs hello and everyone takes naps under trees forehead to forehead with dreamy hippie smiles on their faces. laugh if you will, make barf sounds if you will (raymi) but its good for the fucking soul to go flower child from time to time. check out the totally adorable earings i got to match the totally adorable dress i got. i know, right. we also got that log that yes, is a pillow from the same booth. rye can't get enough sleep on it now, pretty fuckin funny and cute. check out this girls stuff, very rad.

beer garden times


seeing arlo guthrie on sunday evening was far out and by far the coolest, and definitely some sort of hippie rite of passage. he told great funny stories and played a ton of his old stuff and some of woody's old stuff, including this land is your land which we all got up and sang together. not even kidding. i'm not sure if rye saw my eyes were wet or not.

so this was a blank canvas when the festival started and everyone was allowed to paint on it, some artists helped fine tune it, and by the end it looked like this

hahahahahaha (top middle)

ahhhhhh

dear manitoba, thank you for the tan. i fell in love with your endless green rolling fields and sweet prairie breeze. thank you for music and food and air and hippie love, we'll be back. and dear ryan, thank you thank you for everything, my hero. xoxo

big sigh for the big sky

hey ya'll. got the post-winnipeg folk festival blues a bit over here. just a good old fashioned emotional hangover. all i want to do is look at pictures from the trip and put my dress back on and listen to 6 strings.well in truth i want to go pick up ryan from the office and bring him home to pick up his guitar and pick me up.

working on a big post, its taking forever and my hair is one giant dreadlock, i haven't showered since thursday and i still don't wanna. is that so wrong? my feet are filthy and i like it. i didn't even want to wash the dirt out of our folkfest mugs, i'm sentimental and maybe overly so sometimes but sowhat. rye says we take the weekend with us wherever we go now and i can feel that is so, so true.
so i guess i can shower.

stay tuned, post up soon.

also i promise im not going cartman and eating all the skin off the kfc.

we are stardust we are golden

it's lookin a lot like we're goin west to be hippies for the weekend.
peace out, if you can dig it. man.

what are you doing with your life

oh you know, takin pictures of flowers.

i realized looking out over the river its not frozen anymore and it's been three months since we were last here and therefore more than three months since i've been on vacation now. that's prreetttyyy excessive. and not what i intended, i mean slacker is as slacker does but that's hardly an excuse, i'm supposed to be writing, i've been saying that for three months.

i mean i'm as happy as i was and proclaimed three months ago, happier, content and the free-est bird, but i need to get off my ass and i don't mean onto the wii balance board this time.

i need to write at all. something substantial. live blogging wildflowers doesn't count and i know it.

in other news is there anything more darling than forget-me-nots?

newp.

reporting live

from my favourite hotel in chapleau ontario, eatin bagelfuls (gross) drinking instant coffee (not that gross) watching swing vote with kevin costner and some annoying kid (snoozefest) (good soundtrack tho) and internetting.


sometimes when you smoke weed all weekend you feel high all weekend and then when you take a rickshaw to the car after the music festival and you get stuck in a traffic jam of people on actual feet its really really funny. ps right at the end he honks at the pedestrians.

i forgot to tell you

i keep dreaming i'm flying a plane. like all alone, and i can take off and land it inside this hole broken in the top of a building. last night i told someone i could fly and he said he could fly too and i watched him crash while i was looking after his children. trippy. doesn't it mean something when you dream you're flying? ok off on the road for a day or 2 on biz, but i'll try and get some internet at the library or somethin. later skaters.

bluesfest

hey duders this'll be a quickie, i'll get more detailed later. ryan's strummin the electric with his eyes closed on the armchair, "not dirty enough" he says and his voice is all scratchy yep we got pretty ripped this weekend didn't we terry yep we did hey actually terry was AT bluesfest but we didn't get a picture of him. ryan right creeped him out by grinning open-mouthed and pointing every time he walked by us though.
anyhooters here's some for now.

i wanted a sub but the sub stand was only giving away ballots for a draw for a 6 foot sub. i think we entered 6 times between us. fingers crossed.

friends gave us their keys and let us park and crash and hole up at their place all weekend, pretty sweet. took a break from the festival in their backyard and ryan cut the grass told jokes and bbq'd shish kebabs, pretty delicious. ps i got a terrible sunburn on saturday.

our favourite hotel, we were tempted to book a room and stay an extra day, we'll be back.

the dress. looks better in person.

sunday rye took me to kakabeka falls, we are lovers of water and thusly of water-falls, it was so vast and loud and beautiful and hypnotizing, waters a lot like fire that way isn't it. when i post the video i'll tell you the story of greenmantle.

i said i love the feeling of the end of a music festival, everyone's dirty and slow and sunburnt and still goin, its a nice collective feeling.

more lates.

halo of flies

that heading has no significance beyond that i heard halo of flies by alice cooper on the way back from driving rye to work this morning and i was like fuck alice cooper has a song called halo of flies that rules.
we went golfing last night. my first time ever unless you count mini putt and i'm pretty sure you don't.

guess what tron didn't funkin blow. rye's dad said i can really pop a hit which is for sure not at all what he said but i can't remember his wording anyway it meant i'm not the worst golfer ever, i hit some pretty far. golf's fun!

i also broke a club which in all other sports means extreme skill so i'm sure its the same in golf.


also i fulfilled an actual true lifelong dream of driving a golf cart. so fun. i'm not driving in this video i am aware of that. also its unfortunate that ryan got cut off there cause what he's about to say is: "way to go best ball best golfer in the world we can all learn a thing or three from you fuck you're an amazing athlete and woman"

also i took pictures of flowers

golf's fun!
happy weekend. we're going to marina park for bluesfest all weekend long. i might wear my new dress if its hot enough. or wear it if its cold enough and freeze my nuts off. have a goood onee!