Okay. After weeks of being depressed at how far behind my blog had gotten, I have made the radical decision to skip most of the summer. Imagine I did lots of fun things and ate too much, and you would not be far from the truth. I have decided that I did need to blog about a couple of summer things, though. We took two trips this summer – 6 days in Michigan at Mom’s place over the Fourth of July, and 3 days in Amish country in August for our anniversary celebration. I’ll get to the August trip in the next day or two.

Since this was the second summer of trying to sell our old house, we needed to look for a vacation on-the-cheap. Mom’s place in Michigan is very beautiful and has the wonderful merit of being free. Also, Mom and Marc would be there on the weekend and that would be fun, so off to Michigan we went.

We left on Monday, June 30th. We had stuck around until Monday because Mer’s parents were in town over the weekend for Aunt Mary’s 70th birthday party on Saturday the 27th (a big shindig I wish I could blog about). At any rate, we left on Monday. Mom’s place is only five-and-a-half hours away, so we got there in good time. At this point, I’m not sure what we did that evening, but my guess is we played games for the evening.

The next day (Tuesday) we started off with our usual visit to Sammie’s Diner for breakfast. Sammie’s has huge breakfasts that are pretty cheap, so we are fond of the place. Later in the day, we headed down to South Bend to see our friends Gen and Dan. We had not seen them in almost two years, and they had added a new member of the family in that time. So, we got to meet Ellie, who is very cute and seems very good-natured. Gen’s dad came over, and we all headed over to a very good Mediterranean restaurant, Elia’s. Gen and Dan were excited that we wanted to go there; it seems that their South Bend friends are reluctant to get Mediterranean cuisine. We had a good time together, and headed back to Gen and Dan’s place for a little while. Since we still had a 40-minute drive, we had to leave around 9:00 or so, but I do have to say my addiction to dessert, especially after eating out, got the better of me. After getting gas, I pulled in to the Perkins restaurant next to the gas station to get dessert. It was yummy.

Wednesday was the first of July, and it was a nice day. Mer and I wanted to find some places to hike in the area. We like hiking in Ohio, and the parks around us are well maintained and free. So, we set out to find a park. We landed on going to Grand Mere state park. It had a slightly confusing gate. It was supposed to cost $8 to get in, but there was no ranger. The information kiosk was stuffed with a diaper, and the lock-box-looking thing seemed to be in disrepair and looked as if the money might just fall out. I felt bad about it, but given all of that, we just went into the park.

I’m afraid to say that Michigan parks (we checked out another one or two over the week) make Ohio parks shine. Grand Mere was the best of the parks we found, but there was no ranger, there were no trail maps, and the main trail was next to a swamp and so the place was swarming with mosquitoes. We walked along for about a half a mile, and had resolved to turn around and leave shortly if we did not get away from the bugs, when we found a trail that went (very steeply) up a sand dune. So, we took that. The dune was very difficult to get up, but once we did, there was a breeze and no bugs. The dunes kept going up, so we kept climbing, and were given wonderful views of the lake. We tromped around the dunes and headed down to the beach. We meandered around the beach for some time and had fun watching the lake and people and a very happy stick-fetching dog. We eventually returned back up the dune and went back to the car.

We headed further north and went to South Haven. It had been recommended to us as a very cute town, and it was. It had turned cool and was spitting rain, so I don’t think we saw it at its best. We did duck into a diner/ice cream parlor for lunch, and then headed over to the South Bend Chocolate Factory for dessert. A huge piece of chocolate cake caught my eye, so we got that. It turned out to be a pretty shocking $12, but we split it, so that was less shocking. The cake weighed in at over a pound and was quite delicious. Certainly not a treat to have on a regualr basis, but it was nice on vacation.

We headed back home from there, and in approaching Silver Beach we had the happy timing to be the first in line at a drawbridge that went up for a huge freight ship. It took about 20 minutes, but I liked watching both the bridge and the boat, so I did not mind (I was actually pretty excited about it). We made it the rest of the way home and, in the mood for it, we watched Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

I’ll write more about the other three days tomorrow. For now, it is good that the blog bridge has come back down and I can proceed again.