We had Wednesday through Sunday off for Thanksgiving, so we decided to head to Michigan to see Mom and Marc. It was also a fine excuse to pick up our friend Ellen who lives in Hillsdale, Michigan. We left Tuesday, but Meredith had to stay until 6:00 for parent/teacher conferences, so we got a late start. That worked out okay, because we had invited ourselves to stay the night at Ellen’s, and she was gracious enough to accept – she even promised to turn the heat up from absolute zero to merely frigid (actually, her house was very warm this time, but don’t tell her that). Ellen’s house is a nice distance away from Cuyahoga Falls – just about 3.5 hours, so we got to Ellen’s about 10:00ish and chatted briefly and marveled again at how pretty her house is. We did not stay up too long, but went to bed after procuring a lamp and 17 tons of blankets for Mer.

The next morning, Ellen served up a fine breakfast of baked pancakes, which I had never had before. They were very good, and she informed us they are also called German babies or Dutch babies, for reasons unknown to her. This was very fitting, though, since Mer was teaching Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” in her English class (a viciously satiric essay about solving Ireland’s starvation problems by eating babies). Many of Mer’s students were happy to be confirmed in their suspicions that she eats babies.

After breakfast, we packed up the car and headed out. It is about 2.5 hours to Mom and Marc’s place from Ellen’s, and the trip was uneventful. We were a bit surprised when we got there that the drive was blocked by a van, but it just turned out to be a workman. He moved so we could get in the garage, and we were able to unpack while he finished up his work on the front door. After the workman left, I went downtown to get some supplies to make bread as a welcome for Mom and Marc, and by the time I got back, Shannon and Jo had arrived and everyone was quietly reading or grading in the living room. I worked on my bread.

Mom and Marc arrived earlier than expected (they were allowed to leave work early since it was the day before Thanksgiving), and that was much fun, although it did ruin my plan of having hot bread for them as they walked in the door. We all talked, and I did finally get some bread on the table, which seemed to be a hit. Mom and Marc supplemented the bread with pizza (I think).

Meredith and I were in the middle of a fitness challenge that was issued by CVCA. If we exercised 30 minutes/day, and if most of the employees did it, then CVCA would get a break for insurance costs. I can’t say we always had the best attitude about the program, but we complied, which meant we walked 30 minutes every day that we were at Mom’s, incuding Thanksgiving. Several of the days were just a tad cold and windy.

Other than walking, much of the time was very mellow, with a lot of good food. Mom and Marc put out a wonderful spread, and we ate too much. There were also a number of games that were played – Shannon and I rallied from behind, but still lost to Mer, Jo, and Ellen in the book-identifying game Dark and Stormy. Various people in various combinations played Blokus, the Avalon Hill game of Shakespeare (I beat Mer by one space!), and Scrabble over the course of the vacation. Shannon and Jo had to leave Friday, but we filled in for them by watching the five-part mini-series Cranford, which is based on a series of novels from the mid-ninteenth century. The series was quite good – very funny much of the time, and touching in a few places. I was ticked because the author seemed determined to kill off everyone, but other than that little detail, the series was very good. Ellen said she had heard the TV series was one of those rare ones where the series was actually better than the books it was based on.

Saturday, Mom and Marc were going to see Marc’s family in Michigan, so we decided to get adventuresome and headed to a town we had never been to before – Saugatuck. It was a bit of a longer drive than I had expected (about 70-80 minutes), but it did turn out to be a cute little town, although we missed it the first time (it is off the main road about a mile). We wandered the streets window shopping. We saw a sign for a bookstore on a second floor of a bulding, so we tried the door, but it was locked. There was a gallery on the first floor (there is a law in Michigan that all towns near the lake must have at least one gallery on every block), so we went in to see if there was an inside entrance to the bookstore. There was not, but there were hundreds of paintings crammed in the gallery. The clerk informed us that he sold more paintings than any gallery in the entire country, and that everything was 70-80% off because it was off season. We looked around, and much of it was not to my taste or Mer’s taste, but there was one abstract piece we kept coming back to. We had a place in our living room that we wanted to fill with a big painting, and this fit the bill. The painting was only $80, and we had been given a gift of $60 earlier, so we finally decided to buy it. We left it in the store so we could keep wandering for a bit.

We went down to the lake. There were no boats around, but there were a lot of spots to moor boats, so I assume this is a popular spot in the summer. We were getting hungry, so we found (after a little looking) a reasonalbly priced restaurant where we ate. We then went and picked up the painting, which I am guessing is three feet by four feet. I was confident that it would fit in the trunk, just. I was wrong. So, lucky and longsuffering Ellen got to share her backseat with a painting all the way back to Mom’s. (On the return trip on Sunday, Mer sat in the back seat for the drive to Ellen’s.) I did try to mitigate the wow-what-a-great-time-I’m-having aspect of Ellen’s plight by stopping near home at a Culver’s Restaurant to buy frozen custard for everyone. Ellen assured us that the painting story would provide material for her Christmas letter (when it comes out in May).

We did go down to the lake several times, usually on our CVCA-insurance-requested walks. Ellen went with us a couple of times, which insured the next installment of the Ellen-is-cold-with-the-Riordans series. Mom and Marc joined the three of us (with Marc driving Ellen down to the beach and Ellen and Mer back to the house) for a very spectacular sunset on Saturday evening.

While Mer and I still have one more house than we would like to have, we do have many, many things to be thankful for. One of the biggest blessings we have is a pretty great family – not to mention friends who somehow manage to still want to hang out with us despite my best efforts at freezing and crowding them away. It is good to stop and take stock of these blessings once in awhile – we probably should do it more often.