Vacation 2009 -1

Brad and Amy Bellamy on the porch of the Grand Hotel on Macknac island
Tim and me

Our vacation started with picking up Brad and Amy Bellamy in Detroit on our way to Mackanac Island. The island is beautiful. It has an airport, horses and carriages, and bikes on it. The only other motorized autos are fire and police. We ate dinner the first night at the Grand Hotel. It has the longest porch in the world and if you are not eating there are staying there ($600/night) and no we didn't stay there...it cost $10 to walk on the porch! The dinner was so so but very expensive...glad I had the experience once. You had to dress for dinner as you can tell by the photos.
The next day we went to Fort Macknac and saw enactments of what life was like there in the early days. It was all quite interesting. The tour guide said that if you went in every fudge shop on the island and had a sample of fudge, you could eat a pound and a half free in one day.

For those of you who are really interested in more photos and vacation info, see Tim's facebook or my facebook. There's lots of more photos there!

Vacation 2009-2

Laura, John, Nigel, and Tim at the Toronto Zoo. What a fun day it was!
Tim and Nigel at the pay ground the next day. Nigel loves to dig in the sand!
Laura and me at the park.

We went to Toronto on Sunday. It was really good to see Laura, John and Nigel. I think I made a mistake though letting Tim go with me. He played and played with Nigel so I fear that Nigel will favor his Poppa Tim over his Grammie Tammie! We went to the zoo the first day and to the park the second day. Nigel is almost walking and he knows what he wants and where he wants to go. That child loves being outside! Laura and Nigel are coming on Aug. 1 and will be here til Aug. 11. I can hardly wait!
Hanging out with Lisa French in NYC
Live Bait was a neat place to eat with a southern flair that Lisa took us to for lunch.

We went to NYC for a couple of days. My Old-himers is kicking in...when we got there, we realized that I had made hotel reservations at 2 different hotels to arrive on two different days so we had to call and cancel one of them and then I realized that I had gotten show tickets for the same night. So we went to the Jersey Boys theatre and begged the guy to change our tickets. He took mercy on us and gave us two seats on the VERY FRONT row that he said were hard to get rid of anyway because you have to look up all the time...like we really cared! It was great! The language at the beginning of the show was a little rough, but the music was fabulous! The first night we also ate outside at a neat little cafe a couple of blocks away from the Ed Sullivan theatre and we listened to Paul McCartney sing throughout our dinner (eben though we didn't realize that it was really him until afterwards!). The next day, we met Lisa French at Madison Square Park for a free concert by Trout Fishing in America and we had a great time! They are really a kids' group, but Tim and I are groupies anyway! Then we ate lunch with Lisa and had ice cream at the Shake Shack in Madison Square Park. We were told that was one thing you could not miss there and the ice cream was pretty good (but not quite as good as gelato...but Laura did take us to a place in Toronto that was just about that good!). On our way to see 9 to 5 that night, the streets were all blocked off because Obama was in town so we had to find a round about way to get to the theatre, but we made it.
The flight home was the worse part of the trip...had 30-50 mile an hour headwinds and weather to deal with so it took us 9 hours to fly home! I was really ready to get out of that plane, but thankful to the Lord for our safety!