Skip to main content

Another Day in Paradise

I make no apologies for my adoration of Interlochen and my life at the moment.  I only wish all of you were here with me!

The girls had their first day of rehearsal today.  Since it's Monday (technically a day off for the kids), they only had rehearsal for 3 hours in the morning, and the rest of the day was ours.

Hannah and Anna were champs, getting up at 7 a.m. to go running.

Rehearsals were a success, although Hannah doesn't like having to count 90 measures of rest in a John Williams' piece :-)

Anna practicing with Hannah
Glo loves her orchestra and the music they are playing.

Lunch.

Anna then spent an hour with Johannah, helping her rehearse her next set of audition excerpts.  Johannah has no desire to be put in the lower orchestra anytime soon.

Afterwards, we were off for the day.  Our destination?  Sleeping Bear Dunes, voted "The Most Beautiful Place in America".  Seriously.

We've been here for five years now and never visited the dunes.  They are only 30 minutes away.  Boy, we have been missing out!! 

We first drove "the scenic drive".  Anna was our tour guide, and we both learned a lot while the girls completed the Junior Ranger program.  

We just HAD to stop here (hey, it was on the way!)

Feeling guilty about biting off the bear's head...

This was 600 feet (or some other unbelievable number) above the lake

Two of these toes are related, and the other hopes she will be be :-)

When we pulled into the parking lot, I told the kids that it wouldn't take more than five minutes to climb the first dune.
Yeah right, I think I heaved up a lung.

These three made it to "the benches"--the highest point on the dunes.

Now THIS is my kind of picture!  See me?  In my orange shirt?  Don't I look wonderful--skinny and tanned and young?

Yeah, she's a BABE!

No wonder we were afterwards finding sand in places we didn't know we have :-)

SUCH a great day!

We finished off the night by driving to Grand Traverse Pie Company for individual slices of pie which we took home along with our two large Pizza Hut pizzas.  The Bachelorette was on at eight, and we weren't ready for the fun to end.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

SURPRISE!!

When the pizza guy came to the door last night, here's what John saw: It took a few seconds for John to process who the pizza delivery man was, but when he did, he was incredibly happy (and couldn't stop saying "heeeeyyyyy....".  It was Jared Moran, John's best friend. And me, I just knelt down, right then and there, and began repenting of all the lies that I have told over the last four months, hiding this most amazing surprise :-)  I told Sarah the other day that I was glad to see the light at the end of the falsehood tunnel, because if I kept this up much longer, I was destined to end up in liars' hell... Jared ran the Air Force marathon with John last year.  It was his first marathon, and from what he told us, his last.  However, he called in June and said he was coming again, but I was supposed to keep it a surprise from John.  I'm not sure what changed his mind, but we sure are glad he did.  John hates runnings marathons alone, and ther...

Getting Hannie Home

Knowing that Hannah was leaving on her mission to Ecuador February 7, I needed to get Hannie home.  To her credit, she took care of mostly everything out in Utah, including finding someone to buy her apartment contract.  When I got there, it was all about driving her around so she could take care of last minute things (selling back her books, mailing back a rented book, turning in her work stuff at the library), but really it was about some good old girl time too.  Eating at some of Provo's great eateries and buying cupcakes. Kitty, sampling some of the goods. Ah cupcakes.  Sweet Tooth Fairy bakery has become a tradition every time I visit Utah.  Seriously, they sell the most delicious cupcakes and cookies there.  It made sense to me to buy eight cupcakes for the two of us for a three day drive home.  Little did I know... One of the things that I have done too many times to count now is helping my college-age kids move in and out of their apart...

A Quick Trip to Mackinac Island

 Allow me a pity party for a paragraph.  As much as John is earning buckets of money for us and for our retirement, his weekend calls have been infringing on our time together.  Like I said, it's a complete pity party, because my logical mind reminds me that I should be happy he's making so much money, but my heart feels rather lonely at times as I reminisce about trips we have taken that we don't have time to take again. I love John.  I don't need him around all the time, but I find that the best quality time with him is when he doesn't have other distractions like work, and call, and hospital credentialing. Anyway, I guess that was two paragraphs, and I don't need to take it any further than that, because I don't want the body of this blog post to be about me and my loneliness. I've been wanting to go to Mackinac Island for two years now (I can hardly even believe that it's been that long since I was there).  With Lake Michigan getting colder and t...