Wedding/Honeymoon/Moving Super Writeup: June 27 - July 8, 2007
And here it is - over 50 KB of it. The pictures included here - most of which are links within the text, although there are a few batches of clickable thumbnails - are by no means all the pictures - only selected pictures taken by Aaron's mom (on the day of the wedding) and Aaron himself (while we were on vacation). Still to come are all the pictures our photographer took and all the pictures I took while we were on vacation. So, if this fails to meet your wedding photography needs, rest assured, there will be more of them to come.
All currently available pictures can be viewed here.
Once posted, there will be a link to Aaron's writeup here.
Wednesday, June 27
After I spent much of Wednesday dawdling and failing to pack things, the phone rang around 3:30. I wasn't really expecting it to be Aaron and Andy already, but indeed it was.
Aaron: "Yeah, I know it's kind of early..."
Me: "Mm, you guys got delayed by the rain and you'll be a little late? Okay."
Aaron: "...rain? What is rain?"
Me: "Rain is storming and hailing all day here and postponing baseball game."
Aaron: "We have no such rain. I was calling to say we're an hour away already."
Me: "!"
So they arrived at my parents' house around 4:30. We killed time with Wii Sports for a while as we waited for the rest of the group (Beth, Jeff, and Lauren) to show up.
A quick break because I know most of you aren't familiar with everybody:
Dramatis Personae
- My parents
- Me and Aaron
- Beth Meyers (my sister, 43, and the maid of honor)
- Andy Strack (Aaron's friend, 26, and the best man)
- Jeff Meyers (my brother, 42, and the groomsman)
- Lauren Robinson (my cousin, 22, and the bridesmaid)
- Sassy Wilson-Meyers (my sister's 6-pound Shih Tzu, age 14, and the dog of honor)
Then the eight of us headed over to Olive Garden for dinner. But oops! Both Aaron and I forgot the gifts and cards we'd prepared for the wedding party (and the one I'd prepared for my parents). More on that later.
After dinner, the eight of us went up the street to Thunderbowl Lanes, where everyone but my dad played a game of real bowling. Aaron won handily (with like 117). Lauren had been very reluctant to play, but in a crowd where the HIGH score is 117, it is pretty hard to be the suckiest, so she felt better.
Also from the the bowling trip: I have always been concerned that I am being highly inappropriate and buying into stereotypes when I purchase Lauren gifts that are glittery and pink, but when we were bowling I saw her purposely select a pearlized hot pink bowling ball off the rack, and I do not feel bad about this at all anymore.
After Thunderbowl, my parents went home and the rest of us went to my sister's house for the rest of the night. There was much with the good snacking foods, and also four consoles, two TVs, eight or nine different games, and my sister's very small dog Sassy. Before that, though, Aaron and I gave over our gifts and cards to the wedding party (I'd left my card for my parents on a table in their house before we'd left). Then we hooked up the PS2 so my brother could progress a little in Metal Gear Solid 3 - a week prior, during my usual Thursday-night visit to Beth's, Jeff had beaten The Fear and struggled with The End a little bit. I had suggested that he save and let Aaron help him out with it the next week - something about "Aaron knows an easy way through this fight." What I meant, of course, was the whole thing where The End dies of old age is you save and leave the game alone, but Jeff didn't know that and it was a really easy cover story.
So we loaded that up and Jeff "beat" The End, and then spent some time climbing The Ladder. Then we moved on to Karaoke Revolution, which was not really such a smashing success, and then we showed Jeff Katamari Damacy, which went awesomely, and we played through five or six levels of that.
Around midnight, Lauren went home; around 12:30 Andy fell asleep and went to bed in the spare room; and by 1:30 Jeff had gone home, Aaron had gone to bed in the spare room, and Beth and I had gone to bed with Sassy in the den.
Thursday, June 28
Beth had spent the night on the floor with her little dog tucked beside her, and when I got up out of the recliner I'd slept in at 7:30, I assumed the dog was still with Beth. Not so much! Down went the footrest, and my foot made light contact with the dog's head. Oops.
The boys continued to sleep for a while; I played with the dog and got dressed (in the same clothes I'd worn Wednesday) while Beth started making milk-sausage gravy for later in the morning and gave me the wedding gift from Sassy. Andy woke up around 8 or so, and Aaron a little later.
Around 9, Beth and I left to meet my parents at the restaurant to get some stuff set up for the reception. The boys stayed behind, and when Beth and I returned around 10:40 (having accomplished almost nothing at the restaurant, as the ables weren't even set up yet), the guys were fully engaged in playing Tetris Attack. We switched over to Yoshi's Cookie, at which I proceeded to dominate, then Jeff and Lauren each showed up. Then, breakfast! Biscuits and gravy, and fruit salad, all around.
The boys departed from Beth's house around noon. Aaron can be depended upon to fill you guys in on what they did. In the meantime, Beth and I took showers, and the photographer arrived at Beth's around 12:30 to take pictures of us getting ready. Lauren did Beth's hair first (her own hair had been done for her earlier in the morning by another hairdresser-friend), then started on my hair around 1:15. A mad dash to the finish!
Just after 2, we left Beth's. To the bat-chapel! (The wedding was at a small chapel on the grounds of a city park with a pond, gazebo, covered bridge, etc. - good stuff for the pictures later on.) The guys actually got there around 2; we girls didn't arrive until about 2:25. Lauren did my makeup and we changed into our dresses...
Ah, our dresses, which I have not mentioned yet. As shown here, they had three panels in the front; on their blue dresses, the center panel had embroidery and beads; on my white dress, the side panels were the ones with embroidery and beads. And we had sleeves! You have no idea how hard it is to find bridal gowns with sleeves. Here is a picture of the dress from the company's website, and here is a picture of the bridesmaid dresses. The latter picture is the only picture that was available to me when I chose my dress - I had no knowledge of what the back of it would look like until the dress actually arrived in mid-May.
Then Aaron's mom came in to take pictures of us getting ready. Then the minister showed up to get the marriage licenses signed. And the flowers showed up; there were supposed to be white lilacs but only lavender ones were available. The chance in the color balance actually worked really well.
...this is really boring in the retelling, but it was a lot more interesting at the time.
Anyway, so, at 3 p.m. we had a wedding. Including the wedding party, there were about thirty people in attendance - I had two attendants, and so did he. My cousin Vaughn screwed up and used the wrong CD for the processional, but it wasn't really a big deal (it was supposed to be a handbell version of Bach's "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" but wound up being "Leen's Love Theme" from Grandia 1). The minister did not totally suck. He did read from 1 Corinthians 13, which was something I have seen at WAY too many weddings and wanted to avoid, and I did in fact quietly protest it by digging a fingernail into Aaron's hand, but it wasn't really so bad either.
My brother Jeff did a reading from Ruth and cried a little; however, "indothalescent." (I do not need to explain this; I need only to include it for my own reference.)
The recessional was - as we have planned for some time, as Todd and Mecha heard him teasingly suggest to me last April and Jay and Andra's wedding - the wedding theme from Lufia 2. We were supposed to dismiss people individually from their pews afterward, but my mom got her signals crossed and headed out immediately afterward, and everyone else followed her lead.
But it went well.
Put another way: "Reader, I married him."
Then we played with our photographer Jen a while. My bouquet was getting very heavy by this time, and began to attract bees. (I like my women like I like my coffee - covered in bees!) Aaron's mom and my mom's friend Myrna (who made the wedding cake) were also running around taking pictures during this time; his mom in particular got distracted by a little family of ducks that was wandering the park. (We do not kick the duck!) But she also took pictures of us; here we are on the porch of the chapel, and here we are by the little pond.
We left the park around 4:15 or so. Jeff was transporting us in his PT Cruiser, and he had made up a really awesome sign for the back (with Cubs and Tigers logos, cheese and chili peppers, and an FFT logo). For the occasion of chauffering us, he had gone to a costume shop and bought an actual chauffer's hat and white gloves. :D
About halfway to the restaurant, we realized that the car in front of us was Aaron's parents. Ha. For further comedy, both they and Jeff just missed the turn into the restaurant's parking lot, which apparently was all well and good because during part of the loop-around to get back, a house they saw provided them with the final piece of the puzzle of the outside color scheme of their new house? Okay.
We got to the restaurant around 4:45. This was very happy because dinner was planned for 5 and we very strongly intended to not make people have to wait forever while we had pictures taken. My mom had made a very attractive photoboard and a Powerpoint slideshow using pictures of us, and we looked at that a little bit. (Warning: The Powerpoint presentation is about 270 MB.)
We did a toast using sparkling apple cider, and then we got to eat. Buffet-style, with choices of pork, chicken, and tortellini (we'd chosen the entrees ourselves - he picked the pork, I picked the tortellini, my parents picked the chicken). The tortellini was really good. Once we got done with our own food, we wandered the room being social for a while.
Oh, right, people kept banging on their glasses to make us kiss, which was kind of annoying. It was always the same table starting it, too. At one point Aaron's mom turned to us and said "What's wrong with those people?", and in a room that small there was no discreet way to communicate that what is wrong with them is that they are my father's cousins. ^_^;
We cut the cake a little later on. It was a really pretty cake - two square layers, turned 45 degrees from each other and separated by clear pillars, with real candles on the corners and no flowers ANYWHERE. The topper was a double-heart photo frame we'd picked out and put our pictures in. It did not occur to us till some days later that we should have tried cutting it at a corner instead of the middle of an edge, but eventually we got it over with. We were forced three or four times to feed cake to each other so the pictures would turn out right - no, seriously - and then we finally got to sit down and eat cake with everyone else. It was French vanilla and really tasty.
I should note that at this point it was only about 6:30 and every major part of the festivities was over with (since we weren't doing any dancing, bouquet-tossing, etc.). We talked with people some more and ate sherbet, and people talked among themselves for really quite a long time. Finally some people began leaving, and that opened the floodgates.
First, Jeff drove Aaron and I back to my parents' house. On the way, we opened the gifts that had been left for us at the wedding - a bunch of cards and one large package. The package was a toaster oven, which we have already used to very good effect. The cards were more or less what one normally gets from a card, but one in particular drove me to say - sitting there in my pretty wedding dress with my hair done up pretty and me looking all girly - drove me to say "Please pardon my French, but HOLY SHIT."
Meanwhile, Lauren had gone on home and Beth had driven Andy to her house. At my parents' house, I used the bathroom and we sat around watching the baseball game with Jeff, and then with Mom and Dad and my brother Gary when they arrived.
After about the third inning, we took Aaron's truck over to Beth's house, and Jeff came behind us to pick up Andy. Here, I changed back into normal clothes, finally, and grabbed my duffel bag and other luggage for the road trip ahead. Here also, before I changed, I bent down to talk to Beth's little dog as she scurried worriedly through the house. She ran full speed away from me and my dress, and Andy said "Don't worry, Sassy, the giant marshmallow won't hurt you."
From here, we took Aaron's truck to Jeff's house, with Jeff and Andy going ahead (so Andy could spend the night at Jeff's). Now was Aaron's turn to change into normal clothes and get his luggage. From THERE we were off to Dearborn, where Beth and Jeff had gotten us a night's stay in one of the historical homes at the Dearborn Inn as a wedding present. The historical homes in question are replicas of famous Americans' homes - Patrick Henry and Walt Whitman are two that I can remember. Another - the one we stayed in - was the Edgar Allen Poe House (chosen not out of morbidity or any particular love for Poe, but because it's the only one of the five colonial homes that isn't shared with other guests). There is a wooden raven over one of the doors. It is awesome.
On our way from the parking lot to the house, however - well before we got to the wooden raven - we saw that we were parked only three cars down from another vehicle with a Rose-Hulman license plate. It was very strange.
Also, there were many prints/paintings in the house, and three of them - including the only one in the upstairs bedroom - involved cows. Much gleeful mooing ensued, with the bonus phrase "Quoth the Holstein, Nevermoo!"
Around 11, there was a knock at the door - room service bringing us a bottle of white wine and a plate of chocolate-covered strawberries. We put the wine in the fridge, but ate the yummy strawberries because they were yummy (and I do not even usually like strawberries).
(Three weeks later, that bottle of wine is sitting in a shelf in the door of our fridge, still unopened.)
Friday, June 29
We left the Poe House around 11 a.m., remembering to take the wine with us. From there, to my parents', where we left the wine in their fridge and began retrieving stuff at the house we needed to take up to northern Michigan. (I forgot a number of things, though - my jacket among them.) We also loaded a TON of my boxes and belongings into my truck (which Andy drove back to Greenwood later that day, yay Andy!).
Before we left for Detroit, the mail arrived, containing one more card, from another of my sets of aunts and uncles. THEN we headed into Detroit - first to a sucky parking garage, then the county clerk's office to get the marriage licenses certified, then the People Mover, then up to Comerica Park, where we bought tickets for the July 4 baseball game. Obstructed view - oh noes?
Then back to the People Mover and to the truck, and at 2:30 we hopped back on I-75 for a long, long time, 'cause I-75 takes you all the way up to where we went - Wolverine, Michigan. Stopped for gas on the way, but didn't encounter any really terrible traffic until just before Frankenmuth, where we had planned to pull off for dinner anyway. We stopped at a little place right off the freeway called The Exit Restaurant, and then we cut up through Frankenmuth to skip the construction on 75. At this point I began driving, and continued so for about two hours. Much later, we stopped to get drinks, and Aaron drove the last hour or so, finally arriving at the cabins at 9:03.
Mind you, Mapquest claimed that it takes 4 hours to get from my parents' front door to the front door of the cabins in Wolverine. I would suggest looking at the time we left DETROIT - 2:30 - and the time we arrived at the cabin - 9:03 - and even when you account for the time taken to get gasoline, snacks, and dinner, that is still an estimate that, for that leg of the trip, was woefully unlikely.
Anyway, 9:03. The receipt said the office closed at 9 on Fridays, so we supposed they might still be in. But alas, the sign on the door had the new hours - open only until 8:30, but to call a number if you were there outside of normal hours. We plugged in my cell phone to an outdoor outlet - terrible reception, by the way - and called, and they told us that cabin 1 was unlocked with the keys inside and we could just go in. Okay.
Got in the cabin and unplugged something from an outlet so my cell phone could be plugged into it, and with the terrible terrible reception I attempted calling my family to let them know we arrived. Eventually the message got through and people figured out we were there and not dead.
After this, we unloaded the truck and explored the cabin. "Explored." What you see is everything you get. A huge main area with two double beds, a TV, dresser, table, and fridge/microwave/coffeemaker/toaster setup in the corner; a tiny kitchen area with a small stove, a small counter, the only sink in the cabin, and lots of dishes and pots and pans and utensils; and a bathroom just big enough for a toilet and shower, some towels, and a few bugs. Mind you, you have to walk THROUGH the "kitchen" to get to the bathroom.
Finally we sat down and watched some baseball, during which we vaguely decided that Saturday would be the day we went up over to Petoskey.
Saturday, June 30
After heating up some soup for lunch because we are lazy, we checked our directions to Petoskey and headed out. We were aided by the two phone books in our phoneless cabin. We had not yet gone grocery shopping, and on our way out of "town" we saw the Downtown Market in Wolverine. However, Wolverine being a town of 338 people, and with me knowing of another market that we would be passing that was sure to have more variety and better choices, we passed it up.
In Petoskey - about a half-hour drive - we found a parking meter and began walking our way through town. First we stopped in a big kitchen shop and bought nothing; then we went in a neat two-story bookstore and bought nothing.
At this point we were pretty near the harbor, so we quit shopping for a while and walked down there because we'd read that there was a lighthouse viewable from the harbor, and he wanted to take some pictures of it for his mother. We didn't find it, but we did end up walking a ways down the road, and we sat and watched the lake for a while.
Note: "We sat and watched the lake for a while"; this is exactly what we'd done six months prior when we got engaged (six months to the day, mind you, December 30 and June 30) - just a different lake, and different weather. What I would like to especially note about this is that it was Aaron who first made note of this fact, and he is male. I am female and had totally not noticed this confluence of dates in the slightest.
After this, we made the trek back into the shopping district. We stopped in a specialty food store - and didn't buy anything. Then we went to the #1 reason to visit Petoskey - American Spoon. I had seen some "creamed raw honey" in their catalog and thought it sounded interesting, but Aaron had been kinda "eh" about it. So, in the middle of the store, there is this table where you can sample a great many of their products, and the creamed honey was among them.
I took one bite and decided I did not care whether the boy was "eh" about it or not, we were totally buying a jar.
As I was thinking this, I turned around and the boy was staring at me and saying "We are totally getting some of this."
He liked it very much. <3
We also picked up a package of dried cherries for ourselves and some random items for the boy's family members.
Now we went back to the truck and left Petoskey, using a partially gravel road to save mileage and backtracking, and wound up in Indian River. I showed him the cabins my family has stayed in before up there, and pointed out Big Bear Adventures (home of the putt-putt golf course), a restaurant I felt was worth going to at some point, and the grocery store.
Before we did any of that, though, we had to go to Drost's Chocolate's and buy some fudge - and buy fudge we did! We bought half-pound slices of chocolate-cherry and chocolate-peanut-butter. Over the course of the next several days we would manage to eat this entire pound of fudge just by having small bits of it after dinner every night. But it is tasty fudge.
From there, we went back to the putt-putt golf course, where I totally got owned by the boy, despite my having played the course before.
At this point we could now do our grocery shopping at Ken's Market, since we needed some refrigerated and frozen stuff and had no more stops to make. So we did that, and the market's parking lot was packed. From there, back to the cabin, where we unpacked groceries...
Oh right, remember I unplugged "something" so I could plug in the cell phone on Friday night? Turns out that "something" was the mini-fridge, and we didn't find this out until we were putting groceries in it on Saturday night. Didn't really matter, as all that was in there in the meantime was some pop, but still. ^_^;
Anyway, unpacked the groceries, made chili mac for dinner, and watched some baseball. I spontaneously took a nap, after which there was fudge to be eaten.
We decided we'd use Sunday to go up to Mackinac.
Sunday, July 1
Up bright and "early" at 9 a.m. so we'd have plenty of time for Mackinac. We had taco wraps as an early lunch and left the cabin just before 11 and hopped on I-75 North.
We arrived in Mackinac City, found a place to park, and walked about three blocks from there to the docks for Arnold's Ferry Line to Mackinac Island.
Hm. I should stop here for a moment; I'm a Michigan native and I forget that not everyone's familiar with this, so: for those unfamiliar with the concept of Mackinac Island, please take a moment to read the Wikipedia entry on the subject.
The ferry ride to the island took about twenty minutes, and we took some pictures of the Mackinac Bridge on the way. Once we got to the island, we bought tickets for the carriage tour and admission to the butterfly conservatory. We started on a two-horse carriage with about twenty other people. About halfway through this first leg of the trip, the carriage pulled off at the barns and swapped to a different, less tired team of horses. After the switch, the ride did go a little faster, but, uh, one of the horses on the second suffered - or rather, caused US to suffer from - noisy flatulence.
As Aaron put it a few minutes later, "Your carriage ride will be ruined once again by your explosive flatulence."
The two-horse carriage took us to Surrey Hill and let everyone off there. At Surrey Hill, there are a few souvenir shops, and down a short hill is a small goat corral and the butterfly conservatory.
I had brought a bunch of film with me up north, not planning to use more than one or two rolls, but I used up a full roll and a half just in he butterfly conservatory (and a total of six over the course of the entire trip up north). The butterfly conservatory was just THAT AWESOME.
Butterfly pictures (click for full-size):
Went back up to Surrey Hill, where we caught a three-horse carriage (with about thirty other people) to take us through the state park. The first stop was Arch Rock, which is really cool, and which will be mentioned again later in the writeup.
Arch Rock pictures (click for full-size):
Rode past the island cemeteries, Skull Cave (pictured here), and Fort Mackinac, which we chose not to visit. Then we passed the governor's mansion (a state-owned summer home that the state is basically not allowed to sell, where the governors stay a handful of weeks a year). Our carriage driver mocked the governor briefly, and then he gave us a choice. From that point, we could either stay on the carriage for thirty more minutes until it returned to the town center, or we could disembark right now, walk three-and-a-half minutes down a narrow hill path, and wind up about half a mile from the center of town. Most of the carriage made the same choice we made - walking downhill.
From there, we walked along State Highway 185 for about a mile and a half, to where we could see the underside of Arch Rock. This was very awesome. Got some pictures, but they're only on my camera, still undeveloped. Then we turned around to head back into town, and we were helpful to other tourists on three separate occasions within the first half mile of the return trip.
Back in town, we stopped in a couple shops but didn't buy anything, and then we caught the next ferry back to the mainland. Once again, a very nice ride. Windy but nice. Killed time on the ride back by taking pictures of the boat's wake and of the bridge.
Although we'd walked from the parking lot to the docks in the morning when we arrived in Mackinac City, we were not walking any further than we had to now that we'd been on the island. We caught a shuttle back to the parking lot, then visited the Old Mackinac Point Lighthouse. We chose not to go inside, but we did take some pictures and stop in their shop (and buy nothing). Took a few more pictures of the bridge while we were in the area, for good measure (that wound up being my favorite shot of it). We chose to pass up Colonial Michilimackinac entirely, and headed back down I-75 to our happy familiar non-walky safe haven.
On the way back we stopped in Indian River to eat dinner at Vivio's, where we had some good pizza. Then, finally, a return to the cabin, where I discovered that I'd gotten a sunburn on the island. Sadface! Then we ate fudge, watched baseball, made some biscuits for Monday's lunch (setting off the smoke alarm in the process), and taking some time to start reading A Prayer For Owen Meany.
Monday, July 2
This is the day of totally unproductive and doing nothing of significance.
Slept till noonish, then used Sunday night's biscuits and made milk-sausage gravy to go with them. This was an eminently acceptable lunch. Then, at the male's suggestion - the MALE'S suggestion - we drove up into Indian River to buy another pound of chocolate-cherry fudge. Again, this was the idea of the MALE of the species. <3
In our defense, it's almost two weeks later and only just last night did we even start in on that fudge.
Also at the chocolate shop, there was an enormous peanut-butter cup the size of my fist. ^_^;
Before we went back to the cabin, we remembered we wanted to stop by a small branch of river we'd seen a few days earlier when we turned the wrong way when leaving the cabins. So off we went to a minor scenic pulloff and took pictures of the West Sturgeon River. It was very clean and clear and awesome, and we have many nice pictures (and a couple pretty dragonly pictures too).
West Sturgeon River pictures (click for full-size):
Upon returning to the cabins, we wanted to check with the main office about checkout procedures, since we planned to leave on Wednesday and they have no Wednesday office hours. This should have taken about two minutes, but instead we got detained listening to talking to the chatty proprietor while her husband chewed on a stick.
When we got free of that, we checked out the communal laundry room and decided against it. ^_^;
The one good thing that came from that encounter, however, was that we mentioned our side trip to the West Sturgeon River and she mentioned a better scenic outlook we should try, and we decided that yes, we should.
Later on, I made some biscuits and an awesome pasta sauce to put over mostaccioli for dinner. Using a base of plain tomato sauce, I dumped in various foodstuffs we had laying around - some sausage, some green papper, some shredded cheese, some spices - and it was fantastic. I am totally proud of this, and aside from the visit to the river this was probably the highlight of the day.
Yes, I realize that sounds really boring, but it was awesome, okay.
Spent the evening reading some more of Owen Meany, with a break to eat more fudge. We also watched another baseball game (not sure what, as the Tigers had the day off), and I took another impromptu nap.
This day, we did not set off the smoke alarm!
Tuesday, July 3
Slept late again, then ate random stuff for lunch (a can of soup for him, leftover pasta for me).
Then I fell asleep again. ^_^;
However, around 3, we got around to doing what we had tentatively planned for this day - swimming! Our plan was to drive up to Indian River and use either the public beach or the state park to swim in Burt Lake, but it seemed wiser to do all our other trips for the day first, before being drenched in lake water. So we first drove south about two miles to the scenic outlook our landlady had mentioned.
We wandered around taking pictures for a while again - so pretty! so shallow! so clear! - and then reached a conclusion together.
1) The area's grass was mowed, and there was a picnic pavilion, indicating the expectation of real tourist-like humans visiting.
2) The area had a small crappy playground (swingset and merry-go-round), indicating the expectation of small, somewhat uncontrollable humans.
3) The area had a concrete slab sticking out into the water at one place, seemingly for the express purpose of getting in.
4) The area had a distinct LACK of "no swimming" signs.
If you're gonna indicate an expectation of people visiting, and you DON'T want them swimming in your water, you'd put up a sign about it, right? Right.
We were both wearing swimsuits under our clothes, in expectation of the lake, but it was pretty shallow-looking, so I just left my shorts on a bench with our towels and we went wading.
It was FREEZING. I think the intent of entry is more for fly-fishing than for swimming. But we waded for about ten minutes. The water was very clear, the bottom all rounded rocks (which still hurt on bare feet, mind you), and at its deepest the water came maybe halfway up my thighs. (For reference, I am 5'2".) We crossed to the other side, where the water was shallower and the bottom sandier, and moved about twenty feet upstream in this shallow part. This was a good thing, because when we tried to cross the river again to get back to the concrete slab, the current kept catching our feet and kind of forcing us back downstream anyway. There was a little log right below the concrete slab that made a nice step back up onto the shore.
I realize this sounds really boring but it was actually pretty cool and I'm so glad we did it. It was so very very awesome.
From there, we drove up into Indian River. On the way we passed a sign for a beef jerky store. We decided not to stop there right then, and put it on our list of things to do on our way out of town Wednesday. We got into town, and we hadn't intended to make a whole lot of stops, but right next to Big Bear Adventures (the putt-putt place) is Tiki's Meat Market, home of pork rinds, smoked fish, meat jerkies (beef, venison, turkey, buffalo, and elk), some unique varieties of fudge, and other northwoods-type products. We ended up buying half a pound of jerky (mostly regular beef, with a little bit of barbeque beef), and a jar of green pepper spread, which... sounded really good in theory! (We tried it a few nights ago here at the house, and it was so overly sweet for the context of quesadillas as to be basically horrifying.)
An unintended stop, but very fun. It smelled GREAT inside. I realize we skipped the first one and went in the second one, but we knew we wouldn't be as far north as Indian River again during the trip, so it was prudent to go to that one then, and the other later.
From there we headed a little further north into town, and took a road behind the library to get to the public beach at Burt Lake. (We could also have gone to the state park to do so, but that would have cost $8, and the beach was free.) On arriving, we were confronted with a sign warning us that there were zebra mussels in the water and that, therefore, footwear was required.
So, after a brief walk up and down the sidewalk, and determining that everyone else did in fact have water-appropriate footwear, we drove back into town, to a store so unremarkable when we visited it on Saturday that it was simply not worth mentioning in the writeup. However, now the "Summer Store" was just what we needed. We dropped in, bought two pairs of water shoes, AWWWWWed over a small tan puppy that was mauling what resembled Chiyo-dad, then headed back to the beach.
And in we went! The water felt really cold at first, but that was just the moving water near the shore. The further out we got, the warmer it was. It stayed knee-high on me for quite some distance, and at the deepest point we went to it came to my shoulders. I can't swim, so this was fine. There was much with the wading and crawling/kneeling in the water. We stayed there for a full hour and a half. So fun.
Then we went back to the cabin, where I made tasty pasta for dinner again.
I have no notes to this effect, but I can assume that we once again ate fudge, watched baseball, and read Owen Meany.
Wednesday, July 4
Up at 8 a.m. and packing frantically, since checkout was at 10. Down the road, some people were moving into the lodge that was part of the cabin complex. We fixed some taco wraps for a very early lunch, and we were out of the cabin and on the road by 9:30 a.m.
We went south a little bit to the other beef jerky place, which turned out to be way back from the road. We got a batch of jalapeno beef jerky and a package for sausage gravy mix. The jalapeno beef jerky had a label on it saying to keep it refrigerated, which confused us - isn't the whole point of jerky that you DON'T have to keep it in any special conditions to keep it from going bad? Whatever.
The drive was incredibly uneventful, though we switched drivers a couple times. We got to my parents' house around 2:15 - greeted by a sign on their front door - and proceeded to kill some time talking, discussing the trip, and checking the directions to the baseball game.
Around 5:10, we left the house to get to the ball game (scheduled to start at 7:05). It was quite trafficky, but we found decent parking, a straight shot down Columbia from the entrance to Comerica Park. So, yay.
The outside of the park has some pretty neat stuff: a large concrete tiger mauls fans, and the exterior walls are periodically interspersed with... Tigergoyles? I don't know. When we went in the park, they checked my purse for... I don't know, weapons or video cameras or something? They did a pretty crappy job, too; you'd think my DS case would've aroused some suspicion. Then they scanned our tickets, and the scanners made a beepy noise just like when Snake is bleeding in Metal Gear Solid. Use a ration!
We walked the inside perimeter of the stadium, and it was very hot in my long-sleeved Tigers shirt I wore for the occasion (one of the shirts he got me for Christmas). We looked at food but didn't get anything; we visited the official shop but didn't yet get anything, deciding instead to come back after the game was over, when we supposed it would be much less crowded.
We did buy two things before going to our seats, though - a program and a scorecard. Doing the scoring ended up actually being pretty fun.
We found our seats in the mezzanine, then went to get food - a pretzel and frozen lemonade for him; a hot dog and a Diet Pepsi for me. Our supposedly obstructed view wasn't really that obstructed - it was a little hard to see the furthest corner of right field because we were right on top of it, and the foul pole occasionally blocked my view of Maggs and Curtis, but the actual obstruction was the railing just in front of our seats, and that wasn't so bad.
Some children in nearby seats were bickering and whining during the national anthem, and I leaned over and yelled at them to show some respect. They shut up, and as the game started I guess they figured out they were in entirely the wrong seats anyway, because they disappeared and some older, more reasonable humans wound up in those seats for the duration of the game.
Late in the game I also yelled at some teenage boys for blocking our view by standing right in front of our rail. They teased me and tried to screw around. I should have indicated somehow that the big guy sitting next to me was with me, maybe that would've shut 'em up quicker.
There were also some really dumb girls right behind us, with unique remarks like "Kenny is almost fifty", a confusion of Marcus Thames and Craig Monroe (which some other guy called the girls out on their mistake), and some heckling of Gary Sheffield on his third at-bat, to wit: "You're due for a hit, Sheff." I consulted the scorecard Aaron and I were keeping. "Um, but he got a hit in the first inning," I volunteered. General idiocy like that. I kept digging my nails into Aaron out of annoyance. ^_^;
GET OFF MY DAMN LAWN
Anyway, so yeah, there was a game, and the Tigers won 6-4, yay. Not much to say on that? I got more food partway through, a pretzel of my own. After the game, they set off a large, noisy, smoky fireworks display, but it was very pretty.
Fireworks pictures (click for full-size):
Now that the game was over, we stopped by the gift shop again, where the boy got a t-shirt for himself and a stuffed tiger for me - I wanted a jersey-style t-shirt, but the closest they had to my size was men's large, which was not going to work, so.
We walked back to the truck, and he refused to get on I-75 back to my parents' house because every car in the city was now on I-75, so I found us a different way back by making use of my leet skills. Sleep was pretty much immediate once we got back.
Thursday, July 5
Got up around 8, burned a CD for the upcoming road trip, and ate lunch with my parents. Then came the packing of doom, in which we crammed many many of my belongings into his truck. A few boxes wound up staying behind and will be retrieved at our earliest convenience. We finally pulled out of the driveway around 1:30, swung by the post office so I could file for mail forwarding, and got on the freeway and out of town around 2.
Fairly uneventful. He drove the whole way because everything was crammed so tightly into the back of the cab, and adjusting the seats would have screwed that up hardcore. It rained twice on our way, which was okay because I always basically assume that it will rain and protect the stuff in the bed of a truck accordingly.
We got pretty woefully misplaced on our way to his grandmother's house in Claypool, but finally arrived around 6:30, and I got to meet his grandma and his Uncle Matt. The four of us went to have dinner at The Giant Chicken Mann's Country Kitchen, where we had really good fish. (Where "we" is defined as "everyone who is not Aaron, who had tenderloin.")
Over dinner at The Giant Chicken, it became apparent that these particular humans do not hate me, and there were reports of his grandma having laid the smackdown in our defense, which was pleasant. After dinner, we went back to her house, where we got a gift of a set of chili pepper dishes. Not that we do not have many dishes of various sorts, but hey.
We drove through Marion on our way back to the freeway, and stopped to walk the IWU campus (I had wanted to drop in on the student center), but most of the buildings were locked. I ended up just being stunned and appalled at all the changes to campus since I graduated, and I continued being stunned even after we left campus, right up until we stopped for gas and snacks before getting back on the freeway.
Uneventful from this point forward. We got home around 11:40, unloaded his truck, and pretty much immediately fell asleep.
Friday, July 6
This day, we unboxed wedding gifts, unpacked some boxes, assembled the rack for our new tray tables, unloaded my truck, unpacked more boxes... we went out only long enough to get lunch, cash his paycheck, drop by the post office, and get a quick batch of groceries from Aldi. I got some shoes and dresses in the closet, and that's about it as far as productivity goes. I made pasta again for dinner, and broke a piece of old Corelle. We saw the first batch of wedding pictures from his mother, and we ate some M&Ms (the wedding gift to us from my sister's dog).
Saturday, July 7
This day, we organized the pantry, put some clothes in the closet, unpacked Even More Boxes, and made a Wal-Mart run, in which we bought many groceries and made me a copy of the house key. We had wraps for lunch and some sort of pasta for dinner (I like pasta, okay). In our downtime, we took a forty-five minute phone call from my brother, played Karaoke Revolution unto excess, and went to Blockbuster, where we rented WarioWare: Smooth Moves for Wii.
Sunday, July 8
This day, we unboxed things! Are you shocked? We ran many dishwasher loads to accomodate the cookware I'd brought along, and our new dishes and new flatware. We got a couple cupboards reorganized, and... that was about it. Made quesadillas for lunch and our usual Sunday night pizza for dinner, and around 8 p.m. we made a quick shopping run - drop some mail, drop off some recycling, hit up Wal-Mart and began spending wedding gift money - on a stepstool and a plastic pitcher. Go us! Throughout the day and evening there was much to be had with the WarioWare, the Karaoke Revolution, the Wii Sports. Yay!
And... that's pretty much that. Aaron went back to work last Monday, and I've been getting the house together, largely as described here. Evenings have been tasty food, random chores, and various video games (making great use of the Wii and the karaoke games). We've finished writing our thank-you notes; we've got the kitchen completely reorganized; we've got the library almost cleared out; we've got a solid plan for the craft room. There is still much to be done, but largely those are group projects for evenings and weekends.
Phew. Yay.
All currently available pictures can be viewed here.
Once posted, there will be a link to Aaron's writeup here.
Wednesday, June 27
After I spent much of Wednesday dawdling and failing to pack things, the phone rang around 3:30. I wasn't really expecting it to be Aaron and Andy already, but indeed it was.
Aaron: "Yeah, I know it's kind of early..."
Me: "Mm, you guys got delayed by the rain and you'll be a little late? Okay."
Aaron: "...rain? What is rain?"
Me: "Rain is storming and hailing all day here and postponing baseball game."
Aaron: "We have no such rain. I was calling to say we're an hour away already."
Me: "!"
So they arrived at my parents' house around 4:30. We killed time with Wii Sports for a while as we waited for the rest of the group (Beth, Jeff, and Lauren) to show up.
A quick break because I know most of you aren't familiar with everybody:
Dramatis Personae
- My parents
- Me and Aaron
- Beth Meyers (my sister, 43, and the maid of honor)
- Andy Strack (Aaron's friend, 26, and the best man)
- Jeff Meyers (my brother, 42, and the groomsman)
- Lauren Robinson (my cousin, 22, and the bridesmaid)
- Sassy Wilson-Meyers (my sister's 6-pound Shih Tzu, age 14, and the dog of honor)
Then the eight of us headed over to Olive Garden for dinner. But oops! Both Aaron and I forgot the gifts and cards we'd prepared for the wedding party (and the one I'd prepared for my parents). More on that later.
After dinner, the eight of us went up the street to Thunderbowl Lanes, where everyone but my dad played a game of real bowling. Aaron won handily (with like 117). Lauren had been very reluctant to play, but in a crowd where the HIGH score is 117, it is pretty hard to be the suckiest, so she felt better.
Also from the the bowling trip: I have always been concerned that I am being highly inappropriate and buying into stereotypes when I purchase Lauren gifts that are glittery and pink, but when we were bowling I saw her purposely select a pearlized hot pink bowling ball off the rack, and I do not feel bad about this at all anymore.
After Thunderbowl, my parents went home and the rest of us went to my sister's house for the rest of the night. There was much with the good snacking foods, and also four consoles, two TVs, eight or nine different games, and my sister's very small dog Sassy. Before that, though, Aaron and I gave over our gifts and cards to the wedding party (I'd left my card for my parents on a table in their house before we'd left). Then we hooked up the PS2 so my brother could progress a little in Metal Gear Solid 3 - a week prior, during my usual Thursday-night visit to Beth's, Jeff had beaten The Fear and struggled with The End a little bit. I had suggested that he save and let Aaron help him out with it the next week - something about "Aaron knows an easy way through this fight." What I meant, of course, was the whole thing where The End dies of old age is you save and leave the game alone, but Jeff didn't know that and it was a really easy cover story.
So we loaded that up and Jeff "beat" The End, and then spent some time climbing The Ladder. Then we moved on to Karaoke Revolution, which was not really such a smashing success, and then we showed Jeff Katamari Damacy, which went awesomely, and we played through five or six levels of that.
Around midnight, Lauren went home; around 12:30 Andy fell asleep and went to bed in the spare room; and by 1:30 Jeff had gone home, Aaron had gone to bed in the spare room, and Beth and I had gone to bed with Sassy in the den.
Thursday, June 28
Beth had spent the night on the floor with her little dog tucked beside her, and when I got up out of the recliner I'd slept in at 7:30, I assumed the dog was still with Beth. Not so much! Down went the footrest, and my foot made light contact with the dog's head. Oops.
The boys continued to sleep for a while; I played with the dog and got dressed (in the same clothes I'd worn Wednesday) while Beth started making milk-sausage gravy for later in the morning and gave me the wedding gift from Sassy. Andy woke up around 8 or so, and Aaron a little later.
Around 9, Beth and I left to meet my parents at the restaurant to get some stuff set up for the reception. The boys stayed behind, and when Beth and I returned around 10:40 (having accomplished almost nothing at the restaurant, as the ables weren't even set up yet), the guys were fully engaged in playing Tetris Attack. We switched over to Yoshi's Cookie, at which I proceeded to dominate, then Jeff and Lauren each showed up. Then, breakfast! Biscuits and gravy, and fruit salad, all around.
The boys departed from Beth's house around noon. Aaron can be depended upon to fill you guys in on what they did. In the meantime, Beth and I took showers, and the photographer arrived at Beth's around 12:30 to take pictures of us getting ready. Lauren did Beth's hair first (her own hair had been done for her earlier in the morning by another hairdresser-friend), then started on my hair around 1:15. A mad dash to the finish!
Just after 2, we left Beth's. To the bat-chapel! (The wedding was at a small chapel on the grounds of a city park with a pond, gazebo, covered bridge, etc. - good stuff for the pictures later on.) The guys actually got there around 2; we girls didn't arrive until about 2:25. Lauren did my makeup and we changed into our dresses...
Ah, our dresses, which I have not mentioned yet. As shown here, they had three panels in the front; on their blue dresses, the center panel had embroidery and beads; on my white dress, the side panels were the ones with embroidery and beads. And we had sleeves! You have no idea how hard it is to find bridal gowns with sleeves. Here is a picture of the dress from the company's website, and here is a picture of the bridesmaid dresses. The latter picture is the only picture that was available to me when I chose my dress - I had no knowledge of what the back of it would look like until the dress actually arrived in mid-May.
Then Aaron's mom came in to take pictures of us getting ready. Then the minister showed up to get the marriage licenses signed. And the flowers showed up; there were supposed to be white lilacs but only lavender ones were available. The chance in the color balance actually worked really well.
...this is really boring in the retelling, but it was a lot more interesting at the time.
Anyway, so, at 3 p.m. we had a wedding. Including the wedding party, there were about thirty people in attendance - I had two attendants, and so did he. My cousin Vaughn screwed up and used the wrong CD for the processional, but it wasn't really a big deal (it was supposed to be a handbell version of Bach's "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" but wound up being "Leen's Love Theme" from Grandia 1). The minister did not totally suck. He did read from 1 Corinthians 13, which was something I have seen at WAY too many weddings and wanted to avoid, and I did in fact quietly protest it by digging a fingernail into Aaron's hand, but it wasn't really so bad either.
My brother Jeff did a reading from Ruth and cried a little; however, "indothalescent." (I do not need to explain this; I need only to include it for my own reference.)
The recessional was - as we have planned for some time, as Todd and Mecha heard him teasingly suggest to me last April and Jay and Andra's wedding - the wedding theme from Lufia 2. We were supposed to dismiss people individually from their pews afterward, but my mom got her signals crossed and headed out immediately afterward, and everyone else followed her lead.
But it went well.
Put another way: "Reader, I married him."
Then we played with our photographer Jen a while. My bouquet was getting very heavy by this time, and began to attract bees. (I like my women like I like my coffee - covered in bees!) Aaron's mom and my mom's friend Myrna (who made the wedding cake) were also running around taking pictures during this time; his mom in particular got distracted by a little family of ducks that was wandering the park. (We do not kick the duck!) But she also took pictures of us; here we are on the porch of the chapel, and here we are by the little pond.
We left the park around 4:15 or so. Jeff was transporting us in his PT Cruiser, and he had made up a really awesome sign for the back (with Cubs and Tigers logos, cheese and chili peppers, and an FFT logo). For the occasion of chauffering us, he had gone to a costume shop and bought an actual chauffer's hat and white gloves. :D
About halfway to the restaurant, we realized that the car in front of us was Aaron's parents. Ha. For further comedy, both they and Jeff just missed the turn into the restaurant's parking lot, which apparently was all well and good because during part of the loop-around to get back, a house they saw provided them with the final piece of the puzzle of the outside color scheme of their new house? Okay.
We got to the restaurant around 4:45. This was very happy because dinner was planned for 5 and we very strongly intended to not make people have to wait forever while we had pictures taken. My mom had made a very attractive photoboard and a Powerpoint slideshow using pictures of us, and we looked at that a little bit. (Warning: The Powerpoint presentation is about 270 MB.)
We did a toast using sparkling apple cider, and then we got to eat. Buffet-style, with choices of pork, chicken, and tortellini (we'd chosen the entrees ourselves - he picked the pork, I picked the tortellini, my parents picked the chicken). The tortellini was really good. Once we got done with our own food, we wandered the room being social for a while.
Oh, right, people kept banging on their glasses to make us kiss, which was kind of annoying. It was always the same table starting it, too. At one point Aaron's mom turned to us and said "What's wrong with those people?", and in a room that small there was no discreet way to communicate that what is wrong with them is that they are my father's cousins. ^_^;
We cut the cake a little later on. It was a really pretty cake - two square layers, turned 45 degrees from each other and separated by clear pillars, with real candles on the corners and no flowers ANYWHERE. The topper was a double-heart photo frame we'd picked out and put our pictures in. It did not occur to us till some days later that we should have tried cutting it at a corner instead of the middle of an edge, but eventually we got it over with. We were forced three or four times to feed cake to each other so the pictures would turn out right - no, seriously - and then we finally got to sit down and eat cake with everyone else. It was French vanilla and really tasty.
I should note that at this point it was only about 6:30 and every major part of the festivities was over with (since we weren't doing any dancing, bouquet-tossing, etc.). We talked with people some more and ate sherbet, and people talked among themselves for really quite a long time. Finally some people began leaving, and that opened the floodgates.
First, Jeff drove Aaron and I back to my parents' house. On the way, we opened the gifts that had been left for us at the wedding - a bunch of cards and one large package. The package was a toaster oven, which we have already used to very good effect. The cards were more or less what one normally gets from a card, but one in particular drove me to say - sitting there in my pretty wedding dress with my hair done up pretty and me looking all girly - drove me to say "Please pardon my French, but HOLY SHIT."
Meanwhile, Lauren had gone on home and Beth had driven Andy to her house. At my parents' house, I used the bathroom and we sat around watching the baseball game with Jeff, and then with Mom and Dad and my brother Gary when they arrived.
After about the third inning, we took Aaron's truck over to Beth's house, and Jeff came behind us to pick up Andy. Here, I changed back into normal clothes, finally, and grabbed my duffel bag and other luggage for the road trip ahead. Here also, before I changed, I bent down to talk to Beth's little dog as she scurried worriedly through the house. She ran full speed away from me and my dress, and Andy said "Don't worry, Sassy, the giant marshmallow won't hurt you."
From here, we took Aaron's truck to Jeff's house, with Jeff and Andy going ahead (so Andy could spend the night at Jeff's). Now was Aaron's turn to change into normal clothes and get his luggage. From THERE we were off to Dearborn, where Beth and Jeff had gotten us a night's stay in one of the historical homes at the Dearborn Inn as a wedding present. The historical homes in question are replicas of famous Americans' homes - Patrick Henry and Walt Whitman are two that I can remember. Another - the one we stayed in - was the Edgar Allen Poe House (chosen not out of morbidity or any particular love for Poe, but because it's the only one of the five colonial homes that isn't shared with other guests). There is a wooden raven over one of the doors. It is awesome.
On our way from the parking lot to the house, however - well before we got to the wooden raven - we saw that we were parked only three cars down from another vehicle with a Rose-Hulman license plate. It was very strange.
Also, there were many prints/paintings in the house, and three of them - including the only one in the upstairs bedroom - involved cows. Much gleeful mooing ensued, with the bonus phrase "Quoth the Holstein, Nevermoo!"
Around 11, there was a knock at the door - room service bringing us a bottle of white wine and a plate of chocolate-covered strawberries. We put the wine in the fridge, but ate the yummy strawberries because they were yummy (and I do not even usually like strawberries).
(Three weeks later, that bottle of wine is sitting in a shelf in the door of our fridge, still unopened.)
Friday, June 29
We left the Poe House around 11 a.m., remembering to take the wine with us. From there, to my parents', where we left the wine in their fridge and began retrieving stuff at the house we needed to take up to northern Michigan. (I forgot a number of things, though - my jacket among them.) We also loaded a TON of my boxes and belongings into my truck (which Andy drove back to Greenwood later that day, yay Andy!).
Before we left for Detroit, the mail arrived, containing one more card, from another of my sets of aunts and uncles. THEN we headed into Detroit - first to a sucky parking garage, then the county clerk's office to get the marriage licenses certified, then the People Mover, then up to Comerica Park, where we bought tickets for the July 4 baseball game. Obstructed view - oh noes?
Then back to the People Mover and to the truck, and at 2:30 we hopped back on I-75 for a long, long time, 'cause I-75 takes you all the way up to where we went - Wolverine, Michigan. Stopped for gas on the way, but didn't encounter any really terrible traffic until just before Frankenmuth, where we had planned to pull off for dinner anyway. We stopped at a little place right off the freeway called The Exit Restaurant, and then we cut up through Frankenmuth to skip the construction on 75. At this point I began driving, and continued so for about two hours. Much later, we stopped to get drinks, and Aaron drove the last hour or so, finally arriving at the cabins at 9:03.
Mind you, Mapquest claimed that it takes 4 hours to get from my parents' front door to the front door of the cabins in Wolverine. I would suggest looking at the time we left DETROIT - 2:30 - and the time we arrived at the cabin - 9:03 - and even when you account for the time taken to get gasoline, snacks, and dinner, that is still an estimate that, for that leg of the trip, was woefully unlikely.
Anyway, 9:03. The receipt said the office closed at 9 on Fridays, so we supposed they might still be in. But alas, the sign on the door had the new hours - open only until 8:30, but to call a number if you were there outside of normal hours. We plugged in my cell phone to an outdoor outlet - terrible reception, by the way - and called, and they told us that cabin 1 was unlocked with the keys inside and we could just go in. Okay.
Got in the cabin and unplugged something from an outlet so my cell phone could be plugged into it, and with the terrible terrible reception I attempted calling my family to let them know we arrived. Eventually the message got through and people figured out we were there and not dead.
After this, we unloaded the truck and explored the cabin. "Explored." What you see is everything you get. A huge main area with two double beds, a TV, dresser, table, and fridge/microwave/coffeemaker/toaster setup in the corner; a tiny kitchen area with a small stove, a small counter, the only sink in the cabin, and lots of dishes and pots and pans and utensils; and a bathroom just big enough for a toilet and shower, some towels, and a few bugs. Mind you, you have to walk THROUGH the "kitchen" to get to the bathroom.
Finally we sat down and watched some baseball, during which we vaguely decided that Saturday would be the day we went up over to Petoskey.
Saturday, June 30
After heating up some soup for lunch because we are lazy, we checked our directions to Petoskey and headed out. We were aided by the two phone books in our phoneless cabin. We had not yet gone grocery shopping, and on our way out of "town" we saw the Downtown Market in Wolverine. However, Wolverine being a town of 338 people, and with me knowing of another market that we would be passing that was sure to have more variety and better choices, we passed it up.
In Petoskey - about a half-hour drive - we found a parking meter and began walking our way through town. First we stopped in a big kitchen shop and bought nothing; then we went in a neat two-story bookstore and bought nothing.
At this point we were pretty near the harbor, so we quit shopping for a while and walked down there because we'd read that there was a lighthouse viewable from the harbor, and he wanted to take some pictures of it for his mother. We didn't find it, but we did end up walking a ways down the road, and we sat and watched the lake for a while.
Note: "We sat and watched the lake for a while"; this is exactly what we'd done six months prior when we got engaged (six months to the day, mind you, December 30 and June 30) - just a different lake, and different weather. What I would like to especially note about this is that it was Aaron who first made note of this fact, and he is male. I am female and had totally not noticed this confluence of dates in the slightest.
After this, we made the trek back into the shopping district. We stopped in a specialty food store - and didn't buy anything. Then we went to the #1 reason to visit Petoskey - American Spoon. I had seen some "creamed raw honey" in their catalog and thought it sounded interesting, but Aaron had been kinda "eh" about it. So, in the middle of the store, there is this table where you can sample a great many of their products, and the creamed honey was among them.
I took one bite and decided I did not care whether the boy was "eh" about it or not, we were totally buying a jar.
As I was thinking this, I turned around and the boy was staring at me and saying "We are totally getting some of this."
He liked it very much. <3
We also picked up a package of dried cherries for ourselves and some random items for the boy's family members.
Now we went back to the truck and left Petoskey, using a partially gravel road to save mileage and backtracking, and wound up in Indian River. I showed him the cabins my family has stayed in before up there, and pointed out Big Bear Adventures (home of the putt-putt golf course), a restaurant I felt was worth going to at some point, and the grocery store.
Before we did any of that, though, we had to go to Drost's Chocolate's and buy some fudge - and buy fudge we did! We bought half-pound slices of chocolate-cherry and chocolate-peanut-butter. Over the course of the next several days we would manage to eat this entire pound of fudge just by having small bits of it after dinner every night. But it is tasty fudge.
From there, we went back to the putt-putt golf course, where I totally got owned by the boy, despite my having played the course before.
At this point we could now do our grocery shopping at Ken's Market, since we needed some refrigerated and frozen stuff and had no more stops to make. So we did that, and the market's parking lot was packed. From there, back to the cabin, where we unpacked groceries...
Oh right, remember I unplugged "something" so I could plug in the cell phone on Friday night? Turns out that "something" was the mini-fridge, and we didn't find this out until we were putting groceries in it on Saturday night. Didn't really matter, as all that was in there in the meantime was some pop, but still. ^_^;
Anyway, unpacked the groceries, made chili mac for dinner, and watched some baseball. I spontaneously took a nap, after which there was fudge to be eaten.
We decided we'd use Sunday to go up to Mackinac.
Sunday, July 1
Up bright and "early" at 9 a.m. so we'd have plenty of time for Mackinac. We had taco wraps as an early lunch and left the cabin just before 11 and hopped on I-75 North.
We arrived in Mackinac City, found a place to park, and walked about three blocks from there to the docks for Arnold's Ferry Line to Mackinac Island.
Hm. I should stop here for a moment; I'm a Michigan native and I forget that not everyone's familiar with this, so: for those unfamiliar with the concept of Mackinac Island, please take a moment to read the Wikipedia entry on the subject.
The ferry ride to the island took about twenty minutes, and we took some pictures of the Mackinac Bridge on the way. Once we got to the island, we bought tickets for the carriage tour and admission to the butterfly conservatory. We started on a two-horse carriage with about twenty other people. About halfway through this first leg of the trip, the carriage pulled off at the barns and swapped to a different, less tired team of horses. After the switch, the ride did go a little faster, but, uh, one of the horses on the second suffered - or rather, caused US to suffer from - noisy flatulence.
As Aaron put it a few minutes later, "Your carriage ride will be ruined once again by your explosive flatulence."
The two-horse carriage took us to Surrey Hill and let everyone off there. At Surrey Hill, there are a few souvenir shops, and down a short hill is a small goat corral and the butterfly conservatory.
I had brought a bunch of film with me up north, not planning to use more than one or two rolls, but I used up a full roll and a half just in he butterfly conservatory (and a total of six over the course of the entire trip up north). The butterfly conservatory was just THAT AWESOME.
Butterfly pictures (click for full-size):
Went back up to Surrey Hill, where we caught a three-horse carriage (with about thirty other people) to take us through the state park. The first stop was Arch Rock, which is really cool, and which will be mentioned again later in the writeup.
Arch Rock pictures (click for full-size):
Rode past the island cemeteries, Skull Cave (pictured here), and Fort Mackinac, which we chose not to visit. Then we passed the governor's mansion (a state-owned summer home that the state is basically not allowed to sell, where the governors stay a handful of weeks a year). Our carriage driver mocked the governor briefly, and then he gave us a choice. From that point, we could either stay on the carriage for thirty more minutes until it returned to the town center, or we could disembark right now, walk three-and-a-half minutes down a narrow hill path, and wind up about half a mile from the center of town. Most of the carriage made the same choice we made - walking downhill.
From there, we walked along State Highway 185 for about a mile and a half, to where we could see the underside of Arch Rock. This was very awesome. Got some pictures, but they're only on my camera, still undeveloped. Then we turned around to head back into town, and we were helpful to other tourists on three separate occasions within the first half mile of the return trip.
Back in town, we stopped in a couple shops but didn't buy anything, and then we caught the next ferry back to the mainland. Once again, a very nice ride. Windy but nice. Killed time on the ride back by taking pictures of the boat's wake and of the bridge.
Although we'd walked from the parking lot to the docks in the morning when we arrived in Mackinac City, we were not walking any further than we had to now that we'd been on the island. We caught a shuttle back to the parking lot, then visited the Old Mackinac Point Lighthouse. We chose not to go inside, but we did take some pictures and stop in their shop (and buy nothing). Took a few more pictures of the bridge while we were in the area, for good measure (that wound up being my favorite shot of it). We chose to pass up Colonial Michilimackinac entirely, and headed back down I-75 to our happy familiar non-walky safe haven.
On the way back we stopped in Indian River to eat dinner at Vivio's, where we had some good pizza. Then, finally, a return to the cabin, where I discovered that I'd gotten a sunburn on the island. Sadface! Then we ate fudge, watched baseball, made some biscuits for Monday's lunch (setting off the smoke alarm in the process), and taking some time to start reading A Prayer For Owen Meany.
Monday, July 2
This is the day of totally unproductive and doing nothing of significance.
Slept till noonish, then used Sunday night's biscuits and made milk-sausage gravy to go with them. This was an eminently acceptable lunch. Then, at the male's suggestion - the MALE'S suggestion - we drove up into Indian River to buy another pound of chocolate-cherry fudge. Again, this was the idea of the MALE of the species. <3
In our defense, it's almost two weeks later and only just last night did we even start in on that fudge.
Also at the chocolate shop, there was an enormous peanut-butter cup the size of my fist. ^_^;
Before we went back to the cabin, we remembered we wanted to stop by a small branch of river we'd seen a few days earlier when we turned the wrong way when leaving the cabins. So off we went to a minor scenic pulloff and took pictures of the West Sturgeon River. It was very clean and clear and awesome, and we have many nice pictures (and a couple pretty dragonly pictures too).
West Sturgeon River pictures (click for full-size):
Upon returning to the cabins, we wanted to check with the main office about checkout procedures, since we planned to leave on Wednesday and they have no Wednesday office hours. This should have taken about two minutes, but instead we got detained listening to talking to the chatty proprietor while her husband chewed on a stick.
When we got free of that, we checked out the communal laundry room and decided against it. ^_^;
The one good thing that came from that encounter, however, was that we mentioned our side trip to the West Sturgeon River and she mentioned a better scenic outlook we should try, and we decided that yes, we should.
Later on, I made some biscuits and an awesome pasta sauce to put over mostaccioli for dinner. Using a base of plain tomato sauce, I dumped in various foodstuffs we had laying around - some sausage, some green papper, some shredded cheese, some spices - and it was fantastic. I am totally proud of this, and aside from the visit to the river this was probably the highlight of the day.
Yes, I realize that sounds really boring, but it was awesome, okay.
Spent the evening reading some more of Owen Meany, with a break to eat more fudge. We also watched another baseball game (not sure what, as the Tigers had the day off), and I took another impromptu nap.
This day, we did not set off the smoke alarm!
Tuesday, July 3
Slept late again, then ate random stuff for lunch (a can of soup for him, leftover pasta for me).
Then I fell asleep again. ^_^;
However, around 3, we got around to doing what we had tentatively planned for this day - swimming! Our plan was to drive up to Indian River and use either the public beach or the state park to swim in Burt Lake, but it seemed wiser to do all our other trips for the day first, before being drenched in lake water. So we first drove south about two miles to the scenic outlook our landlady had mentioned.
We wandered around taking pictures for a while again - so pretty! so shallow! so clear! - and then reached a conclusion together.
1) The area's grass was mowed, and there was a picnic pavilion, indicating the expectation of real tourist-like humans visiting.
2) The area had a small crappy playground (swingset and merry-go-round), indicating the expectation of small, somewhat uncontrollable humans.
3) The area had a concrete slab sticking out into the water at one place, seemingly for the express purpose of getting in.
4) The area had a distinct LACK of "no swimming" signs.
If you're gonna indicate an expectation of people visiting, and you DON'T want them swimming in your water, you'd put up a sign about it, right? Right.
We were both wearing swimsuits under our clothes, in expectation of the lake, but it was pretty shallow-looking, so I just left my shorts on a bench with our towels and we went wading.
It was FREEZING. I think the intent of entry is more for fly-fishing than for swimming. But we waded for about ten minutes. The water was very clear, the bottom all rounded rocks (which still hurt on bare feet, mind you), and at its deepest the water came maybe halfway up my thighs. (For reference, I am 5'2".) We crossed to the other side, where the water was shallower and the bottom sandier, and moved about twenty feet upstream in this shallow part. This was a good thing, because when we tried to cross the river again to get back to the concrete slab, the current kept catching our feet and kind of forcing us back downstream anyway. There was a little log right below the concrete slab that made a nice step back up onto the shore.
I realize this sounds really boring but it was actually pretty cool and I'm so glad we did it. It was so very very awesome.
From there, we drove up into Indian River. On the way we passed a sign for a beef jerky store. We decided not to stop there right then, and put it on our list of things to do on our way out of town Wednesday. We got into town, and we hadn't intended to make a whole lot of stops, but right next to Big Bear Adventures (the putt-putt place) is Tiki's Meat Market, home of pork rinds, smoked fish, meat jerkies (beef, venison, turkey, buffalo, and elk), some unique varieties of fudge, and other northwoods-type products. We ended up buying half a pound of jerky (mostly regular beef, with a little bit of barbeque beef), and a jar of green pepper spread, which... sounded really good in theory! (We tried it a few nights ago here at the house, and it was so overly sweet for the context of quesadillas as to be basically horrifying.)
An unintended stop, but very fun. It smelled GREAT inside. I realize we skipped the first one and went in the second one, but we knew we wouldn't be as far north as Indian River again during the trip, so it was prudent to go to that one then, and the other later.
From there we headed a little further north into town, and took a road behind the library to get to the public beach at Burt Lake. (We could also have gone to the state park to do so, but that would have cost $8, and the beach was free.) On arriving, we were confronted with a sign warning us that there were zebra mussels in the water and that, therefore, footwear was required.
So, after a brief walk up and down the sidewalk, and determining that everyone else did in fact have water-appropriate footwear, we drove back into town, to a store so unremarkable when we visited it on Saturday that it was simply not worth mentioning in the writeup. However, now the "Summer Store" was just what we needed. We dropped in, bought two pairs of water shoes, AWWWWWed over a small tan puppy that was mauling what resembled Chiyo-dad, then headed back to the beach.
And in we went! The water felt really cold at first, but that was just the moving water near the shore. The further out we got, the warmer it was. It stayed knee-high on me for quite some distance, and at the deepest point we went to it came to my shoulders. I can't swim, so this was fine. There was much with the wading and crawling/kneeling in the water. We stayed there for a full hour and a half. So fun.
Then we went back to the cabin, where I made tasty pasta for dinner again.
I have no notes to this effect, but I can assume that we once again ate fudge, watched baseball, and read Owen Meany.
Wednesday, July 4
Up at 8 a.m. and packing frantically, since checkout was at 10. Down the road, some people were moving into the lodge that was part of the cabin complex. We fixed some taco wraps for a very early lunch, and we were out of the cabin and on the road by 9:30 a.m.
We went south a little bit to the other beef jerky place, which turned out to be way back from the road. We got a batch of jalapeno beef jerky and a package for sausage gravy mix. The jalapeno beef jerky had a label on it saying to keep it refrigerated, which confused us - isn't the whole point of jerky that you DON'T have to keep it in any special conditions to keep it from going bad? Whatever.
The drive was incredibly uneventful, though we switched drivers a couple times. We got to my parents' house around 2:15 - greeted by a sign on their front door - and proceeded to kill some time talking, discussing the trip, and checking the directions to the baseball game.
Around 5:10, we left the house to get to the ball game (scheduled to start at 7:05). It was quite trafficky, but we found decent parking, a straight shot down Columbia from the entrance to Comerica Park. So, yay.
The outside of the park has some pretty neat stuff: a large concrete tiger mauls fans, and the exterior walls are periodically interspersed with... Tigergoyles? I don't know. When we went in the park, they checked my purse for... I don't know, weapons or video cameras or something? They did a pretty crappy job, too; you'd think my DS case would've aroused some suspicion. Then they scanned our tickets, and the scanners made a beepy noise just like when Snake is bleeding in Metal Gear Solid. Use a ration!
We walked the inside perimeter of the stadium, and it was very hot in my long-sleeved Tigers shirt I wore for the occasion (one of the shirts he got me for Christmas). We looked at food but didn't get anything; we visited the official shop but didn't yet get anything, deciding instead to come back after the game was over, when we supposed it would be much less crowded.
We did buy two things before going to our seats, though - a program and a scorecard. Doing the scoring ended up actually being pretty fun.
We found our seats in the mezzanine, then went to get food - a pretzel and frozen lemonade for him; a hot dog and a Diet Pepsi for me. Our supposedly obstructed view wasn't really that obstructed - it was a little hard to see the furthest corner of right field because we were right on top of it, and the foul pole occasionally blocked my view of Maggs and Curtis, but the actual obstruction was the railing just in front of our seats, and that wasn't so bad.
Some children in nearby seats were bickering and whining during the national anthem, and I leaned over and yelled at them to show some respect. They shut up, and as the game started I guess they figured out they were in entirely the wrong seats anyway, because they disappeared and some older, more reasonable humans wound up in those seats for the duration of the game.
Late in the game I also yelled at some teenage boys for blocking our view by standing right in front of our rail. They teased me and tried to screw around. I should have indicated somehow that the big guy sitting next to me was with me, maybe that would've shut 'em up quicker.
There were also some really dumb girls right behind us, with unique remarks like "Kenny is almost fifty", a confusion of Marcus Thames and Craig Monroe (which some other guy called the girls out on their mistake), and some heckling of Gary Sheffield on his third at-bat, to wit: "You're due for a hit, Sheff." I consulted the scorecard Aaron and I were keeping. "Um, but he got a hit in the first inning," I volunteered. General idiocy like that. I kept digging my nails into Aaron out of annoyance. ^_^;
GET OFF MY DAMN LAWN
Anyway, so yeah, there was a game, and the Tigers won 6-4, yay. Not much to say on that? I got more food partway through, a pretzel of my own. After the game, they set off a large, noisy, smoky fireworks display, but it was very pretty.
Fireworks pictures (click for full-size):
Now that the game was over, we stopped by the gift shop again, where the boy got a t-shirt for himself and a stuffed tiger for me - I wanted a jersey-style t-shirt, but the closest they had to my size was men's large, which was not going to work, so.
We walked back to the truck, and he refused to get on I-75 back to my parents' house because every car in the city was now on I-75, so I found us a different way back by making use of my leet skills. Sleep was pretty much immediate once we got back.
Thursday, July 5
Got up around 8, burned a CD for the upcoming road trip, and ate lunch with my parents. Then came the packing of doom, in which we crammed many many of my belongings into his truck. A few boxes wound up staying behind and will be retrieved at our earliest convenience. We finally pulled out of the driveway around 1:30, swung by the post office so I could file for mail forwarding, and got on the freeway and out of town around 2.
Fairly uneventful. He drove the whole way because everything was crammed so tightly into the back of the cab, and adjusting the seats would have screwed that up hardcore. It rained twice on our way, which was okay because I always basically assume that it will rain and protect the stuff in the bed of a truck accordingly.
We got pretty woefully misplaced on our way to his grandmother's house in Claypool, but finally arrived around 6:30, and I got to meet his grandma and his Uncle Matt. The four of us went to have dinner at The Giant Chicken Mann's Country Kitchen, where we had really good fish. (Where "we" is defined as "everyone who is not Aaron, who had tenderloin.")
Over dinner at The Giant Chicken, it became apparent that these particular humans do not hate me, and there were reports of his grandma having laid the smackdown in our defense, which was pleasant. After dinner, we went back to her house, where we got a gift of a set of chili pepper dishes. Not that we do not have many dishes of various sorts, but hey.
We drove through Marion on our way back to the freeway, and stopped to walk the IWU campus (I had wanted to drop in on the student center), but most of the buildings were locked. I ended up just being stunned and appalled at all the changes to campus since I graduated, and I continued being stunned even after we left campus, right up until we stopped for gas and snacks before getting back on the freeway.
Uneventful from this point forward. We got home around 11:40, unloaded his truck, and pretty much immediately fell asleep.
Friday, July 6
This day, we unboxed wedding gifts, unpacked some boxes, assembled the rack for our new tray tables, unloaded my truck, unpacked more boxes... we went out only long enough to get lunch, cash his paycheck, drop by the post office, and get a quick batch of groceries from Aldi. I got some shoes and dresses in the closet, and that's about it as far as productivity goes. I made pasta again for dinner, and broke a piece of old Corelle. We saw the first batch of wedding pictures from his mother, and we ate some M&Ms (the wedding gift to us from my sister's dog).
Saturday, July 7
This day, we organized the pantry, put some clothes in the closet, unpacked Even More Boxes, and made a Wal-Mart run, in which we bought many groceries and made me a copy of the house key. We had wraps for lunch and some sort of pasta for dinner (I like pasta, okay). In our downtime, we took a forty-five minute phone call from my brother, played Karaoke Revolution unto excess, and went to Blockbuster, where we rented WarioWare: Smooth Moves for Wii.
Sunday, July 8
This day, we unboxed things! Are you shocked? We ran many dishwasher loads to accomodate the cookware I'd brought along, and our new dishes and new flatware. We got a couple cupboards reorganized, and... that was about it. Made quesadillas for lunch and our usual Sunday night pizza for dinner, and around 8 p.m. we made a quick shopping run - drop some mail, drop off some recycling, hit up Wal-Mart and began spending wedding gift money - on a stepstool and a plastic pitcher. Go us! Throughout the day and evening there was much to be had with the WarioWare, the Karaoke Revolution, the Wii Sports. Yay!
And... that's pretty much that. Aaron went back to work last Monday, and I've been getting the house together, largely as described here. Evenings have been tasty food, random chores, and various video games (making great use of the Wii and the karaoke games). We've finished writing our thank-you notes; we've got the kitchen completely reorganized; we've got the library almost cleared out; we've got a solid plan for the craft room. There is still much to be done, but largely those are group projects for evenings and weekends.
Phew. Yay.