Vacation Day 5

Back to the vacation narrative...so there we were staying over in St. Ste. Marie. The next morning we drove south over the bridge (Annie mercifully sleeping this time) and took the ferry to Mackinac Island. Here we are on the first deck of the ferry. The top deck was filled completely with a group of high school cross-country guys, all wearing the same t-shirts. We saw them later around the island.

While there we did the usual touristy things - looked at the Grand Hotel (from a distance - going inside costs $10 a head), circumnavigated the island on rented bikes, and bought things in the myriad shops. We stayed in a bed & breakfast on the island, which turned out to be a charming place. The big drawback was that both beds were small, so Annie ended up sleeping on the floor.

We had planned to take two days for the drive back from Mackinac but were antsy to be home, so we got up the next day, rode the ferry to the mainland and drove home with only a brief stop in Jackson to pick up college dorm stuff from Brian and Lorrie. All in all it was a great trip.

Empty Nest

I have to interrupt my slow retelling of our Michigan vacation with pictures from last weekend, when we dropped Annie off at Roanoke College to begin her course of study there.

It was a nice weekend trip. We left from downtown Cincinnati Friday as I was getting off work and drove to Charleston, WV for the night. Next morning we continued on to the college (total driving time: 7 hours) and Annie was moved into her dorm room by noon. She then attended a blizzard of onboarding meetings and ceremonies. We got to see her for lunch and dinner Saturday and lunch on Sunday before heading home.

The college was beautiful, and the people we met were really nice, including Annie's roommate Katrina. Lee Ann and I had a good time poking around campus and staying Saturday night in a nearby b & b. Except for the fact that we were forced to leave our only daughter behind, in the clutches of total strangers, it was a pretty nifty weekend.

Vacation - Day 4

From Petoskey we drove north across the Mackinac Bridge (which Annie managed with a minimum of terror) and on to St. Ste. Marie to see freighters go through the locks there. We stayed at a nearby Indian casino resort called Kewadin and played the starter tokens they gave us in slot machines on the gaming floor, but lost interest in gambling as soon as the free tokens were gone.

St. Ste. Marie is a fun town. We visited the county historical museum, which is down a side street that was all torn up for repaving, and according to their visitor log we were the only visitors in a week. There was an art fair going on and we bought a watercolor of a lighthouse we had seen at Betsy Point the day previous. Then we shopped on Main Street and ran into a lady whose husband was the mayor of Hillsdale at the time I worked for the city utilities department in 1992-93 and she regaled me with public employee gossip, 18 years after the fact. It sure is a small world - sometimes too small.

Vacation - Day 3

Day 3 was Dune Day at Sleeping Bear Dunes. We all climbed this starter dune, but then Annie climbed the dune beyond this one. We stopped a few places along the Lake Michigan shore to wade in the water. The weather was gorgeous.

We went from here to Traverse City for lunch and poked around there a bit before checking in to our historic hotel in Petoskey.

More Vacation

Later on Day 2 we visited the Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park near Grand Rapids. We were lucky to visit during an exhibition of glass art by Chihuly, who positioned his really cool pieces throughout the gardens.

The permanently displayed pieces are pretty impressive too. In the second picture, Annie and Lee Ann get ready to put a twitch on Leonardo Da Vinci's horse. This sculpture is the largest cast bronze in the world. Leonardo designed it but the techniques for the casting did not exist until modern times.

We wrapped up day 2 by driving north to a little low-rent fishing resort motel just west of Cadillac and spending the night there.

Vacation Day 2

Having reached Jackson the night before and imposed on the hospitality of Brian and Lorri for a night, we rose early Sunday morning and hit the road. First stop was MSU campus. I had not been there for years, and since Annie is off to college in a few weeks thought it would be fun to show her my old stomping grounds. We spent some time in Beal Botanical Gardens, which is a really cool place, had a snack in the Student Union building, visited Sparty (the NEW Sparty - I didn't know he had been remade) and then motored up the road.

Family Vacation 2010 - Day 1

Part of the reason I am hopelessly behind in blogging about our lives is that we were on vacation for a week, arriving back home yesterday.

Last Saturday we loaded up the car and headed north, in pursuit of some cooler weather and good times in Michigan. Along the way we visited the site of Fort Jefferson, south of Greenville. This was one of a line of forts established in the late 1700s to protect the frontier from Indians, which is a little ironic since General St. Clair lost something like 600 men while on a sortie out from this very fort, a record for casualties inflicted by Native Americans in a battle. Nothing remains of the fort, but there are signs describing what archaeological digs on the site have found. And they have a cool stone monument there, so of course we posed in front of it.

We had a few other first-day adventures, including a visit to the Kitchen Aid Blender museum, but the real highlight was the McAlpine Corvair/GTO Museum in Jackson, whose curator is none other than my brother Brian. He is always gracious and let us tour the place yet again.