On Vacation

Vacations are always too short aren't they? Mine garnered an extra bonus because my birthday took place over my vacation, so what did I do? I spent the day on the beach, that's what. I followed it up with some sort of delicious Sangria concoction during dinner.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. We headed to an area outside of Lansing for a friend's wedding. The location was idyllic, at a nature preserve, however, the temperature was topping out at around 95 degrees that day and there was no A/C inside the building where dinner was being served. Yes, it led to a hot, sticky mess. But it seemed as though the party goers had a fair enough time.

We trekked along the Shore of Lake Michigan, from South Haven to Muskegon, making Holland our Home Base of sorts. It's a wonderful little town filled with genuinely happy people, not like over here on the East side, where everyone is angsty and pissed off all the time. They're progressive with their electric car plug ins and scooters scooting about town. It almost made me want to drop everything at home and move over there.

We cut the trip short because we were supposed to experience some pretty wicked storms for two days (which we did) so we headed home, regrouped, and headed up to Lake Huron, which is just over an hour away from our house. More beach bumming ensued, with friends even, making for a perfect end to a lovely vacation week.

I don't know when I'll see my next vacation, some time in 2012 I imagine.

Probably the best looking lighthouse of them all, the Whitehall Light which is currently a museum, except we couldn't figure out how to get to the other side of the channel to actually enter the museum, so a photograph must suffice.
The Grand Haven Light, which looks just like the South Haven Light minus the rather colorful graffiti.

We drove over to Holland to start the official vacation/lighthouse tour. Below is what the Hollanders call Big Red! Which isn't that big in person, so it left me rather baffled.

You can't go to Holland and not see the only working windmill in the U.S. imported directly from the Netherlands. Yes, you can go inside and walk up onto the deck and view the whole park, which would probably be more breathtaking during the Tulip Time Festival.

On Heat Indexes Near 110 Degrees

Another hot day here, still not going to complain about it. I mean, what good would it do right? It's going to be got nevertheless. The silver lining is, today is going to be the hottest day of our heat wave with the temperature reaching 101 today, but then it's going to drop going into the weekend, back into the low 80's. You know it's hot when the low to mid 80's sounds like a relief.

Something that's been consistently bothering me as of late is other drivers. I've been known to go at least 5-10 over the posted speed limit, not exactly a good practice, but it's what I do. I don't exactly get pissed off if I can't speed, but I do happen to become quite flustered when I'm forced to go 10-15 UNDER the posted speed limit. These slow pokes seem to be running rampant, it's not just one person here and one person there, but gobs of people. I usually end up getting boxed in by these yahoos, so I'm stuck shaking my fist and trying to keep the vein in my forehead under wraps. Since it's been so hot, and I happen to drive a Wrangler with barely working air, my only solace is to keep moving to get some sort of breeze. Well, when it's 100 out and I'm going 20-25 mph, there's not nearly enough breeze to cool me off. So here I am going out of my head, baking to death in my car because some people think they by going slower, they're conserving gas. I beg to differ.

However, I'll be going on vacation next week, where I'm hoping to just lay on a beach with a cocktail and a book and not worry about such trivial things such as traffic.