Vacation Miscellany

One more day of randomness and we'll call our 2nd annual birthday bash getaway...complete!! Here are some things that didn't fit anywhere else:

When we visited the windmill, they had an old village set up around it...you could walk around and interact with the people, who were in character. We stopped by a coffee shop of that period...and found that this would have been the work required to foster our addiction that many years ago:

Roast your own beans...grind your own beans...no coffee filters...warm it over a fire. In short: no Keurig and no Starbucks.

I might not have survived.

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Saturday night, we walked through massive crowds toward a park to watch fireworks. Obviously not familiar with the area, we went where I thought we were supposed to sit and found tons of bleachers. We climbed to the top, sat, and waited.

It grew closer to dusk and the bleachers weren't filling up, so Ryan went to ask a security guy about the location of the fireworks. Turns out we needed to walk about three more blocks. Whoopsie! So I carefully made my way down the bleachers...and do remember that I'm scared of heights - and OPEN heights at that.

Ryan helped by taking my picture. And special thanks to that red headed lady there at the bottom, who said to me when I finally landed safely on the ground, "OH! That was you coming down. I thought it was thunder."

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We ended up with a MUCH better view....

...marking the second time we've watched fireworks together, and both times...they were over a lake. It's really the only way to go.

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Speaking of "a way to go," we noticed when the fireworks began, that there were some mysterious green lights that floated around above us.

In the photo above, it's the white dot at the top far left of the picture. Because I am, in fact, an avid watcher of Lifetime and SVU, I concocted no less than half a dozen scenarios for what this little UFO wannabe might be...and spent most of the fireworks show keeping an eye on it and hoping to NOT be the next day's headline. It came to the ground after the fireworks ended, and Ryan, who does NOT watch Lifetime or SVU, went over to check it out. While he was gone, I devised a couple of plans for getting back home to Indiana if left by myself in the great state of Michigan.

As you might expect, he returned to me in one piece with the news that it was a remote control camera, taking pictures of the fireworks from above.

No longer afraid, I concluded what any reasonable girl would: I want one.

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I call this piece, "Duck meets car."

 ...sans his diaper.

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 ...self explanatory...

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Car karaoke. It's how we survive drives back to reality.

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It's not a true Shafferland vacation until this girl finds herself a Sonic.

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Dear waitress at the BW3's...if I say I want my pork without BBQ sauce, can I just have it without an argument on the potential blandness of the meat? I actually do know what I like. And plain pork it is.

There you go! Vacation complete!!