This past weekend was the yearly Quilting Retreat that my mom and I attend. The above picture is our faithful alarm clock from retreat, we call him Pickles the Peacock. He lives at the camp where we stay for Retreat and he is a very vocal peacock, especially at 5am. For those that don’t know the background, my Mom is part of a Quilt Guild (here is their Facebook page) and every year they go on a retreat the weekend after Memorial Day weekend and spend the whole weekend quilting. For the past few years I come along and spend the whole weekend reading. Here is my post from last year’s retreat. You can also read about retreat on my Mom’s blog, joann94wquilts.

So this year I think I was a little overzealous when packing because I brought 8 books with me, not including the one I had already started. I was bummed though because I didn’t get to start reading until about 5 pm on Friday. By the time we got to the Incarnation Camp in Ivoryton, CT, unpacked the car, and got my Mom’s sewing station set up it was about 11am. At that point I ended up having to do something for work (blah) that took me a little over an hour. Then we had lunch and I started reading after lunch but only got about 4 pages in before I promptly fell asleep. I had been up until 1:30am Thursday night doing laundry and packing for retreat and then I was up at 5:30am to drive over to my Mom’s, so by 1pm Friday I was dead tired. I took a two hour nap, then when I woke up it was time for our daily walk (Mom and I take a walk every day to make sure we are getting some exercise). We saw the adorable baby goat (see pictures below) and then I did some additional exercises and took a shower. Could barely believe it but it was already 5pm and almost time for dinner. Suffice it to say I didn’t get as much reading done on Friday as I would have liked. Luckily, I was able to read all of Saturday as we didn’t go out anywhere this year like we usually do. And then Sunday I read for most of the morning in between getting things packed up into the car when I could.

So that being said, I started reading Pride and Prejudice on Friday afternoon/evening and finished it before dinner on Saturday. After doing my blog post on it, I started reading the first book in the Hunger Games series and finished that book by Sunday before lunch (blog post to follow, I’m just doing one blog post after I finish the whole series). I started reading the second book in the Hunger Games series next but I didn’t get too far since we had lunch at noon and then we did final clean up and packing before we had to be out by 2pm. Overall I still consider the weekend a success but I wish I had planned my reading choices differently. Besides reading, I also spent some time assisting the ladies with IT items and helping my Mom with a few quilt related decisions.

I’ve included a collection of photos from the trip below. Some I took, and some are from other people’s Facebook pages.

I would encourage any reader to try this. Taking a whole weekend away just to read is great fun and I think it is a real treat to be able to devote your time for a whole weekend to reading.