I’m sitting in Espresso Bay in downtown Traverse City, leeching bandwdith from the first AP I found called ‘linksys’, tunneling everything via SOCKS (SSH tunnel). I drove up here yesterday in order to visit my grandparents who live about half-way between here and Grayling.
While I like visiting them, I find it a bit difficult to be in this area at times. I’d really, really like some nice veggie food, or at least some mostly-veggie Thai or Indian or Middle Eastern, but that doesn’t seem to be available. Despite being near water, seafood around here isn’t any fresher than it would be in Flint or Grand Rapids. There does seem to be a local organic / veggie eatery called the Homegrown Organic Eatery (WARNING! MySpace link), but it closed at 8pm. I think I’ll probably just end up grabbing a bean burrito from Taco Bell on the way back to my Grandparents’ place.
On the upside, I did get to do a bunch of outdoor things today. I first went for a bike ride, then swapped the touring tires out for knobbies, then went another 10 miles or so back on random trails that I came across in the woods. Some of the trails were particularly difficult because if the extremely (in many cases 100%) sandy soil in this area, but overall it was fun. I also managed to end up on some piece of property full of oil drilling remains, semi trailers (one marked Radioactive), campers, mobile homes, and other pieces of scrap. I think my grandpa knows the owner of the property and hopefully I’ll be able to get back there tomorrow with my camera and grab some photos.
My main reason for heading to Traverse City today was so that I could make my way up to Old Mission Point (at the 45th Parallel) and wander around the beach there. I ended up wandering down the beach, walking across a bunch of rocks, and ending up way out in the water on a rather interesting sand bar after quite a bit of walking. I think it’d be nice to bike up the peninsula one day, but it’s 18 miles (each way) of rather steep hills. The main road up to the point does have nice bike lanes on it, though. There are also some quite nice trails along the point in the park which might be good for riding around as well.
In lieu of other food I think I’ll just head back to my grandparents house now and grab a bean burrito from Taco Bell on the way. My grandma made turkey for dinner, but that’s one meat I particularly don’t like. No matter what it always tastes dirty to me.
Oh, something very positive: lunch today was pizza from the small convenience store near my grandparents house. While picking up the pizza with my grandpa I found that the store carries a small assortment of very good beers along with the normal stuffs. There were probably two doors worth of better Michigan beers and other imported things. While I don’t plan on getting any beer this weekend, it’s nice to know that it’s available in the future.
So, I was checking out your blog in my moment of insomnia and got caught up. WOW, you write a ton. Kudos to you for keeping up with the blogging. As far as TC goes and being dull. Well, it is a very shoppy place and over rated.. yet beautiful landscape. The small towns around it is where the good stuff happens or doesn’t happen? But it sounds like you know that. Anyway, I enjoyed peeking in on your blog. Take care and good luck with the gummy on the Ergons! Ali
p.s. it’s 130 and i have to be at the ithaca race by noon tomorrow and i will tell my teammate that is because of your blog that i’m going to have to sleep between laps…. ZzzZzzzzzzzzzz
Thanks, I just use it as a place to babble about stuff… I’d been writing things over at LJ for a while, but I’m (slowly) attempting to move the data to something that’s a bit more under my control. I figure after a year or so has elapsed with things here I’ll pull back lots of the LJ content (maybe delete it, or at least disable indexing) and keep things wholly here.
It looks like you’ve been writing stuff for quite a while as well. Nice. I’ve spent a bit of my waking up time this morning reading some, I’ll read more later.
Good luck with the race. I didn’t wake until 10:30, and then I still wasn’t able to sleep on one side very well. Oh well.
For what it’s worth I hope to be up in the TC area next weekend. There’s some family doings at my grandparents house in the Kalkaska / Mancelona area, so my girlfriend and I are heading up there. As the North Country Trail at Pickerel Lake runs about three miles from their place I’m hoping to give that a go. It should be interesting.
If you have some spare moments, the AuSable Canoe Marathon kicks off Saturday night in Grayling. If you haven’t witnessed the start, it is a sight to behold! Downtown Grayling IS the place to be! Check out my archives July 2007 for last year’s photo story. Great stuff.
I’d actually forgotten that we had other plans this weekend, so no up north journey. Instead we’ll be at the Michigan Brewer’s Guild summer beer fest.
Wait, things happen in Downtown Grayling? As I saw last time I was through there it’s almost all closed up and dead. There’s a bike shop and… concrete?