Home from Park City

We arrived late last night after a loooooong trip home from Park City, UT. We drove several hours on Sunday night after tearing down the booth, and all day Monday. There was an incredible thunderstorm just past Las Vegas - now I have a much clearer idea what flash floods are like in the desert. First, the pavement looked moist. Seconds later, it was puddling up. Minutes after that, the desert floor (sand, gravel) was puddling up. Very soon, there were huge muddy torrents down every gully - even down the middle of the freeway, between the east-bound and west-bound lanes! The roar of the huge drops of rain on the windsheild was incredible. All the cars and trucks on the road had to slow to 30 mph or less in order to be able to see the road. I haven't been in such a downpour since we drove through Missouri in April of 2006...and this was in the desert! Wow! The forecast for that area is for more rainstorms through Friday - they'll probably get a year's worth of rain in one week.

The Kimball Art Festival in Park City consists of a double row of artists' booths down the length of Main Street. Here's the view north from our location:



And the view looking south:



And the booth, with multilayer scarves hanging on the walls and complex twills on the rack behind me. There's a rack of sacrificial hand-dyed scarf blanks and a few hand-knitted scarves to the left front. Sacrificial, because I don't cringe if children who are eating ice cream or greasy hamburgers fondle them on the way past. (That's one of the drawbacks to outdoor shows - food is sold among the art booths, and lots more small children are present.)



In an earlier post, I inadvertently reversed the north/south directions when giving the location of the booth. It seems that someone at the Kimball Art Center draws maps with South at the top of the page and North at the bottom. No wonder I was confused! Geographers, take heed! Somebody out there needs to be taught about proper map orientation.

The weather was sunny during the show, and in the 90-to-100-degree (F) range. It might look cool and shady in the booth, but it felt more like a sauna. The white material of the canopy blocks visible light pretty well, but not infrared, and the surfaces of furnishings (podium, table, chairs) were much hotter than air temperature. Between high temps, high altitude (over 7000 ft), and ultralow humidity, I was more than a little uncomfortable.

I'm gonna have to think long and hard about doing this show again. If it were in cooler weather, later in the season, maybe, but this was killer weather. The EMS staff of the local fire department were a visible presence, for that very reason.