Vacation

On Sunday during work, I decided that I would fight the hard battle of getting someone to cover my shifts for a couple of days while I went on a family vacation. At first I was annoyed to be on it at all due to the fact that I would end up losing hours at work and not get paid as much. And that is never a good thing...but I'm so very glad that I decided to go.
After complaining about how camp spaghetti usually tastes, I earned myself the chore of cooking it for the whole compound camp.  It was really good though, so I'm not complaing anymore!
This trip is to a tiny potato town called Weiser, Idaho. Every year, they hold a national fiddle competition (what's the difference between the violin and the fiddle? There isn't a difference in the actual instrument. Fiddle refers to the style of music played on it.)

We go there and camp in the sticks behind these big buildings that used to be a college or boarding school (there's a big huge history to the area, but I can't remember. The buildings are big and old, that's all that really matters.) All week we play music until all hours of the night and throughout the day making new friends and reuniting with old ones.  This year just so happened to be really cold at night, so we folded down the sides of the wall tent and turned on the heater to jam. Unfortunately the heat got the best of everyone and they started sleepin on the job...

But some people managed to stay awake long enough to keep the jam going. It was probably around 12:00 am when I took this picture. Somehow, the later you stay up, the better the jams get.  But we could just be getting more immune to how crappy it can be sometimes.












The best part of Weiser is playing music with your friends that you don't usually get to see. The second best part? Yard Sales. Seems how this town is pretty small, this is the biggest week of the year for them. There's so many people from out of town that it's the perfecft time for a yard sale. These signs are just the beginning. There were more on the corners of most streets and signs were stapled to half the powerline poles. Needless to say, I had some awesome finds.

This the best used book store ever. I can't even believe how many printings he had from the 1940s and earlier. It's really cool to see.

This is the MINATURE MASTERS contest. They give really excellent musicians tiny instruments and ask them to play them. The kid in the yellow shirt was camp by us. He and his friend drove all the way from Ohio just for this contest. We fed them some pancakes and lent them phones and made friends with them. That's the best part of these things. Music brings people together :)

And that was my family vaction!