How did Harry spend the summer?

He went with the FAM to Myrtle Beach. They go every other year. This year I did not go because I did not know what my finances would be like, but my family kindly included Harry in the festivities. He had a great time.

This is one of my favorite photos. It is a tradition of Mike and Jim's (my brother in laws)to get a photo of the two of them partaking in their favourite past time:

What did I do on my summer vacation?

I went up north with Corinne! Yes, and we had a G R E A T time. Corinne thinks I am immoral because I kept trying to get out of paying the state park entrance fees ..well.. no-ot re-ally. My thought was if they don't ask don't volunteer. Then come to discover that there are some shared parking lots between the Minnesota DOT and the park system. ANYWAY .. i think we saw every waterfall in Northern Minnesota between here and Canada. We went to the Boundary Waters National Forest and Thunderbay in Canada. I just wanted to see if we would get frisked at the border. I HAVE A VERY EXCITING LIFE. (But wait...in highschool my friends and I used to go to the Cleveland Hopkins Airport on a Friday night to go through security and the metal detectors. This was back in 1975. We just wanted to see if we could. And we could. What innocence!) We stayed at a famous er lodge called Cascade Lodge in the Boundary Waters National Forest. The brochure showed a lovely landscape with a Lake Superior view. Amazing how they were able to take the photo and completely edit out THE STATE HIGHWAY right in front of the lodge. (We didn't know it was famous till a found a book in a book store that chronicled its history in Grand Marais.) Needless to say Corinne thought it was a dump. I thought it was pretty nice and inexpensive and better than Motel 6. In truth it was quaint. Overall we did a lot of walking,talking and the weather was decent. We promised each other we would do it again for sure!

One more

These are my sister's husbands on the last day of our vacation. They love the surf.

More about vacation

I am in the middle. My sisters are on either side. We made John (my husband) hold the beer can as a prop. After all, a man is a man, and all good men drink beer. It took the whole vacation to get John into his bathing suit, and he went swimming in the pool! Yeah! He's doing a great job for a guy who is blind and has had stokes up the ying yang (amen).

How I spent my summer vacation....

Like this. And, when we weren't by the pool, we were on the beach.

My sisters and their husbands did a lot of fishing in the morning(wives 3 husbands 0). I had fishing rods for our family, but frankly, it was too much work.

Lots of walks along the beach, to the point at low tide,very peaceful, and my son made the following observation: This vacation provided a big change for our family from Chicago, but for us, personally, there wasn't much difference between this and home, except for the beach of course. My son, like his cousins, was in pursuit of the perfect vacation tan. My sister dubbed one of the nieces the President of the PTA - Professional Tanning Association. This sister would have been the Vice President as she takes her tanning very seriously.

By the end of the week, being much less competitive on this front, I had had enough. John and I went over to the Brookview Botanical Gardens and spent a day amongst the marble and granite Sculptures, walking through the "rooms", reading the poetry on plaques on the walls, and enjoying the fabulous green green architecture.

I can't make this stuff up

We lost the car in Knoxville Tennessee. I am not kidding. It was the second day of our trip to Garden City, SC (Myrtle Beach). We were at a gas station just off Interstate 40 in Knoxville, Tennessee. I parked the car at a gas pump and put the nozzle in and all that. Then I told John and Harry I was going in to buy some water. I am in the habit of leaving the pump while I’m fueling the car, doesn't everybody? Well, then Harry said he was going in to use the rest rooms. John didn’t need to go. I actually used the rest room too (I think) and at any rate I met Harry at the counter buying an ice cream bar. We walked out together.

“Harry where is the car?”

We looked. It was gone. We went to all the pumps, nothing in back.
We were freaking, and then Harry pointed. The car was about 500 feet or more away, across the street. It was sitting between an electrical utility pole and the wires that they use to support it. It had rolled across a street, through a grassy ditch full of who knows what, through utility wires, just missing a utility pole, and into an old arborvitae that was cracked and falling over from the impact. There were two guys who looked a bit shell shocked standing near the car. They must have seen what happened. John was in the passenger seat. He was white. I asked the one guy how fast the car was going… he thought maybe 10 mph maybe faster. It took Harry a couple of tries to get it out of the tangle of shrub and grass. Amazingly, while the bumper smelled strongly of spruce, there were no dents. Everything seemed to work. No scratches on the underbody. We still had to go through the mountains and I was hoping we didn’t have alignment problems. John’s only comment when we asked him if he was alright was “I DO NOT WANT TO BE LEFT IN THE CAR BY MYSELF AGAIN!” I was too stressed to do any more driving so Harry drove the rest of the way to Garden City. We found out later
when John was describing the incident to my sister, that John was trying to turn on the air conditioning. He put the car in neutral and turned on the car. The parking brake was up but didn’t work. The car was on an incline so it rolled forward. Harry confessed that in the excitement he had dropped his ice cream bar. We should have bought a lottery ticket.

Its all about consumption...

We're headed off on our vacation.

Over many years, my sisters have been going down to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina in July. My brother sometimes joined them, but this year, with his kids getting older and different schedules, they are going a week earlier.

My sisters continue to go, together, every couple of years, and for the second time, my husband, son and I will join them.

The first time we came down, it was a whirlwind of activity. Of course when you have that many people, it seems very busy. Lots of time at the beach, and then out to dinner and the bars.

The kids, all various stages of teen hood, go down and hang out at the pier. My son rode in the trunk for one of these occasions. I mean when all the kids piled in the car, there wasn't enough room, so he volunteered to ride in the trunk. The pier was only about four blocks away. It is something my fearless son would do. I wasn't happy to hear what he had done when he told me about it months later. He was about fifteen. That was the same year he and his friends discovered duck tape and, would duck tape themselves to street lamps late at night, and various other pranks which could have gotten them hurt or worse. Hopefully he won't be that goofy on this trip.

The most memorable thing we did on this vacation was ride on a jet ski. I rode with my son and he was jumping all the waves, doing sharp turns and going at death defying speeds. You have to be 18 to be by yourself. He wasn't so I rode behind him. I think I lost two cavities with all the teeth nashing.

The best part about it though, is I get to spend time with my family...

Go West

The summer of our move to Minnesota we took a trip with Johnny, Courtney, and Harry to Mt. Rushmore in South Dakota. It was a driving vacation, literally. We drove nine hours out in two days, took pictures of the family in front of Mt. Rushmore, and then drove home. In between we did the usual stops, the Badlands, Bear Country, Petrified Forest, Wall Drug, on the way there, Sturgis, and the Corn Palace on the way back.

Outside of our stops at all the tourist attractions, hotels, bathroom breaks, and restaurants, we spent alot of time together in the car. We discovered very quickly that Harry, three at the time, and Courtney, fourteen, had to be separated, because they could not get along. I was surprised that a fourteen year old and a three year old could bicker and pick and irritate so successfully. At one point, getting ice cream at some restside stop, Courtney, in a fit of frustration, exclaimed that Harry was the most immature three year old she ever met. We all just looked at each other. Can a three year old be anything else?

The car we were driving was John's mercedes station wagon. It was his baby, painstakingly washed, waxed and and maintained in top condition. He was constantly harping at us about the way we shut the doors too hard. On the way home, he became so annoyed, that he passed an edict that he would be the only one allowed to close doors when anyone got in or out of the car. And so it was that we would stop at a rest stop or a restaurant. Everyone would pile out of the car and into whatever place we ended up. John had to go around to each door and shut it. Then after whatever, lunch, restrooms, we'd pile back in. We would wait for John to walk around to each door and close it. But oops, Johnny forgot something. Out the door he went back into the rest stop. John would have to get back out of the car, make his way around the car (he was blind of course), shut Johnny's door and get back in to his own spot. Then Courtney needed something and out she went. John would repeat the process. Then they were back and John would have to get out and start all over again. This lasted for about a day and a half before John finally gave up, and things were back to normal. Slam, Slam, Slam!