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Northern Michigan 2010

Molly and I went on a little weekend vacation last weekend to northern Michigan. You can see all the photos from the trip on my Gallery server. We started on Friday going to Traverse City for some wine tasting. We did pretty well; I forget what the total was, but we hit like 7 wineries on the Leelenau Peninsula including quite a few that we hadn't been to before. Keeping in mind my imminent house moving, I managed to keep the number of bottles purchased to a modest 4 or 5.

One of the wineries we went to was very Mexican adobe-house type of themed, which was way cool, and included the equally cool statue I've termed "Square Mary" pictured here. We also ran into an establishment that sold only hard apple cider from a variety of apples that I'd never heard from. I didn't think any of the cider was all that tasty, but it was interesting. The girl working said that apple cider is one of the only drinks that you can mix different varieties of and potentially end up with good results. Beer, wine, soda, can't mix different types of those. Hard apple cider, go to town. Now you know.

Friday night we drove over to Mackinaw City where we were staying, but stopped in Petoskey for dinner and a shout out to the sunset. We actually attempted to stop in Charlevoix, but there was some kind of fiesta happening in the streets and it was chaos, so we bailed. Anyway the sunset was rather nice, and provided quite a photographical challenge. I've only a couple times tried to photograph a sunset, and any positive results have been mostly on accident. These pictures turned out alright, although I've learned you're at the mercy of the clouds quite a bit.

The picture here on the left, I have no idea who the people are that are standing there. I would like to thank them for making my picture way better though! This picture really reminds me of OutRun for some reason. I can't find the picture to support it, although I swear the high score screen from the original OutRun has a similar vibe. Or something like that.

So we made it to Mackinaw City, then Saturday to Mackinac Island. We sorta fell into a special "bridge view" boat ride, where we went under the Mackinaw Bridge before making it to Mackinac Island. That was pretty nifty, I do enjoy the bridge. It was my first time to Mackinac Island, and it was quite an experience. People everywhere, at least in the little shopping area near the boat docks. We tapped around in that area before hiking up the hill to Lookout Point, which is supposedly the highest point on the island. Even picked up a few Geocaches along the way (having a real compass in my iPhone is awesome)! It was about that time that my back decided it had enough climbing steep hills, and I spent the rest of the afternoon avoiding anything that looked like a hill.

We continued wandering around, thankfully downhill this time, and ran across a few interesting things. One being this totally abandoned playground, which was pretty awesomely creepy. Especially because some storm clouds were rolling in. Good stuff. Ran across the Grand Hotel, complete with a tiny woman guarding the street in front of the hotel, off-limits unless you pay $10 to visit the hotel. No thanks. Almost got run over by some giant horses hauling about 50 elderly people, who seemed unconcerned that we were in their path. And found a pay phone along a random road in front of a standard farm. Odd.

Mackinac Island is pretty cool to see. I'm curious what goes on outside of the little tourist village there by the docks. Probably not necessary to go back anytime real soon though.

We headed back to Mackinaw City proper, and made the long trip back to the hotel room. After some much needed rest, we went back out to find dinner. We ended up eating at The Chippewa Room, which I can best describe as "northern Michigan fine dining". I posted a picture of the bread basket we got before dinner. The food was good, but it was totally just a townie restaurant with ridiculously jacked up prices, dim lighting, and some more exotic food choices (I actually wrote a review on Urbanspoon about it). Given our other opportunities, I think we made the right choice for food, but it was a really weird experience.

Also in Mackinaw City, I got the awesome opportunity to take this photo of a very overweight woman sitting on the stairs, right next to a sign that says "DO NOT SIT ON THE STAIRS". Molly reported she also had her shoes off and was generally "owning" her space, although I was too excited about the potential photo to notice such shenanigans. Awesome.

Finally we ended up back at the bridge for another sunset, as well as a couple of night shots. We didn't really have an awesome view for the sunset due to the location of the sun. Probably would have been better on the U.P. side, or better yet on Mackinac Island. Or, just a short walk to stand underneath the bridge actually so we didn't have the bridge in the way anyway. Oh well, it worked out alright.

On the night shots...I forgot my tripod, so I was attempting to position my camera using my iPhone to prop up the lens. Unfortunately, the glass-backed iPhone 4 came back to haunt me here, as it reflected some light into the top of the shots. So if you look at the upper part of any of the night shots of the bridge, you'll see a whole bunch of little green-ish dots. Yep, that's reflected from my iPhone (I think anyway). Oops.

So that was our trip! The total photo haul currently stands at 221, although you should know that I actually *shot* something close to 800 photos! I had a ridiculous amount of sunset photos; mostly of the same thing. I really should be able to trim it down further, but I need a break from looking at sunsets!

Hope you enjoyed the recap...

Breadbasket

Fine dining in Mackinaw City

Sunset FTW

Took a lot of pictures. Probably many terrible ones.

July $5 Amazon MP3 deals

I'm a big fan of Amazon's monthly $5 mp3 deals. Yesterday I picked up Allison Iraheta's album "Just Like You". Her sound seems to be somewhere between Hayley Williams (of Paramore) and Kelly Clarkson. I'm hesitant to give it a review after the first listen, but I'll say it doesn't suck. Which is surprising, considering her American Idol roots. Definitely I can tell there's some lazy generic rock-ish tracks, and some ballads that I'll probably decide are just boring. Once you get past those, I think there's some winners in there though. We'll see. She does refer to "texting" a couple of times, which I think is weird. I guess what can you do.

I also picked up the Silversun Pickups' first album, Carnavas. Salgat introduced me to their second album, "Swoon", which is as the kids say, straight dope. I haven't fully listened to the first album yet, although I know a couple of tracks from elsewhere. I don't expect it to match the awesome subdued intensity of the second album. I think it will be alright though. I did just realize that the second song is "Well Thought Out Twinkles", not "Well Thought Out Twinkies", which does make me less excited. I'll try to contain my disappointment.

And while it wasn't a deal, since I'm on the topic (although quite a departure musically from Allison Iraheta), I also picked up the new Eminem album last week, "Recovery". I have listened to it a couple of times, but not real closely, so I'm going to abstain on an official review here too. I'll say though I can already tell it's better than "Relapse" if for no other reason than he stopped using that obnoxious Triumph the Insult Comic Dog accent. Ugh, that was so annoying. Anyway it's no Slim Shady LP, but that's like asking Metallica to remake "...And Justice For All" (although they did come close with "Death Magnetic", which rocked hardcore).

In my new group at work, I'm no longer allowed to listen to headphones. The nicest way I can possibly put that is "lame". Especially since I now get enough cell phone signal to actually stream music from Pandora or Last.fm. So close to being awesome. So I'm not sure exactly when I'm going to listen to all this music, but at least I've got it! Can't have too much new music, right?