What I Did on my Summer Vacation

Instead of one long post about our vacation, which I really rather not rehash in full detail and in response to my husband who thinks my blog entries are too heavy, I will provide a series of entries that chronologically document our vacation in photos (with a little narrative).

So here are the first few days...

We headed to Holland, Michigan. The drive was about 4 1/2 hours. Jeff thought the drive was great, but I thought it was an eternity, as I heard my name more than 1,000 times in that 4 hours. Mom, mom, mom, mommy, mom, mama, mama, mommy, mom. And, the car was packed--oh, I am sorry, the van was packed, so that should be a pretty good indication of how much stuff we took.

I usually don't take this much stuff, but figured since we were only going four hours away, instead of the usual 16+ to the west coast of Florida, I could take more--including a ton of food so I didn't have to buy it there and I could help ensure we continued to eat pretty healthy stuff. The food took up a lot of room. So did all of the beach crap (where we go in Florida, we know what they have--chairs, umbrella, etc. so we don't take anything). And we took our bikes on the new bike rack. We were totally loaded down.

We arrived safely and the house we rented turned out to be rather nice. We arrived around 4:00, so we settled in a bit and then headed off for a dinner out and to the grocery store. The next day, we spent shopping in downtown Holland. They have a street of very cute and unique stores with stuff you would actually want to buy (not just vacation/tourist crap). We had lunch at a local micro brewery and eventually headed back to the house for exhausted Andy to nap and to meet my dad and his wife who were joining us.