Monday, August 17, 2009

Vacation Observations


A couple times a year I get the opportunity to vacation with family in the Upper Peninsula. It’s an escape from the usual routine to a place that differs a bit from Wisconsin and Michigan’s Lower Peninsula if you will.

On the drive there and back here are a few things I encountered. I had to stop dead on Highway 41 northbound three times as I ran into traffic waiting to take the exit to EAA AirVenture. It wasn’t too bad except for the people who were in the wrong lane to hit the exit.

In Marinette I saw a place called Jerry’s Bar. I don’t know who owns it, but it struck me as funny because I have a former brother-in-law named Jerry who loves to have a few. In Rapid River there’s a restaurant called “Mikey B’s.” Not sure how the food is, but there are no golden arches.

In my hometown of Manistique a couple of businesses side-by-side have moose as mascots. They are not real of course. One is a moose in a white shirt and checkered bib overalls in front of the Big Boy Restaurant. One friend refers to it as Bullwinkle’s Big Boy. The other moose is decked out in a tuxedo in front of the hotel next to it. The only live wildlife I saw was a gray fox that crossed the road in front of me. Usually I see some deer too.

Shopping is different. Some of the products we see on grocery store shelves you can’t get in Fond du Lac and vice versa. I saw chocolate flavored Chex Cereal. I guess if you make the treat puppy chow that would come in handy. I also saw a Mexican-flavored pasty. They had regular pasties too.

I’m hooked on the news so I kept track of what was going on either through television or the internet. The story about the Fond du Lac man whose private part was glued to his stomach by spurned lovers was on the Today Show. One story making news in the U.P. was about a Schoolcraft County Judge caught drunk driving by State Police after a chase that exceeded 100 miles an hour. Judge Charles Nebel spent a night in jail and issued an apology saying he made some inappropriate decisions. Well, duh!

I tried to have a conversation with my 14-year-old nephew Max while I was visiting my brother John one night. I had to compete with X-box. He was playing a game online with some chap from England. As my 11-year-old nephew Derek put it, “Boy that guy Max is playing with sure is snotty!”

The sad thing about vacation isn’t that it has to come to an end, but how easy it is to step back into the routine. Well to put it in perspective I just remember something I saw just before I went on vacation. Across the street from the Fond du Lac Police Department’s parking lot a small bird was comfortably perched atop of a sign. The sign read, “Two hour parking only!”

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