A desperate lengthening of days

Yesterday was our last vacation day. Woke up; eggs and cheese for breakfast; state park beach in the morning; read more book on the sand; heading for home.  Home?  Who ever wants to go home from vacation?  While laying on the beach we concocted a scheme to extend the trip a bit… and add one more national park to our belts before our annual pass runs out (next month).  After lunching on the deck with Lonnie we hit the road at 2:30 and headed for Traverse City and Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore.  It was a great stop and worth the extra time… we haven’t ever seen so much sand in one place.  And we got there as the day was waning, so everything was bathed in an evening shade of mystery.  We didn’t stay for sunset.  As it was we didn’t get home until one in the morning, and four plus hour drive felt like a real crawl.  Just as a note… Tim Horton’s is a good bet if you ever need coffee after midnight while on the road.

Wedding #2

Woo hoo!  Another day without being lost!  We got up early this morning and made it home by about noon thirty, which was good because then we got to take a nap before heading out for the second wedding of the weekend:  Kate and Alerk’s.  Once again, a fabulous wedding!  Alerk’s family is Indian and many of them wore traditional clothing and his cousins did a traditional dance after dinner.  Both ceremony and reception were held at the Henry Ford Estate in Dearborn, which is a wonderful house steeped in history.  It felt a little like The Great Gatsby; dancing in the ballroom and spilling out onto the terrace and towards the bar.  The only real difference?  The Indian techno music!

It's a fathers' day miracle....

Okay, maybe not.  In fact we went to the zoo, which is not at all miraculous, seeing as that we do so every weekend!  But this time was a little different because we went with our friends Nathan and Diane (getting married in t-minus 20 days!), who hadn't been there in a long time.  It was a lot of fun!  We even got to see the mama wolverine chase a bird up in a tree, which also added some spice to the afternoon.  I guess that's why we go every weekend... it's always different and we don't want to miss anything!
Then this evening we had a mongolian sized barbecue for fathers' day.  We were lucky enough to have both of our families together, which is something that we love.  We gathered at the Ophoff's house (Jon's parents) and most of us munched away on snacks out in the evening sunshine while the dads grilled our way to blissful dinner happiness.  They had two grills going and cooked something like five different meats.  There was enough food to feed an army and, even though sometimes when it comes to eating I think Curtis is an army unto himself, we will still be eating leftovers for a week!  That's especially good because now we don't have to go grocery shopping.