Kentucky or Bust!

 I visited my sister in Kentucky a few weeks ago!  She is a fabulous musician, botanist and world traveler.

Her guest room boasted instruments from all over the world as well as her original guitar that she played in gigs when she was younger.

Since I was still on my diet, she helped me stay on it as much as possible. :)

Her deck is covered with probably 20ish banana and other tropical trees.  I got to bring home a banana tree baby and a few Taro tree babies and she gave me instructions on what to do with them in the winter time so they'll continue to thrive.  At the moment, they're looking nice on my deck as I try to keep them out of the wind.

Tammy remodeled her home and added a woodfire pizza oven in her kitchen!  Some of her kids came over Tuesday night and we made personal pan pizzas in it.  Taking roughly 2 minutes per pizza, this was loads quicker than in my meager oven.  The temp in the oven got up to almost 900 degrees!

Us with three of her boys and her grands.

The grand niece and nephew!

My pizza is the tiny one on the right!

 

Took about 2 minutes and we slid it back out.

Tada!!

More in the making!

She uses a watered down rake to move the coals to the side when it's reached the max temp.  I was astounded at either how either it really didn't heat the room up at all or we just got used to it.  The coals were still hot for 2 more days and every now and then Tammy would pop an eggplant in to cook or some other veggie to use up the residual heat.  I might need one of these...

Another day we went on a walk around a local park and check out this tree trunk!  Spikes all the way up! yikes! That would cure me of climbing trees!

If I climbed trees, that is.

My niece, Christy, came over for breakfast a couple mornings so I got to visit with her too.

One of the days, Tammy and I visited the National Quilt museum in Paducah.  

The details were amazing in every single quilt!

And we inspected closely, without touching them, the various techniques used in each.

Isn't this awesome?!

We only made it about half way through before we got "talent overload" and then skimmed the rest, nodding or saying "ooh ahh!" "keep walking".

We drove down to the river's edge and Tammy freaked me out a little, making me think I'd need to push her car back up the embankment. 

And the artsy district!

We had so much fun!  The trip down took 9 hours, but the trip back took 11.  Almost the same route but had to stop for a work emergency for a bit. BARELY got back to Iowa in time to go to a barn quilting class with my kids.  More on that another time.

I hope you're enjoying your summer!