Castroville

If you haven't heard of Castroville, it is a neat little town just west of San Antonio.  It has often been a destination for us when we want to go for a nice ride.  It is probably about 40 miles from here.  Now Friday is the day that we go, and the destination we sometimes don't even decide until we leave the house... we just know we want to enjoy the day and have lunch some place nice.  If we have a particular item we want to shop for, that can influence our decision of where to go, but it is kind of like our "date day", so the sky is the limit.

Castroville is where we headed today.  We always go to the bakery first.  It is an Alsatian bakery and the breads and pastries are wonderful.  After the bakery, the next item on our agenda is the quilt shop.  The shop is on my list of favorites.  My husband visits with the sales person while I shop around and I think about all the wonderful quilts I could make... then I think about all the fabric and quilt kits I have at home that I have no idea when I will get to them.  So I look for a couple neat fat quarters.  In fact I took one of the fat quarters that I bought and made 4 little zippered pouches when we got home.  I had to use some fabric from my stash to go with it, but I was inspired from a new piece of fabric.  I have my gift show in November to prepare for, so I try to use any spare time I can making something neat for the show.

After we left the quilt shop is was approaching lunch time and Castroville has a really neat cafe on the green.  The food is really good and the atmosphere is very quaint.  There is an antique shop to the rear of the parking area... some day I may go explore.  Today we chose to eat on the porch.  There are tables under the trees in front of the porch as well, but we thought the porch looked appealing today.

There was a cat that appears to be the greeter on the patio. He never approached the tables or tried to get too close to the people, but being a cat person, I thought it was kind of neat just to have him there.  The tree at the end of the porch behind the cat was a fig tree.  I don't think I have ever seen one before, at least not up close.

On the way home we went by a few fields of sunflowers.  It was a  real reminder of our trips through Kansas.  The neat thing about sunflowers in a field is they are always facing towards the sun, so in the picture of the field, they are all facing away from where we were.

Decided to take a couple pictures of my pouches that I made, the four from this afternoon, and the one I made yesterday.  I think these guys are really neat and very easy to make.

Have a great weekend.