Beau Jackson

The (first??) Great Fiber Road Trip of ‘07 started at 6:30am on March 22nd (of 2007 - duh). Allena, William and I hit the road and were off to Nebraska to buy more wool roving and yarn than you can shake a stick at.

I really gotta say that William (about 5 1/2 months old) is an OUTSTANDING traveler. Out of three very long days of driving (not quite 1700 miles) he was cranky about being in the car for maybe an hour at most.

Day 1 -

We drove from our home in Humansville, MO to my Mom’s house in Highlands Ranch, CO - a Denver suburb. We got there in time to have dinner with Mom, chat for a while and go to bed. This was the first she’d ever seen William in person, so even though it was brief, it was nice to be able to stop at her house. Day 1 was pretty much all driving, and nothing really eventful happened. We did take a “scenic route” down to Highlands Ranch though. We cut off of I-70 about 60 miles shy of Denver and took a Colorado state highway. This shaved probably 50 miles off of the trip, since I-70 takes you north up to Denver, and then you have to head South to Highlands Ranch. The state highway went pretty much straight there. It was a very pretty drive - hilly with trees and intermittent views of the mountains.

Day 2 -

Another early morning. William does not care about Central time and Mountain time. He lives on Tummy time, and when the tummy says it’s time to eat, well then it’s time to eat. Tummy time says it’s time to eat at around 4:00am Central time. It worked out ok - he ate, and I went out to get coffee for Allena and myself, since my Mom only has a miniature coffee pot (two cups I think). We went over to my brother’s house and ate some Mc Donald’s breakfast there. We hung out for about an hour and a half or so, but it was back on the road by about 9:00am Central time.

We reached our destination - The Brown Sheep Co. in Mitchell Nebraska - at around 2:00pm. To get there we ended up cutting across the South East corner of Wyoming. Wyoming is a beautiful state, but I’ve never seen anything that empty since driving across the desert in California. At one point you could litterally see 10 miles in every direction, and there was NOTHING. Not even another car. It was a little sureal.

Once we were at The Brown Sheep Co., we were given a tour by a very nice lady named Sherry. As an aside, one of the first things she told us about was hysterical. If you follow the link to The Brown Sheep Co., you’ll see a picture that has a bunch of sheep running around in the back ground. The sheep are all different colors - pink, green, yellow, etc. It seems they were contacted by an animal rights group and were told that the absolutely could not dye the sheep like that. Apparently the animal rights folks have never heard of Photoshop. :)

The tour was really cool. These folks make a LOT of yarn. Sherry told us that in their peak week last year they sold over 15,000 lbs of yarn! Another thing I found very interesting about the tour is the new yarn dryer they recently acquired for the bargin price of $750,00. This thing is basically a giant microwave with an 8-foot-wide conveyor belt running through it. It dries yarn in 45 minutes as opposed to the 8 hours it took the old dryer.

After the tour we got to pick out our roving. We bought two “bumps” of white roving. A bump is a 30 lb ball of roving. This was top-of-the-line stuff, and we got a great price on it. It’ll be great for people who want to dye their own yarn. We also bought 25 lbs of mill ends. This is when they combine multiple colors for a particular yarn, and they’ve got a little left over at the end of the run. Not useful to them, but more than enough to be useful to a hobbyist. We got an even better price on that. We also bought some already spun yarn - mostly for Allena’s personal use (and I get a sweater in the deal), but we also got some white yarn to dye and sell.

We left The Brown Sheep Co. at around 5:00pm and made it to Ogallala, Nebraska before we decided to call it a night. Ogallala is right on I-80, and the drive down to it from Mitchell is very scenic - lots of bluffs and valleys.

Day 3 -

Once again, William awoke us nice and early. We ate a continental breakfast at the hotel (which was fairly descent) and were on the road by 6:30am. I think we were a little slap-happy by then. Before we left, I got about 4 1/2 hours of sleep. Then I got about 5 the night we stayed with my Mom. About 5 - 5 1/2 hours the night we stayed in Ogallala. We managed to make it home alive though by about 8:30pm Central time. We got home with 85 lbs of wool roving to re-sell, and probably another 5 lbs of yarn. It was really a great trip despite the looooooong drive. We also have a lot of motivation to get our shopping cart up so we can start selling this stuff…’cause 85 lbs of roving costs a lot of money ;)