Harry Potter

Four years ago tonight I stood on the steps of Caernarfon Castle in north Wales with a group of fellow study abroad students proudly posing with our new copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  We were all bummed to find out that we'd be on a field trip to Wales when the book was released, rather than in Oxford, but an enterprising student on the trip called the only bookstore in Caernarfon and convinced them to open at midnight so long as we could guarantee that at least 25 copies would be sold.  We got our books at the shop and ran to the steps of the castle for a photo op, and only one person (not me) immediately read the ending and called her friends in the States who would otherwise have had to wait another five hours to see how it all turned out.

I had only jumped on the bandwagon that spring, but I read all six of the previous books in a four-month time span--two while I was here at the Bio Station for a spring term class--for the sole purpose of being able to go to a launch party in Oxford (or Wales, as the case turned out to be) when it came out.

I have not seen the movie as of yet.  But it's not like I don't know how everything will turn out...

Weekend adventures, part 2

The weekend's excitement did not end with that trip to Petoskey on Saturday; I also had to drive the fiancé back to the airport on Sunday.  This time there were no weather conditions affecting air travel so his flight departed as scheduled from Chippewa County International Airport.  Driving someone to the airport is usually not that big of a deal, but then one usually doesn't have to drive across the Mackinac Bridge in order to get to said airport.  I had been over the bridge in the past but had never driven across myself.  Thankfully, I don't drive a Yugo, so my car didn't get blown off the bridge even though I drove over the grating in the middle lanes, but when you can still feel the winds buffeting your car it's a bit unnerving when you're 200 feet above a body of water that's almost 300 feet deep.

I told the fiancé to take the photos for this one since I certainly wasn't going to take my hands off the wheel.

Approaching the Bridge from I-75; at this point we'd already  passed the last exit possible in the Lower Peninsula.  The sign on the right says "REDUCE SPEED" but people were still going 70 at this point.

Looking east toward Lake Huron.

Ooh, we're on the Bridge!  So far so good.  But we're really high up and we're not even to the towers...

The car's swerving because I'm driving on the grating and this never happens when I drive over grating on other bridges and it's super windy and it's really far down to the water OMG

I would like it to be known that I drive over bridges with grating every time I visit my parents; it's just that those bridges don't face the wind that the Mackinac Bridge does, so my car doesn't swerve back and forth ordinarily.

Now that I am not, at the moment, driving a car across the Bridge, I can appreciate how much of a feat of engineering it is.

Made it!  And that van there totally makes the photo that much more "Upper Peninsula".

Our destination of the day.  It has flights to and from Detroit, and the security checkpoint doesn't even open until about 45 minutes before takeoff.  Fun fact: the airport used to be Kincheloe Air Force Base with a squadron of B-52s in the '50s and '60s.

On my way back; this time I've got to do it on my own.  Definitely glad I'm in a car and not on a motorcycle like the people in front of me.

The loooong approach from the north side.  Needless to say I couldn't take any more photos after this.  The ride back was only slightly less harrowing than the ride up but I managed to make it despite the car in the right lane deciding not to get out of my blind spot and, therefore, preventing me from changing lanes.

Petoskey

Photo post!

The fiancé came to visit me this weekend after an eventful trip from Washington DC on Friday.  His original flight plan called for a flight from Baltimore to Detroit, to Chippewa County International Airport (south of Sault Ste. Marie).  Storms had apparently rolled through on Friday afternoon and disrupted air travel on the East Coast, causing his flight out of BWI to be delayed for over an hour.  Upon landing in Detroit, he found that his flight up north had been cancelled altogether which did nothing to improve Delta Airlines' image for either of us.  They put him on a late flight to Traverse City which very slightly improved their ratings, but the flight was scheduled to arrive at 11.40 PM and Traverse City is about two hours' drive from the Bio Station.  All told I spent a little over four hours in the car on US-31 late at night, trying to avoid deer in the road for my first visit (albeit brief) to Traverse City, but as you might imagine I have absolutely no regrets about it.

On Saturday we drove a little ways back down US-31 again and visited Petoskey.  I figured I could get another photo post for the blog!

We parked for free near the marina and checked out the boats before walking over to the downtown area.

I'm a fan of the flower photos.

I don't even know what any of these are called.

We got lunch at the American Spoon Cafe which has amazing everything.  I had breakfast for lunch, partly because I wanted to ensure that I got some of American Spoon's delicious sour cherry preserves with the meal.  Before I go home I intend to stop at the American Spoon shop next door to the cafe and make a huge purchase of delectable fruit preserves.  It was a sad, sad day when the American Spoon Cafe in Ann Arbor closed; I couldn't go the Beaner's Coffee (now Biggby) that replaced it for a long time!  (In much the same way I couldn't go to the terrible pizza place that replaced the Tim Hortons at the League on campus, ever.)

We walked around downtown Petoskey after lunch, and made a stop at a gazebo in what I have since learned is Pennsylvania Park.

American Spoon also has delicious gelato which we came back to after checking out various downtown shops.  All available tables and benches being occupied, I had the fiancé hold on to my cup of hazelnut-stracciatella and maple walnut so that I could get a photo.

Some foul fowl, mayhap?

This jetty is near the marina.  The sign says one thing, but the obviously recently-surfaced sidewalk says otherwise.  A short ways down the jetty (behind the sign from this perspective), the groomsmen of a wedding party were taking photos and generally looking classy.  At the far end of the jetty, high school kids were alternately jumping off the jetty (there are ladders built into the retaining walls to get out of the water), smoking cigarettes, and generally just doing things that stereotypical high schoolers are often wont to do.

A view of Little Traverse Bay, looking towards Bay Harbor and the rest of Lake Michigan.

A view of Petoskey from the end of the jetty.

New books

When I lived in the dorms in undergrad there were few things more awesome to get in your mailbox than the slip notifying you that a package had arrived.  Apparently nothing has changed in six years.  I went to check the library's mailbox this afternoon and lo and behold, a package notification!  Not even just one, but two different boxes, one of which was directly addressed to me by name; the other had been addressed to "Library".  It's not even my stuff, and I had been expecting all of the materials to show up, yet the novelty of getting that slip in the mailbox and the anticipation of opening up a box containing new books is still powerful.  It's the small things in life.

Also: bubble wrap.

Free time?!

I'm sure most people, like me, feel as though they have very little in the way of free time at home (or maybe that's just me?); there are always errands to run, groceries to buy, and countless other things to take care of.  This is emphatically not the case here.  All meals are taken care of so in theory I wouldn't need to go grocery shopping; I haven't yet found that I forgot something essential in Ann Arbor; and a lot of things can be taken care of online very quickly.  So what's a person, much less this city girl, to do in her free time here?

• Hike the trails around the station property.  Best to douse oneself in bug spray before going out on the trails at this point in the summer, I've found.
• Attend a square dance (held yesterday evening) for the social, rather than the dancing, aspects of it.
• Attempt to watch the Monegasque princely wedding but be thwarted by the network strength.
• Drive 90 miles round trip to Otsego County Sportsplex in Gaylord, the only rink in the area that has ice in the summer, to go skating and to prevent what few hockey skills I have from deteriorating.
• Read a lot of books.
• Sporcle.
• Plan a wedding from 250 miles away.

If you have other ideas as to what could be done with this abundant free time, I'm all for it.