Donuts, Pies and a Knitting Mishap

Any Homer Simpson fans out there?  We stayed the night at Springfield, a small town in Canterbury, at the foot of the Southern Alps.  Believe it or not, Springfield is famous for a large pink donut, but where did it come from?    The  movie studio 20th Century Fox presented a giant pink donut to the town in 2007  to promote the premiere of The Simpsons Movie.  We are not really Simpson fans, but even we know that Homer Simpson loves donuts.

That’s a very big donut

Just 10km down the road was Sheffield, home of the world famous in New Zealand Sheffield Pies.  The number of cars, trucks and motor homes parked outside the shop was unbelievable, on both sides of the road – seems the rumour was true, the pies certainly must be famous indeed!  Robin had to drive around the block to find room to park our rig. Just look at all those people munching away on their Sheffield pies on the veranda, and there were plenty more customers inside.  And the customers were right, those pies were delicious for “lunch on the go” while we continued on our way.

Happy customers make great advertising

Robin chose a bottle of coke, but I wanted a coffee for lunch.  I thought this poster by the coffee machine was very apt.

We were on our way to a “new to us” NZMCA camp down a gravel road by the Waimakariri River.  There are plenty of gravel areas to park in, more than enough room for just the three vans on site, but some extra vans may well turn up later in the day. 

We had only just arrived, wound the legs down, when the rain came down.  This looks like a good place to while the afternoon away and enjoy some R&R.   Or do some knitting, or maybe work on my stitchery perhaps?  Robin is having a rest, his knee is giving him a bit of pain lately.  Gemma has her afternoon all taken care of.  She has hopped onto the bed, given herself a good grooming, then settled down for a while. No doubt she will let me know when to serve her evening meal.   Cats have a great life, don't they!

Gemma is happy

I was keen to get on with the armhole shaping on the navy blue jacket I had taken away as holiday knitting.  But something was wrong, when doing the decreases for the start of the armholes I ended up with an incorrect number of stitches.  So I counted them again, no, still a different number.  Finally I decided to check the number of stitches I had started with, down in the ribbing, and was rather shocked to find that I had not cast on the correct number of stitches right from the beginning. How on earth had I done that?  There was nothing for it, I had to rip it all out and start again – all those hours of knitting down the drain.  Oh, bother!  So now I’m starting again on the rib band, and double checked the correct number of stitches.  I think what happened is that I was in a rush to get my knitting projects underway before we departed for our trip, I’ll have to be more careful in future.

Undoing the back and starting over again