I recently did something downright insane: I took a vacation while everybody was off at band camp. Somehow I managed to get my shit together enough to have drill written well ahead of where everybody would be. Beyond that, I managed to get so far ahead that when I got back from my vacation, I was still roughly a week ahead of everybody. So for the first time in about 4 years, not only had I caught up, but I managed to be well ahead of the game. That's worth a vacation right there.
We left Thursday morning, managing to get everything in Jen's car with tons of room to spare. We each had only brought one backpack, a cooler, a bag of snacks, and her bike. The drive up to St. Ignace was easy, only hitting 2 construction zones the entire way there. Once we hit I-75, the massive barrage of advertising for the 3 competing ferry companies began with righteous fury. The clear winner, however, was Sheppler's. Every 4 feet there were at least 2 billboards, signs, people standing in sandwich boards, a ballet dancer doing an interpretive dance, and an Indian tribe communicating to you via smoke signals, all of them touting the greatness that was their fleet of boats that were clearly the fastest. Suckers for an all out advertising blitz, we embraced commerce and chose them as our charioteers to the island. As would happen many times over the trip, our timing was impeccable. We showed up, loaded our luggage, hit the bathroom (not literally HITTING the bathroom, you can get arrested for that), and got on the boat. Within 5 minutes, we were off.
My picture taking prowess is demonstrated quite clearly here. I hadn't quite mastered the digital camera I was using just yet. It was precisely at this moment you see here that I discovered that if you don't go through the whole auto-focus mess, the camera will not take a picture right away when you press the button. So instead of getting a picture of the world's 6th longest suspension bridge, I was instead blessed with this excellent picture of the seating on top of the ferry. The blurriness makes it artistic.
This is really what I was trying to get the first time around. As you can tell, the weather was particularly overcast. It would pretty much stay that way the entire time we were there. Little did I know, this would be the first of an absolutely unnecessary and almost excessive number of pictures of the bridge I would be taking over our 2 day trip.
After landing at the island, we made our way through downtown. We were apparently not the only people to come up with the brilliant idea of "getting away from it all" as there were tons of people all over the place. You quickly learned to hone your ninja like skills of sliding through things and being aware of everything around you since most everybody else on the island wasn't aware of anything. People and their children would randomly dart out or stop wherever they wanted because clearly they were the only ones on the island.
Fighting through the crowds, we made our way down the road to the edge of town where our bed and breakfast was located...