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Making, baking, and (un-)breaking things in Southeast Michigan.

Category travel

Tahquamenon Falls State Park

October 4, 2007

Southeast Lower Tahquamenon Falls
(Click for more photos…)

As mentioned previously, Danielle and I headed up to Tahquamenon Falls State Park in northern Michigan this past weekend. I guess I don’t have too much to say about it, except that it was a nice weekend.

In short, as I remember the UP is much like many of the scary southern states, except without the accent. There are loads of pretty parts, good food is hard to find (Pickelman’s Pantry was not very good), and long distances between things. There were lots of nifty things around the park to look at, including the falls themselves, hiking trails, multicolored mushrooms, puffballs, and people who don’t know how to row.

I found the gift shop particularly interesting, especially the wall of fantasy figures in the gift shop. I guess the 80s have finally reached the UP.

Hmm, I’m going to stop now and state that I’ll likely make a lengthier post tonight or tomorrow. For now I’m feeling a bit hungry, so I want to get home and eat. Finishing captioning the photos was the last thing on my to-do list, and now that it’s done I’m happy.

If you’d like to look through the photos, just click here (photo gallery retired).

moved from livejournaloutdoorstravel

Birmingham, MI to Ann Arbor, MI via Train

September 21, 2007

Train Arriving at Birmingham Platform
(Click for more photos (photo gallery retired)…)

Back on July 7th Danielle and I decided to head to Ann Arbor for the evening. However, instead of driving there, we decided to take the train from Birmingham at around 5pm, then back at about Midnight. While the ticket cost was around $80 for the two round-trip first-class tickets and gas would have cost around $18, it was a nice diversion from the normal drive.

Along the hour-ish ride we passed through some rather interesting areas, seeing everything from a state trooper attempting to drive around the gates and TURTL graffiti to someone with a pickup slinking around an abandoned building (stealing copper?) and a giant chicken on KIDZ PLAYLAND. There was also the typical landfill, rail yard, and wetlands.

Once we arrived at Ann Arbor we walked up the stairs and road to Zingerman’s Deli and Next Door where we had dinner. I actually ate a rather substantial bacon-laden sandwich, Zingerman’s lovely Jen’s Pimento Parti.

After eating we wandered around the town a bit, eventually meeting up with and a very tired (and lost) . After a bit more wandering around, including back to the train station, waited until it arrived, then made our way back to the Birmingham station, where we arrived just after 1:30am.

By the way, the Birmingham platform is pretty crappy. It’s nothing but a track-level concrete platform located at the end of a road, and is fitted with a very uninformative information display and a “shelter” which does little but retain heat and stink of urine.

The train itself was decent, but nowhere as nice as UK trains. The ride was smooth, but slow. Staff was courteous, although not particularly friendly. The inside of the train feels like sparse 70s engineering. I’m not sure if I’ll take it to Ann Arbor again, but I’d definitely consider it for transit to Chicago. Without all the hassles of air travel (able to bring whatever you want on board, no security, etc) is rather nice, and the ticket cost is about the same as flying.

(Yes, I did just get these pictures uploaded this week. If you’d like to see all of them, please look here (photo gallery retired).)

foodmoved from livejournaltravel

Heritage Harvest Days

September 20, 2007

Water-cooled engine powering a reciprocating saw.
(Click for more images (photo gallery retired)…)

After hearing about it from Danielle and I headed up to Seven Ponds Nature Center in Dryden, MI (map) for Heritage Harvest Days. We were supposed to meet up with and , but due to some confusion we went on Saturday instead of Sunday and missed them.

Seven Ponds is a private, non-profit nature center, and Heritage Harvest Days is one of its fundraisers. The event consists of a number of people demonstrating their crafts, music, and a few people selling things. Admission is US$5, and it’s very worthwhile. There were lots of nifty things to look at, trails to wander, and it was just an all around good time.

Here are some highlight photos:

· Tractor-powered sawmill.
· Guys sitting on the tractors which are powering the sawmill.
· Studebaker Pickup Truck.
· Frustrated-looking magician after getting out of a straight jacket.
· Danielle in the herb garden.
· Hummingbird clearwing moth.
· A sheep named Piggy being sheared.
· Cute sheep!
· Goat with a cast on its leg! (It got caught in a fence…)
· Reciprocating saw powered by the engine pictured above.
· Corn on the cob being steamed in a barrel.
· Danielle eating corn on the cob.
· Lake, at the bottom of the hill behind the festival.
· Raccoon poop.
· Cute goat reaching under the fence for leaves.

Of course, the rest of the photos can be seen in the Heritage Harvest Days at Seven Ponds (photo gallery retired) album.

When looking through the gallery you might notice that things look a bit… better. In order to make the page look fuller and cut out some whitespace I set the thumbnails to fit within a bounding box of 300 x 300 (up from 150 x 150) and made the default resized images fit within an 800 x 800 box. Around 30% of visitors to the site are at 1024×768, and when tested on a monitor running IE at that resolution, things were still plenty usable. A little bit of scrolling to the right was required, but only maybe 20% of the screen wasn’t visible without scrolling. As almost all other users were using a resolution above 1024×768, this seems like a safe sizing.

moved from livejournaloutdoorstravel

Sheepie Preview…

September 15, 2007

More photos coming later…

This is just a preview of the Heritage Harvest Festival in Dryden, MI.

Due to some confusion Danielle and I attended the festival today instead of with friends tomorrow, but that’s okay. It was really nifty. There was a good bit of farm equipment, sawmills, animals, steam-roasted corn on the cob, trails to wander on, and stuff like that.

Anyway, more later. For now you get a really cute, freshly shorn sheepie. (By a multi-generation shearer who seemed to really care for her animals and made things from their wool.)

moved from livejournaloutdoorstravel

iPhone, Amtrak, Bacon, etc.

July 8, 2007

Yesterday I got to play with an iPhone. I think that I would buy one if the following things change:

· Ability to get photos off of it via Bluetooth (OBEX?), or some method other than simply syncing with iPhoto or via email.
· Ability to upload photos via Safari.
· Ability to use the phone as a network device for data access via from another device. Either as a BT modem or network device.

The interface is very very slick, and it’s pleasant to use. Google Maps on it is a dream. However, it doesn’t do the couple things I want.

Danielle and I took an Amtrak train from Birmingham, MI to Ann Arbor, MI. We wandered around Ann Arbor, ate at Zingerman’s, bought a few things, met up with Kate and Ben, and then took the train home. It was $72 round trip for the two of us with business class seats. I have a few complaints about the service, but generally it was all right. I don’t know if I’d go via that route again, but it was nice to see the trip between the the two towns from a different perspective.

When at Zingerman’s I ate a very tasty sandwich plied with some high quality, tasty, smoked bacon. It also included lettuce, tomato, avocado, and green chilis.

Photos of all of this will likely come later.

acquired thingsfoodmoved from livejournaltravel

Poutine!

April 2, 2007

Poutine!

Poutine from HARVEY’S.
(Click for more moblog photos…)

Danielle and I headed over to Point Pelee National Park yesterday. I’ll post photos of it later, but for now I wanted to post the photo of an order of poutine acquired at HARVEY’S in Windsor, just before crossing back into the US. This was part of our dinner, where I had a veggie burger (with onions, lettuce, and hot peppers), poutine, and 7-Up, while Danielle had a normal burger, poutine, and root beer.

Also, this was some tasty candy from Friday.

foodmoved from livejournaltravel

Alaska in 1996

March 27, 2007

Steve Vigneau and two halibut in 1996.

Me with two halibut in 1996.
(Click for more photos…)

Since I got a good bit of work done in the quiet of this morning I decided to finish up something else I’d been slowly working on for the past while: captioning of the re-scanned photos from Alaska in 1996 (photo gallery retired).

Back in 2004 I had scanned these photos using a transparency adapter on a Epson Perfection 3170 PHOTO. This didn’t work out as well as I had hoped, so when I acquired the Nikon Coolscan V ED I decided to rescan these negatives. Well, that’s finally done. (Information about 110 Slide and 35mm Negative Scanning is here.)

They look much nicer now, and I’d now consider them fairly well archived digitally.

If you’d like to look through them, the rest of the images can be found here (photo gallery retired)

found thingsmoved from livejournaltravel

Loads…

February 20, 2007


KEYWORD SEARCH: CHEMTRAILS (as seen in Berkeley, CA)
(Click for more photos from this trip…)

Hmm… So… What to say? I just returned from dropping my car off at Cass Collision in Shelby Township. The person seemed pretty insistent on having someone drive me home, but needing the exercise (and with it only about a mile from my house) I walked back anyway. With the weather in the 40s today it was about as cold as Mountain View was at night over the weekend, which I was pretty comfortable with.

Oh, so, yeah. The trip to Mountain View. Except for some cascading delays which put me at the airport a bit more than two hours late, all the traveling went great. I’d never rented a car before, but (likely due to the reservations being handled for me) both the pickup and drop-off went rather well. I was given the option between a Ford Mustang and a Chevy Malibu Maxx, but I opted for the Malibu Maxx in order to have something with better visibility and four doors. While I thought I would be driving people around, that didn’t happen. But… it’s all right.

On Saturday we headed down to Berkeley to grab pizza from The Cheeseboard Collective, which was absolutely wonderful. Mike, Joy, Jeff, Megan, and I ended up sitting on a ledge in front of the bank eating it while drinking Orangina and Reed’s Ginger Beer.

After that we went to the excellent Rabbit’s Food Meadery to taste a bunch of different meads and ciders. I really wanted to get more than just the single bottle of dry mead which I acquired, but due to the whole liquids on a plane security theater and my suitcase it would have been difficult to bring any back. I’ll just have to get more next time I’m out there.

I didn’t take very many photos while I was out there, and (stupidly) none of the meadery itself. The photos I did take can be seen here (photo gallery retired), though. These include a good number of my room, #423, at the Hotel Avante. It really is a great hotel, with a especially friendly staff and wonderfully clean, very comfortable rooms. I was quite happy with it.

foodmoved from livejournaltravel