Red Plaid is suddenly EVERYWHERE! Just a few years ago I was looking high and low for Red Plaid stuff that would be bizcaz-able. Nowadays there is all manner of Red Plaid wear out there on the market. I personally own two Red Plaid skirts and a Red Plaid jackety kind of thing. I wore one of my Red Plaid skirts to help staff our North Country Trail table at the Quiet Water Symposium today.

And then there are the Stormy Kromer hats. Everywhere you look, there is a guy (or a woman) in a Stormy Kromer hat. A lot of them are Red Plaid (the GG owns TWO Red Plaid Stormy Kromer hats) but not all. They come in all manner of colors. It’s fine with me if people want to look like Elmer Fudd but I also don’t understand why a Stormy Kromer is *warm*! At least not without a balaclava underneath it. I am sure that I don’t totally understand the technology surrounding a Stormy Kromer (even though there are probably 10 of them in my house) but how do you keep your neck warm?

Red Plaid was fashionable when the Veteran Greenhorns (my dad’s high school/college friends pre-WWII) romped in the yooperland back woods. It has become fashionable again in the last decade or so, almost de rigueur among the hiking crowd I hang with. The Quiet Water Symposium was a sea of Red Plaid today and I spied some really CUTE Red Plaid *accented* articles of clothing. As much as I loved those, it made me wonder if Red Plaid is on the cusp of fading out as a fashion trend…

…and then there was this Orange Person out there doing his/her/their thing. This was the only pic I took at the QWS today. Could this kind of thing replace Red Plaid? I think more likely it’s just one person’s expression of their individuality via an article of clothing 🧡🧡🧡

So, another good QWS is in the books. I attended three presentations. One about visiting the islands of the Great Lakes, another about paddling (more or less) from Lake Superior to James Bay, and a third about paddling the Yukon River to the Bering Sea (or not…). And then Pizza House for dinner with our Hiawatha Shore-to-Shore chapter plus the Jordan 45. At the end, the Jordan 45 gals had kind of absorbed the GG into their booth and I had to pry him out 🐽 Red Plaid or not, may the North Country Trail live forever. Good times and g’night.

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