Travel Wheels: A Comparison

I currently have a Spin-A-Way Holiday wheel, a Pocket Wheel, and a Bosworth Journey Wheel.

And it cracks me up a little to say that. When I first started looking at the possibilities for a travel wheel, these were my top contenders. And bit by bit they suddenly all became mine!

All three are great travel wheels but that really depends on what type of traveling you are planning to do. I just went through a bit of a nightmarish experience in the Ankara, Turkey airport when they told me that I could not take my Holiday wheel on the plane...

But let me see if I can break it down,
pros and cons in regards to travel wheels:
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Journey Wheel: McFly

Pros
-Built into a box ready for travel, complete with carrying strap
-Built in Lazy Kate
-Assembly: Quickest - Easy to set up - Ready to Spin in ~2 minutes
-Small foot print on the ground
-Quiet but makes the most noise out of the three
-Scotch tension option
Cons
-Too large to go under the seat on Planes (would fit on most planes, but getting it under the seat would be the problem)
-Smallest Bobbins
-Tallest, which can be a problem for spinning in a vehicle
-Requires some oiling (treadle pivots, and the footman)
-Weight: 14-15 lbs (Heaviest)
-Price: Starting at $1475 ($150 deposit)
-Waiting List: 3+ years (not sure on this, can anyone confirm actual length at this time?)

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Pocket Wheel: Doc

(Photo borrowed from Mr. Pocket)

Pros
-WooLee Winder option!!!
-Carry Handle for when it is assembled
-Treadles are set high for comfortable couch spinning and such!
-Shortest height
-Small foot print on the ground
-Dissembles and fits into a backpack and can go under the seat on a plane
-Infinite Spinning Ratios
-No drive belts or strings!
-Largest bobbin capacity (I think on the WW anyway)
-Very Quiet
-Weight 6 lbs (Lightest!)
-Price: Starting at $550 ($200 deposit)
-Waiting List: 8+ Months
Cons
-Assembly - Longest - can be difficult with Treadle Axle and adjusting settings for proper tension and settings - Ready to Spin in ~10 minutes
-Treadle Axle can be very difficult to insert and remove
-Treadle Axle and Flyer Shaft can cause concerns at security screenings and must be protected from dings/bending
-Requires oiling on the Flyer Shaft under the Bobbin
-Adjusting ratios is approximate and can be a bit fiddly (requires tools)

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Holiday Wheel: River

Pros
-Assembly - Easy to put together - Ready to Spin in ~5 minutes
-Small foot print on the ground
-Taller than the Pocket but shorter than the Journey
-Dissembles and fits into a backpack and can go under the seat on a plane
-So easy to adjust bobbin tension (with little screw on top of the Spindle Assembly)
-Does not require any oiling!
-Very Queit
-Weight: 8 lbs
-Price: Starting at $675 ($0 deposit)
Cons
-Spindle assembly and flyer could cause concern in security screenings
-Bobbin capacity
-Waiting List: 2+ years

Having made this list on the fly, I'll come back and update as I think of other things to compare.

All in all, in regards to flying with a travel wheel, here is my opinion:

For me, I will not attempt to carry a wheel on board a plane unless I am in a situation where I have a safe alternative for my wheel if they say it can't go. For example, flying to Germany (which I do often) I have someone on the other side of security (not flying) both in my departure and arrival cities. So, if I got to security and they said no, I could just turn around and hand it to someone who would take care of it until I returned or would ship it to me (very carefully!). I have a large hard-sided suitcase that I would be willing to pack my wheel for checked luggage. However, I'm always a bit leery of checking anything important to me since I know where lost luggage goes...

The Journey Wheel is really not an option for flying, for me. But it would be great for car road trips where I want to bring a wheel along. Between the Pocket and the Holiday, I believe that the Holiday is my favorite choice for traveling. Mainly because of the issues that I have had with putting together and taking apart my Pocket. Currently I have it assembled and can spin at will at home but prefer to not take it apart and therefore it's not a great option for travel, other than sitting it in the car assembled!

I've also had a Kromski Sonata previously, and while it does fold and have a padded carrying bag, it's a rather large wheel and not really a good option for travel, IMHO.

Here's a side by side comparison of the Pocket and Holiday.

So all in all, even though some of these things sound negative, I love all of my wheels!

And I feel like the luckiest person in the world to have all three!!

One More Disney Day

Leap Day
February 29, 2012

I had an extra day and this is what I did! 

What did you do?

3:30am woke up and drove to the airport

10:00am - I was on a plane from Atlanta to Orlando and I made a new friend

10:30am - picked up rental car, had a hard time explaining to the the agent that I really was "staying" in the Magic Kingdom that night. 

                 Agent: "Where are you staying while you are here?" 

                 Me: "I'm staying at the Magic Kingdom tonight"

                 Agent: "Yes but which hotel are you staying at?"

                 Me: "No, no, I'm really staying in the Magic Kingdom all
                         night"

                 Agent: "Are you sleeping in the castle?" 

                 Me: "Well wouldn't that be nice..."

11:00am - Arrived at the Magic Kingdom, 5 hours late for the full 24 hours

11:30am - Sneaked a picture with Mickey in his PJ's while he was being interviewed by the local news.

11:40am - Picked up fastpass for Buzz Lightyear

12:00pm - started stalking the Emporium because they were continually sold out of the One More Disney Day t-shirts in Small and Medium...

12:15pm - Picked up my first set of Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom cards!!

1:15pm - Lunch at the Plaza, which was booked solid but oddly had sooooo many empty tables... I wonder if people were just skipping out on their reservations... Also check out my cool set of Mickey ears, just for One More Disney Day!

2:00pm - Main Street Philharmonic Band!!!

2:15pm - Dole Whip #1 - nectar of the gods... no joke

3:00pm - The 3 O'clock parade... Celebrate a Dream Come True

3:30pm - Tom Sawyer's Island... To those of you who know this story, you will appreciate the humor in this picture... To those of you who do not, This is the entrance to a cave.

3:50pm - Got fastpasses for Peter Pan

4:00pm - Haunted Mansion - got stuck in Madame Leota's Seance scene... this becomes important later

4:30pm - Phone started dying, started borrowing power from every outlet I found

5:00-7:00pm - rode various rides, really enjoyed just being in the park!

7:00pm - Tomorrowland Terrace where people were gathering for a WDW Radio meet up! I met so many Disney fans through out the day! It was a great feeling to be surrounded by so many people that knew more about Disney than I do!

7:30pm - Lou Mongello of the WDW Radio Podcast  was doing a live recording of his podcast! You can watch the video of that broadcast below!

8:00pm - Watched Wishes from the TTA, the crowd on Mainstreet was shoulder to shoulder and it turned out that the TTA is a great place to watch from!!

1:00am - Grouped up with the coolest group of people for the Touringplans Great All Nighter Scavenger hunt!


1:15am - Literally sprinting through the Magic Kingdom in a race against 10 other  teams

1:30am - Trying with everything we had to pull the sword out of the stone!

2:00am - Begging our way through the line at the Haunted Mansion. We needed to know how many candles were in Madame Leota's seance's scene... (10 incase you are wondering)  Ran into the Inside the Magic meet up group and convinced Ricky to let us pass his group of 60 people... You can hear this transaction on the Inside the Magic Podcast, show #361. At about 1 hour, 19 minutes, and 30 seconds in you can hear me shouting "Ricky" from afar...

3:00am - Endured the excruciating last step on the scavenger hunt, drove a lap around the Tomorrowland Speedway

3:15am - Arrived at the finishline

4:00am - Rode Space Mountain with my team. The coolest picture ever of me on Space Mountain!

Look closely, you can see arms sprouting from my ears!

4:30am - Victory Dole Whip #2 with my team to celebrate finishing the race!

4:45am - Exchanged contact information with my team and we parted ways! Awesome team!

5:00am - enjoyed a Nutella and fruit waffle from Sleepy Hallow for breakfast!

5:30am - Watched the last "The Magic, The Memories, and You" show on the castle

6:00am - I could see the sun beginning to make an appearance from behind Tomorrowland as the park officially closed for the night, I mean morning!

At this point most everyone was in zombie mode but it was totally worth it! 

6:15am - Mickey gives his good night kiss to the park and everyone starts making their way down mainstreet.

The cast members where high-fiving everyone on the way out saying "You did it!" Many people stopped to take pictures in front of the Main Street clock. 

All in all, I'm very glad that I made this journey. It seemed a little crazy on the outside, at least to outsiders. But once I arrived in the park, it was as if I had arrived at the best Disney fan convention ever! Much like Comic Con or Blizzcon... everyone there was just like me! I was surrounded by people who knew more about Disney than I do! And at least 1 in every 5 people had gotten on a plane to come down for the day all by themselves! It turns out that if I am crazy, there are at least 30-40,000 people that are just as crazy as I am (at least the ones that were at WDW, there were even more at Disneyland!). 

The park was surging with an energy that day that can not be described! It was like taking the normal Disney magic and sprinkling it all with pixie dust and wishes and dreams and blue fairies to make it even more magical! And being surrounded by so many people that love Disney as much as I do and were just as excited to be there, it was just great!

I'm now counting down to Leap Day 2016. I will be there, without question!!!

Spain and Gibraltar

OK, so I admit it, I'm a bad blogger.

Blogging, just like so many things in my life, has to strike me at the right moment. I'm such a fair weather friend when it comes to my many hobbies and interest. I might go for 6 months without reading a single book and then one day the whim will hit me and I'll read 6 books in a row. I recently read the entire Game of Thrones series and can not wait for the next book to come out. I'm on the third book in the Rain Wild Chronicles and I just can't seem to get enough. But this sudden reading obsession could stop as suddenly as it started. Even mid-book... It's just how my brain works. 

Same goes with knitting and spinning.  I often have 5 or 6 projects in the works because I get bored so easily and find that if I can rotate between projects this happens much less. Right now I have a half done Stripe Study Shawl, Barley Sugar, Scarlet Capelet, and a pair of socks that are only missing the toes...

Basically there is a queuing system in my brain and what ever pops to the top as the thing I want to do most, is what I do and I cast aside everything else.

So this leads to me being a bad blogger. I'm bad about posting on Facebook, Twitter, emails, and even calling family members to say hello. It's not that I don't like you guys, it's just that I forget so easily when there are 100 other things that I'm trying to do at once. 

I will try to make up for that today!

I've been on so many adventures that I doubt that I can tell you about all of them but I'll start with my most recent ones and TRY to post others as I think about them. 

Feel free to give me a nudge if you think that I'm not reporting in often enough!

In January, I was lucky enough to get to spend a week in Spain! 

It was wonderful and such a great adventure!

I flew in to Madrid and took a high speed train 

to the Southern most tip of Spain to a city called San Roque.

From San Roque, I was able to walk into Gibraltar where Leroy and I got to play with the Monkeys!

It was like a weird Twilight Zone world going from Spain to Great Britain... 

We had to walk across the airport run way to get into Gibraltar and once a day they close the walk way so that the one flight  in/out can take off and land! So bizarre!

Yes this car was in fact moving... Mr. Monkey was just enjoying the ride!!

And this monkey stole my hair clip!!! 

I'm sure he is the envy of all the monkeys on the rock with his pretty new hairdo!

And here's Leroy, living it up in front of the Governors mansion in Gibraltar!

At the end of the week, I took the train back to Madrid and met up with my new friend Kaystir from Ravelry! She's pretty awesome and we hit it off right away! She and her husband where our tour guide/translator extraordinaire on a grand tour of all of the Madrid yarn stores!

We went to several yarn stores and a few craft stores. They all displayed their stock in the windows on the outside of the store, then when you went inside you had to tell them what you wanted. 

For those yarn petters out there, you have to adjust to picking your yarn just by looking at it about 5 feet away! They will let you pet but in many cases, the stores were so busy that they didn't have time for you to request to hold every single yarn before you made your selection!

Awesome, vintage but still working like a champ, cone winder!

Everywhere I travel, I always tend to find what we call Janadoors!!

And yes, those are bags and bags and bags of yarn :)

I made this hat with some of the yarn I bought in Madrid! 

It's a Walnut Whip by Ysolda Teague

In Spain, the stores all close at 2:00pm for siesta.

So that is when we started Tapas hopping!

We went to several places and enjoyed many different types of food and drink! It was great!

It was a great time and we hope to meet up with our new friends for more adventures in the future!

The NASA Silver Snoopy

Crew of Space Shuttle Mission STS-135

10 years ago I began my work career and around that same time I came across a sterling silver lapel pin of Snoopy in an astronaut suit.  I pinned it to my lanyard and wore it to work for about 3 months, until one day a coworker nearly fell out of their chair exclaiming “Is that a Silver Snoopy??!?”  I’m sure my response was something in the neighborhood of “Well, it’s Snoopy and it’s silver…”  He explained that the Silver Snoopy is a very prestigious award given by the Astronauts to individuals for outstanding achievements in flight safety and mission success.  Each pin is flown on a space mission and then awarded by an astronaut to the recipient.  I removed the pin at once because I did not earn this award, it was not mine.  I contacted the antique store where I bought it for $1 to see if I could trace it back to its origin.  They told me it was most likely purchased as part of an estate sale.  So then I turned to NASA.  I was able to track down the coordinator of the Silver Snoopy award at Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC).  Unfortunately, she told me that because the pins are not stamped with serial numbers there is no way to identify the original owner with any certainty.  She told me that by all rights, the pin belonged to me now.

I tucked the pin away in a Tiffany’s box and hid it in a drawer.

I guess I never really realized how much the space program meant to me.  At one point in my life I had planned to join the Air Force and pursue an Astronaut position.  Other responsibilities prevented me from going down that path.  A few years later, in 2005 I was at Disney World and it just so happened that a shuttle launch was scheduled for that week.   I went to the Polynesian resort beach and among 50 or so other people watched the shuttle go up.  It was a streak of light over the Contemporary!  As I stood there tears were streaming down my face.  I was so proud and it felt like it was a part of home, something that we should all take a little ownership in.  Right then and there I vowed that if I ever had another opportunity to see one launch, I would be as close as they would legally allow me to be!

10 years past since I found Snoopy and we reached the end of the Shuttle era.

I tried to make it to a couple of the last launches but things never worked out.  After the launch of the STS-135, the last shuttle mission, a mass email was sent out to all of the employees of my organization.  I believe I must have been the only one to read it as no one else seems to know about it.   It was from a gentleman named Jon and included the story of the last shuttle launch and his experience.  It turns out that Jon had been accepted into the test pilot school at Edwards Air force base and was in the 92A class of 1992.  Of the 17 individuals in this class, 5 of them were selected as astronaut candidates, and 4 of them went on to fly a total of 11 missions.  Jon kept in contact with each of them (Walheim, Bloomfield, Carey, and Sturckow) and collected their mission patches for each flight.  He plans to put them all together in a display including autographed pictures of each astronaut and then donate the display to the Test Pilot School in honor of their class.  Before the last shuttle launched, Jon contacted Rex Walheim and asked if he would be willing to do him a favor!  He thought it would be cool if his last patch (for the STS-135) could be flown on the shuttle.  Rex told him to overnight it to him and he would see what he could do.

A few weeks later, after the shuttle’s successful return, he received an email from Rex including a photo!  Not only did Rex manage to get it on board but he sent a picture to prove it!  The picture shows the patch floating in front of the window with the International Space Station and Earth seen in the background. 

When I read this story, I remembered the pin that I had found 10 years earlier and had an idea.

I contacted Jon and told him that I would like to donate my Silver Snoopy to his display.  He was shocked and honored that I was willing to part with it but I explained that it was never rightfully mine.  My goal from the beginning was to find a proper home for this Snoopy and I felt like this was the best place for it!

Through further research, we were able to confirm that this Silver Snoopy flew on either Apollo 7 or 8.  We are currently in contact with the NASA Silver Snoopy representative who is helping to verify the list of recipients from Marshall Space Flight Center from 1968-1969.  Once we have a confirmed list I plan to contact the Huntsville times to request their assistance in researching the obituaries from the time period around when I found the pin.  We assume that the individual that received this award passed away and their belongings were sold in an estate sale which led to the pin being found in the antique store.  We are hoping that we can narrow the possibilities down to our best guess so that the final display will read something to the effect of “Silver Snoopy pin… thought to have flown on XX mission and awarded by XX astronaut, in honor of all contributors to space exploration.”  We understand that we will never know, with any certainty, who the original owner was but a “best guess” may provide closure to this 10 year adventure! 

Jon met with the crew of the STS-135 last week and shared our story with them.  They passed the Silver Snoopy around and appreciated the wonder that this was one of the first items to ever fly in space and until a new mission is assigned, they (the crew) were one of the last to fly in space. 

I may have not had the opportunity to chase after my childhood dream of being an astronaut but it is an incredible thrill that, because of this serendipitous event, they know my name.

Yesterday I received a package in the mail that caused my heart to skip a beat and I sat down in my driveway shaking as I opened it.  Astronaut Rex Walheim had sent me a package.  Inside was included a photo of the STS-135 crew (signed by each of them), a photo of Rex himself (signed with a thank you), an STS-135 mission patch, and a letter from Rex expressing his gratitude for my contribution.  Again, tears were streaming down my face. 

I cannot explain why the space program conjures up such deep emotions for me.  But what I can say is that I am so proud of what our country has accomplished in the last 50 years in the fields of space exploration, scientific discovery, and aeronautics research.  I have hope that NASA will be given a new manned flight mission soon that will spark the imagination of this country and my children’s children will aspire to be astronauts as so many of us once did.  In the words of Jon, “with all the bad stuff going on around us, like the economy, the war, people losing their homes and possibly even their jobs…” if his story and mine “…provides even one person with a sense of hope and pride that our country has, can, and will continue to do great things, then they most certainly did serve a purpose.”

Some businesses frown upon mass emails but Jon’s is a good example of one that was appropriate and even necessary to give the Huntsville space community a little hope for the future and above all else an enormous THANK YOU to everyone who has played a part in Huntsville’s history in space.

"Eyes on the Stars"

McFly's New Jacket

It took several hours

5 broken sewing machine needles

lots of staples (don't ask, I use what ever works!)

and a little bit of blood

But McFly will now travel in style!!!

It's not perfect, as nothing I make ever is!

But, it will work, and I think it looks pretty cool!

All I need to finish it is a giant piece of velcro to close the front

And a patch that says "McFly"

Anyone out there have the skills to make a patch?

Black with Silver letters?

Nothing fancy, just something plain,

not too big, just a couple of inches...