Dear Friends:
My daughter Mary Donnelly and I are having such fun on
Quilt
Camp at Sea’s 2009 New England 9-Night Cruise for a Cure,
which is a fundraising cruise to benefit the Breast
Cancer Research Foundation. I was most honored when I was
asked to be a guest speaker on the cruise. As many of you know,
I love quilts and have included them in many of my paintings;
and, I am a twenty-plus-year survivor of breast cancer, so breast cancer
research is very important to me.
Before leaving for the cruise, Mary and I had lunch with my son
John at the Artisans Grill
in Luray, Va. John is the chef there. Seated, left to right,
are Little and Wes Porter (owners of Artisans Grill), me, Mary, and
John.
We have met the nicest people on this cruise, both at
the hotel before we embarked and onboard the ship. During my talks,
I’ve spoken about the work of the P.
Buckley Moss Society and the P.
Buckley Moss Foundation for Children’s Education, as well
as the Foundation’s annual Creative
Mind Conference for educators. Lots of people have volunteered
to make quilts around my painted fabric centerpieces for the Foundation
to auction or raffle. I am so grateful to everyone for their kindness
and generosity, as well as for the numerous quilting tips I’ve
picked up while on the cruise!
We left Baltimore, Maryland, on August 13, and so far we’ve been
to Portland, Bar Harbor, and Kennebunkport in Maine and Saint John,
New Brunswick, and Halifax, Nova Scotia, in Canada. During our
shore excursions in Maine we visited Acadia National Park, and saw Cadillac
Mountain, which is the highest point along the North Atlantic seaboard
and is the first place to view the sunrise in the United States from
October 7 through March 6. We ate lobster salad and clam chowder
and went out in a boat to see the whales. We discovered that while
it was hot on land, it was quite cold out on the water. The difference
in the air temperatures makes it foggy at night, so we hear the fog
horn quite a bit.
While we were in New Brunswick, Canada, we saw a river that rises 59
feet at high tide! For you landlubbers, there are two high tides
and two low tides every 24 hours. This is the natural rise and
fall of bodies of water in reaction to the gravitational attraction
between the earth, the sun, and the moon and the centrifugal force due
to the relative motions of the moon around the earth and the earth around
the sun. I get to see the tidal changes everyday when I’m
at my home in Mathews, Virginia. As of this writing, we’re
getting ready to go to Nova Scotia and see Lunenburg, which is a fishing
village that was formally established in 1753 as the first British Colonial
settlement in Nova Scotia outside of Halifax. On our way back
to Baltimore, we’ll stop in Boston, Massachusetts. This
has been a really fun cruise, and I’m very grateful to Quilt Camp
at Sea for giving me the opportunity to visit so many places I haven’t
seen before. Mary has already called all her quilting friends,
and they all want to go on the next cruise, which will be to Alaska.
The P. Buckley
Moss Museum’s Administrative Assistant Pat Carter, right,
awarded Michael Jones, left, his gift certificate for being the Monthly
Mystery Winner for August. Michael was on vacation and visiting
his parents in Stuarts Draft, Va., and stopped by the Museum on August
11. It was his lucky day! For more information on the Museum’s
Monthly Mystery Winner Program, please see my February
11, 2009, newsletter.
Love,
Pat