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I could hardly believe it when I was planning this trip, and as always, I looked for a race AND FOUND ONE!  In fact, it was the closing weekend for Mackinac Island, and I guess the tradition holds that the third and final race of the island is held.  As it turns out, Mackinac Island is in the shape of a turtle (I wondered why it was a turtle race, but the medal illuminated the reason why).  We had stayed overnight in the Bicycle Street Inn, and we had hoped that they would allow us to come back after the race and take showers, but with the big storm system from the previous week, the race trail had to be reconstructed, and the race actually began even later than the 11:30 start time.  We wondered why they start so late, but when we saw numerous runners coming off the ferry in the morning to run the race, we understood why.  Yes, it's expensive to stay on the island, but I have never found a hotel in nearby Mackinac City that is much cheaper.  Oh well. ...

We woke up Friday, ready for another beautiful day, but I'm not sure if it's because we were on the turning point of the side of the Mitten, or because there was a storm system coming up from Louisiana, but it was windy !  Not any colder than the day before, and not much less sunny, but that wind! We ended up starting 20 minutes late (I forgot to factor in that John likes to take full advantage of the free breakfast), and we ended up chasing that time for several hours.  No worries though--we knew we had more good stuff to see! Manistee was 40 minutes away, and because we'd started early, the sun was really just coming up.  And glory be that the pier was built high and the waves were low--we could actually go OUT to the light.  And you can appreciate how yesterday we racked up almost five miles of walking just going out to the lighthouses--it's quite a distance there and back, repeatedly! It felt like we just couldn't take a bad pictures of the lighthou...

It all began with Glo serving a mission in CA. John said to me, "Let's celebrate our anniversary by going to California for a week and see Glo." Hmm.  Maybe it started a year ago (to the day almost) when he lost his job. Yes, he has a lot of free time at the moment, and can drop everything and go anywhere at any time...for a week at a time. Okay, maybe it started before then. Maybe it started 30 years ago when John married me. Whatever the reason, I was NOT going to surprise Glo and drop in and see her (and seeing all the fires that are erupting all over CA at the moment, including near Santa Rosa today, I'm kind of glad we didn't make that plan).  Plus, who did he think was going to plan  that trip? But John was determined that we celebrate.  I didn't want to unless we did the big party with friends and the kids that I had wanted to have, but we don't have the money to do that, and a dark cloud of stress and bad emails and worrisome phone call...