September 1, 2012

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  DAY Fifteen:  Adventure Blog

  It’s actually been quite the busy week.  Oh, Monday and Tuesday were my ‘drag days’, but Wednesday I got my oomph back, and started catching up on the stuff I’d let slide.  Brian was in Detroit all day Wednesday with his boss, at some seminar thing. 

  And then Thursday was a visitation we had to go to.  And yes, I’m lazy and am going to cut/paste what I wrote at FB about it:  At his work, Brian and Rick are the daytime CNC crew. Joe and Keith are the night shift CNC crew. Joe is 50-ish, unmarried, no kids, and has spent the past decade or so taking care of his mother (diabetes, dementia, alzhiemers, etc) while his sister works days, and she while he works nights.
  

  He’s the nicest guy – he likes to give away food. Once Brian came home with a HUGE sack of apples – Joe bought a whole truck-bed full of them, and gave out sacks to his family and friends. Another time, Brian called home and said not to make supper – Joe made chili dogs. HUNDREDS of chili dogs, each individually wrapped. He gave Brian a grocery sack FULL of them! So my kids know him as ‘the chili dog guy’.

  Well, Monday when Joe woke up, he found his mother had passed away in her sleep. So tonight was the visitation, and Brian wanted to go. But because Joe is such a good guy, EVERYONE was going to be there for him from Brian’s shop, including the owners/boss. And most of them had never met me or the kids, so… well, making a good impression was a close second on the menu to being there to give our condolences to Joe. I had concerns… me the silly blonde housewife and my F.I.V.E children at a funeral parlor where we knew no one…?

  And we did good! We were clean, dressed nicely, the kids behaved really well, I was cordial (and tasteful, not at all SAHM-ish) and met everyone… and it went well. So YEAY! We represented Brian well. ((And the Mexican supper we had afterwards was SOOOO good.))  A great evening. I was really relieved!!  And when Brian went into work Friday morning, his boss came out to the shop floor to comment to Brian that our kids were impressively well behaved.  He said that they were cordial and stayed close to their parents, and he thought they handled the visitation amazingly well.  Then he asked if they were public schooled.  Brian said, “Nope, we homeschool.”  His boss nodded.  “I thought so.”  ((!!!))

  So then Friday Brian also ended up spending time with the big boss: a client needed numbers and stats, and Brian’s the man for that, so he was invited to a lunch meeting with the boss and the client.  I’m… a little wiggy about how much time Brian’s been spending with the boss, truth be told.  That’s not normal.  More, he’s going overnight to Chicago with the boss (and two other guys) in a week or two.  That’s a LOT of boss-time!

  Anyhow, I thought that the funeral might be up north further, since Joe’s mom lived north of Cedar Springs, so I had gotten it in my head to pack a picnic lunch and do the Meijer Flat River Trail in Greenville on our bikes while we were up there.  When the visitation ended up being held in GR, I just bumped the bike adventure to the Friday night!  ((grins!))

  
  

  
  This is a kewl video of the whole trail, and while we’d taken a part of it before, long ago when we lived further up north, it wasn’t completed at that time.  It’s been 10 years since we’d ridden our bikes up that way, and so much has changed!  The trail is 9 miles long, and I figured we could do it with no problem.  Mostly because we did the Kent Trail South and the Paul Henry Thornapple Trail earlier this summer, and they’re just flat railroad beds that have been paved. This was kind of a psychotic ride – a LOT of up, up, up… and ZOOOOOOOOM! down around sharp curves and under bridges and thru the tunnels and such. The video doesn’t do it justice, seriously.  It kicked my booty!

  The fun started on the way up there.  We took the alternative route, because the expressway on Friday night of Labor Day weekend?  Um, no.  And we ended up riding behind this for quite a good deal of the way:

  
  

  
  Yes, I took pictures thru the windshield – I couldn’t help it!  And yes, he’s got a straw hat, a blue ‘Amish’ shirt, and suspenders on.  He can’t be Amish, though – they don’t drive.  They were cute, watching thru the back window.  He kept scootching her closer, LoL!! 

  
  
  

  
  We kept stopping along the way, because of all the critters we got to see.  There were kids swimming in the river under Jackson’s Landing, then we saw the Mama deer with two babies, then the Blue Heron, right up within 10 feet of us under a railroad tressel bridge!  Then there was this HUGE turtle out on a rock in the middle of the river, and Brian saw a woodchuck sit up in the grasses, but it darted away before I got it’s picture.  I also got a shot of a fuzzy black/white cat in the grass, but it didn’t turn out so well.

  Baby Owen is the cart behind me, and Lydia rides in the back, to be sure Owen doesn’t throw anything out of the cart (it’s a trick of his), so they didn’t make the picture, but there are the guys on the trail.  And it was definitely a fun ride.

  The ‘oops’ we made was in stopping halfway and having supper at McD’s (Brian talked me out of the picnic thing, for time constraint purposes).  If I had it to do over, we would’ve finished the trail in the last of the daylight, then gone to eat, but… hindsight is 20/20, and all that.  Anyhow, when we came out, the sunset was just GORGEOUS.

   

  We hit sunset just as we went into the grasslands behind Meijer, and I was getting pelted in the head by bugs, Lydia was giggling like crazy, cuz I was all “Ptttt! Ptttt! Pttt!” every time one hit me in the mouth. But we saw three more deer as we went back into the grasslands, and with the sunset off to the west, and this amazing sun ray display to the south… oh, wanna see that, too?

  
  

  
  Isn’t that amazing?  I’m glad we hit it at twilight, the colors were just breathtaking.  And as we came out of the grasslands, we accidentally missed the wetlands and took a residential shortcut… but I am NOT complaining. Because by then the sun was gone, and it was dark.  Swamp after dark?  NO. Thank. You.  As it was, it was kind of spooky in the woods, because it’s even darker in there.  You know me – Miss Girl Scout (“always prepared”)… I had my LED flashlight in my purse, so I rode up front and lit the way, and we biked the last two miles by flashlight!  Talk about an adventure.

  
  

  Also made for fun unhooking everything
  and loading the truck back up!

  Brian says he wants to do it again by daylight. I… may need some convincing.  The  kids loved it, but it’s the up, up, up that had me hot n’ sticky and not in a good way. ROFL!!  We had flavored water to re-hydrate on the way home, and got to see the blue moon – it was way beautiful.  In fact, here’s the picture I took from our yard:

  
  So there’s our adventure for the week. 
  And I’m pretty sure I lost several pounds on this one, too!
  

  • 9:26 am
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