virginia city.

i seems like i waited so long for the virginia city crop to arrive, and it was over so quickly!

i woke up bright and early and left the house sharply at 8am. i was rather proud of myself for being so punctual. it only took me about thirty minutes to get up to virginia city, but then it took me ten minutes to find the hotel. google maps was way way way wrong, which i sort of knew, so i checked the hotel directions, which were also ridiculously incorrect. i could tell just by looking at the map that you cannot make a right on "e" street from "c" street when "e" street is left of "c" street and parallel not perpendicular. needless to say, i got frustrated trying to find directions the night before and decided that i could probably just find it once i got up there. virginia city is a teeny tiny little town after all. i didn't expect that it would take ten minutes to find, but it did. ah well. i was rather happy to finally come upon the hotel. :]

once i arrived, there were so many ladies all wearing orange waiting in the hotel lobby for 9am to roll around so they could head down to the crop area and check in. i had to sneak by them to avoid the questions about why i was able to go in and they had to wait. i ended up helping people get all checked in, and it was a pretty busy job! fun to get to see and greet everyone though.

after everyone was checked in and angela given a little welcome speech, i made all the nifty fifty girls get together for a photo. that's the nice thing about being among a bunch of scrappers... when you bother them for a photo, they rarely mind. :]
the top row is julie [who won the fiskateer of the year award during the train ride later in the day], angela, me, stephenie, and suzanne. the bottom row is jennifer, jen, and hisaho. all of us were in san antonio together, so it was a nice little reunion. stephenie was a lead fiskateer who now works for fiskars. suzanne also works for fiskars and hosts fiskarstv. the other girls and i are all considered part of the nifty fifty.

one of my favorite parts of the day was going on a little adventure with hisaho and jennifer. angela sent us to decorate the train car for our train ride. we asked her where the train station was located, and she said she was hoping we knew. ack. luckily, hisaho and jennifer remembered driving by it while they were trying to find the hotel (seems i wasn't the only one who struggled), so they had a general idea of where to go. angela told us to just ask for tom when we got there because he would be expecting us. so we drove down the street and found a stationary train car where they sell tickets for the train rides. jennifer went to asked if tom was there, and the guy replied (in a total western character, which we decided means he's probably never left virginia city) that tom wouldn't be there until 11:30 or noon. well. our train was supposed to leave at 11:30. so the man came and looked out down the mountain and said "oh. i see tom's car down there. you can go meet him... just take this road and cross over the railroad tracks, then go trough the s-curve and between the two metal buildings. turn left on the dirt road, and you'll know when you're there." so with these fabulous directions, we left to find tom.
once we started heading down the dirt road [in angela's mini van, which i nearly bottomed out at one point. not sure how it was decided that i would be the driver. ha.] we hit this gate blocking passage over the railroad tracks, which we had already crossed over one time. there was a sign on the gate that said something like "private property. do not enter." but there was a clear path heading around the gate and sharply turning back to pass over the railroad tracks on the part that is safe to drive over. so i decided to just take that path [again, nearly bottoming out in the van] and eventually, we made our way to this place with all kinds of broken trains and rusty old stuff.
by this point, we had to really hurry to decorate the train. we just put up some posters that said something like "welcome aboard the fiskateer express" and we placed tote bags on each seat. the train still had orange lights on the outside and inside leftover from halloween, so that was sort of perfect.

on our way back up the dirt road to get to the place where the train would pick us up, we found this car and thought it was the perfect fiskateer car since the fiskateer colors are orange and green. so we jumped out and grabbed a photo using the self-timer. :]

once we got to the train station thing, mandee was there. i was so happy to see her. it's always fun to have someone you know along at events where you don't know very many people. it wasn't too long before we got on the train.
i don't really know where we went on the train or anything. with 100 ladies talking, i couldn't hear anything that was being said over the speaker system. we did make a stop for the fiskateer of the year presentation, but people took so long to get off the train that by the time i got off, it was already part way done. these western guys did a little skit and shot some cap guns, but i couldn't really hear what they were saying, so i don't know what the whole skit was all about.

when we got back to the hotel, there were bbq pork sandwiches for lunch. a little spicy for me, but the bread was pretty yummy. then it was crop time. i didn't get much done expect for pushing a bunch of paper around. [at work on sunday, i finally glued some photos and paper down. woot!] i was super tired from only getting two hours of sleep. i can say with certainty, that i wish i wouldn't have wasted my time making all of those ATCs. i definitely should have slept instead. ha. i kind of knew what to expect and made them anyway, so i wasn't that disappointed. just a little. the sleep would have been much more useful though because i totally hit a wall from being so tired.

i decided that i needed a good old coca-cola at one point to try and wake up, but the hotel vending machine was sold out. so i convinced hisaho and mandee to go with me to the main street of virginia city where the little shops are located to try and find one. i had success in the fudge shop, where i also picked up a piece of peanut butter fudge that i'm still slowly snacking on. :] then we had dinner from round table pizza. the pizza guy was filming everything for some reason, so mandee and i had fun running away from him. when we noticed him entering one room, we would run into the other and vice versa. it was actually pretty funny.

the weather was pretty rainy all day. eventually the ceiling started leaking. not a good situation for a room full of scrapbookers. i decided to take my stuff out to my car shortly after that and noticed that the rain had turned into snow, so i decided to leave at that point. the drive home was a little sketchy for a bit... there was so much snow that it was almost a whiteout. but the roads were fine. i was glad to get far enough down the mountain to where it was just raining. i don't mind driving in the snow, but with all the twists and turns it adds a bit more anxiety.

as i was driving by the store where i work, i noticed that the crop was still going, so i decided to stop. i let the girls look at my ATCs, which was hilarious. :] it almost made it worth spending all the time to make mine. ha.