on the road....with quilters

Ah yes,  another quilt retreat has come and gone, but what a retreat it was. Of course all good retreats begin with the road trip to get there. WOO - HOO!
This year my friend Karen was the driver and I, the navigator. This usually works out quite well, I said usually. Last year there we took a small unintended detour. Oops.

This year things went very well. We started out in the morning and met up in Sarasota with our friend Fran (aka Frannie). We had decided to go to Yoder's Amish restaurant for lunch before hitting the quilt shop. Hard to shop on an empty tummy.
If you are going to be in Sarasota, love good homemade food, and are hungry, then Yoder's is a must. They were featured on an episode of Man vs Food. You can see the video clip on their website. Warning .....it will make you hungry.

Anyway, we all sat down and then started placing our orders. When it came to choosing our side dishes we decided to all get something different, and then share. Sounds like a plan..... well, when the waitress came to our table and set our "sides" down in front of us, we all burst into peals of laughter. OMG and OMG again! See for yourself..... we could have shared with the entire restaurant.

would you call these "side" dishes?

We knew there was NO way we could, or would want to, finish these tasty, but decadent plates of food. I do confess however, that the still warm, homemade chips were very good, as were the very tender onion rings. Needless to say, we left with the plates still mostly full and with very full tummies too.
Just one more thing.... Yoder's happens to have the BEST homemade pies and I LOVE apple pie. I have had their apple pie before, and just couldn't leave without some, and so we left, full and giggling with an apple pie in tow.
Luckily, we were headed to retreat where the salad bar rules with lots of healthy choices.

This is all that was left of a large apple pie on the last day of retreat... I did share it....

sharing the apple pie with "Olivia"

Our next stop was Alma Sue's Quilt shop where Fran wanted to see about having her gorgeous quilt hand quilted by the Amish women there. It's a very nice shop and sure enough there were two older Amish women sitting at the quilt frames, quilting away by hand. I found a couple of things while there....more on that next time. Until then......

a true labor of love....by Fran