I’m not sure of the exact date at the moment, but sometime in mid July, Todd and Linda had organized a kayaking trip to Lime Island in the UP / Canada. The plan was to get to the launch around 5:30 on Friday evening and head over to the Island where there were government cabins for camping. On Saturday, we’d paddle around the Island with a stop at St. Joseph Island in Ontario. On Sunday, paddle back and head home.

Janet and I drove up to get to the launch site in Raber, MI at 5:00 Friday afternoon. We got there a bit early – which is odd for us, so we decided to turn around to go back to some rumored general store that had coffee.

We never did find that stupid store… Instead, during a moment of brilliance trying to read a sign behind us, I managed to drive the Subaru into the worlds largest ditch, where it stayed for the next few hours.

We walked back down to the nearest establishment – a bar / restaurant on the corner and called the nearest towing service. While waiting, we got to meet the owner of the property on which my car was now located. She gave Janet a tour of the farm and offered us her four wheeler in case we needed to go anywhere.

The group headed off to the island around 7:00 – 7:30 after Todd helped move our kayaks over to the launch site just in case the Subaru wasn’t driveable. Ends up, the car was fine other than some scratches on the wheels and a bend safety ring on the trailer hitch from the wrecker. Janet and I headed over shortly after 8:00

We got there just a bit before dark, and I insisted on making a fire to cook, because I believe that cooking on a fire is essential for a camping trip.

On the island there are a set of government owned cabins in which we resided for the weekend. They were minimalist, but nice. I think I even have some pictures of them and the general “camping” landscape, but apparently I did not set them aside to be posted here.

Saturday, as planned, we circumnavigated Lime Island – with a little jaunt over to St. Joseph’s Island in Canada. While on St. Joseph’s we toured the remains of the fort there. Very importantly, they also had Reese’s PB ice cream sandwiches.

This was the most prominent remainder of the fort on St. Joseph’s, but there was no explanation of what it was for since it was detached from everything else.

Toward the end of the day, most of the group wanted to head back to the cabins to make dinner. I took a small group out to the light house North of Lime Island – which is really a glorified mansion at this point.

This buoy marked the East side of the shipping channel. We paddled up this east side and crossed at the buoys.

The lighthouse itself – like I said, it’s now a glorified mansion.

Sunday, we took a hike across the island in the morning, then headed back to the mainland. On the trip back, we got to see a Coast Guard ship in the channel.

Todd with the Coast Guard in the background.

The group on the return to the mainland.

Janet testing the water temperature.

When we got back, we were “greeted” by the boarder patrol who breezed through to make sure we all looked American. Some of the group gathered at the restaurant/bar, but we opted to head back since it was about a five hour drive to Grand Rapids and another three to Chicago.

Packed up for the return trip – the side that didn’t have mud packed wheels.

Playing “blog-entry-catchup” here, but backdating things so no one will know…

Fourth of July weekend is kind of a big deal for Traverse City, the surrounding area and probably anywhere that has an economy reliant on summer tourism. It’s a popular time to come back to visit, and Mark and Ashley were going to be back in Michigan for a week. Since I wanted to see them and Janet, I invited her up for a stressful weekend of meeting the entire family and many of the extended family.

Since she had never been North of Grand Rapids until this winter for skiing, all the summer fun things of Northern Michigan were new… which made a nice excuse to revisit some activities from the past. I got to Traverse City on Friday, and joined Mark and Ashley for the visit to Cedar and Polka Fest – Janet did not make it into town until very early that morning, so she missed out on that.

One of the most important of events was a trip to and up the Sleeping Bear Dunes. This also is a prime opportunity for picture taking.

The group atop the Dunes and looking out over Glen Lake.

One of the reasons that you go to the Dunes is to jump off the high points as in this fine exhibit.

The sand was incredibly hot, but I have issue with wearing shoes for the dune climb. This was a mistake, and at this point I had started to develop a nice blister in the middle of my right food. This eventually turned into a hole about an inch and a half wide in my foot… and I stole Kenzie’s shoes for the walk down.

This is Pier Stocking drive. Due to the hole in my foot, there was no plan to slide down and climb back up this time.

After the dunes, we did a cruise down the Platte River. I’ve probably done this 100 times, making it an easy classic. Apparently I didn’t take any pictures of our journey, but this is representative (and even understating) of the mass of people.

Sunday we went out on Kyle’s boat and Janet and I stopped briefly in town for a quick Cherry Festival experience – as usual, if you live there, downtown is not really the place you want to be during Cherry Festival.

WPC 21 took place in Qingdao China… honestly, not my favorite place to visit. I had been to Qingdao once before for a quick business visit, but to a more industrial area. This time we were staying in a hotel on the coast – I guess this is somewhat of a vacation place within China.

When it wasn’t insanely foggy, the beach was kind of a cool landscape. This boardwalk didn’t run everywhere, but there was some sort of path along most of it.

It wasn’t really a sandy beach, and we weren’t quite sure if these were natural or remnants of something man made.

I don’t know what these are, but they were scurrying everywhere on the beach.

This is a close up of one of the centipede like guys. They’d usually scurry as soon as they felt footsteps on the rocks.

We saw a couple of these little crabs to, but they were more elusive than the bugs.

So, I was hungry… looking in the fridge: there’s a bag of spinach and an over ripe mango. I happen to recall that I have a several month old package of chicken in the freezer. So, with these three ingredients we have the basis for something that resembles food.

Internet says mango-chicken salads take arugula not spinach. Experience says that salads including fruit go with vinaigrette. Internet also says something about honey-mustard chicken. So, now we have inspiration.

For the chicken – as it turns out, I don’t have any honey. So, since I’m using mango, I substitute a bit of orange juice concentrate for the honey and add garlic.

My spinach isn’t magically changing into arugula, so that’s just not going to happen. Plus, spinach probably has more nutritional value.

For the dressing – I’m not sure what the actual ingredients of balsamic vinaigrette are, so I mix the vinegar, oil, the last few frozen blackberries from a bag in the freezer, a couple of the mango bits, some oregano, some thyme and some garlic. The seasons are the biggest issue here – I really don’t know what oregano or thyme taste like, how they’ll mix or what they’re supposed to go with.

Mix all ingredients in a big bowl and toss and the result is:

Voila: Salad!

It was relatively edible. Maybe even good in some ways, but I don’t think I need to make it again.

This was the first attraction of the gardens – a giant slab of granite.

The Chinese Gate.

I’m not sure the significance of this, but I thought made a cool picutre. A walkway just ouside the Chinese gate.

I don’t recall the Indian name, but we would call this an Umbrella Tree for it’s wide canopy.

Just some pretty flowers growing on a tree… Not a tourist attraction.

Capturing the nice tree canopy. You can see the glass house in the distance.

The biggest mango tree in the garden. Mangos are delicious, BTW.

The glass house, serves as the central area of what sounds like a larger gardner’s market.

On our way out, the crows were putting up a fuss. Apparently it’s because one of the parks many dogs had taken one down… who knew dogs could do that.

The Bangalore Palace from the outside. The armed guards informed our group that we were only allowed one camera. The fine gentlemen I work with were gracious enough to let me play photographer.

Maharajas like hunting elephants. This one was mounted just inside the entry way of the palace.

Once they shot the elephants, they made stools out of their feet. You can’t really tell from the picture, but that’s a sizeable stool.

I think this was the most impressive chandelier in the palace.

Back at the hotel. Half way around the world, the one constant remains, McDonalds.

And, finally, because I promised, a quick shot of a couple of the monkeys lounging on the rooftop outside the hotel.

And, with that, I must go be social or risk various coworkers’ wrath.

Unknown Church in Eindhoven

Mmmmmmm… pollution!

I purchased a “Bag of Crap” from Woot.

For the uninitiated, Woot is a site that features one item (often techy) for sale every day, available until midnight central time or it (occasionally) sells out. Then, there is the Woot-Off… a multi day event where an item goes up for sale until it sells out and is the replaced my the next item. The problem I have is that people often buy stuff they don’t need and often don’t even want on the chance that the next item might be better. “Bags of Crap” are an item that invariably come up a fwe time per Woot-Off and sell out almost immediately. When they come up, the web site nearly crashes and a few people end up paying $1/ea. for up to 3 craps and $5 S&H. Your $8 gets you a box of (3) random odds and ends which can vary from a broken MP3 player case to a 46″ LCD TV. Obviously, some is complete garbage and some is worth hundreds to thousands of times the price you paid.

The pride aspect is that snagging one of these “Bags of Crap” is very highly revered in the geek community. Which brings me to the present… the crap was on my doorstep upon returning from TC.

A High School Musical pink kids clock!

A t-shirt. Kids size 6. Anyone understand the pattern? Anyone have a kid who is or will be size six?

A steam cleaner. This had an RMA number and a remanufactured sticker on the box. It appears to work as new, but I can’t vouch for its ability to clean anything.

A three pack of gym totes (not sure why I got four items). I’m seen guys wear these, it makes me embarassed for them.

And… all orders include a flying screaming Woot! Monkey. This guy will get to live at work until his screams annoy someone into destroying him.

So, there you have it. The contents of my first Woot! Bag of Crap.

The above was made at GPS Visualizer. It makes some very nice plots, and has a lot of configuration options. The only downside is that because it’s all done through a web interface, there’s a lot of slow iterations to find the settings that work. In that sense, it would be nice to have a piece of software which would go grab the maps and allow more real time tweaking of all the input parameters.

Lest you not be bothered to note the key, the track is colorized by heading (read / pink heading North, green heading South). I had colorized it by speed, but we cruised right between 3 and 3.5mph for almost the entire time we were moving, so that didn’t show much. You can see in the middle that we passed on the upwind side of the lighthouse each time.

The trip was fist planned a week earlier, but weather wasn’t cooperating. On the second attempt, the weather appeared to be holding, so we headed up to the area on Friday night. Crashed at the farm in Empire, mainly to avoid having to pack up, paddle in the dark then pitch a camp somewhere along the point.

Saturday morning we got up kind of early to head out to the island. Stopped at DH Day, filed a float plan, got car passes and a back country permit. Stopped in Glen Arbor for breakfast and were unpacking at the beach when I had the brilliant idea to lock my keys in the car. Since there were no objections, I went ahead with the plan. That ended up causing about an hour delay in getting on the water.

Conveniently, I’m still within the three year / 36k mile window on the Subaru, so with that I get free roadside assistance. I called Subaru, Subaru found a tow service who they then contracted to come let me back into my car.

Launching… from this angle you cannot see the lighthouse which was our crossing landmark.

Morning drama aside, we got on the water in what was a beautifully clear day with maybe 10kt winds from the West / Northwest. We cruised three miles out to the point before turning to cross the channel. Finding the point is kind of battle between logic and instinct. Instinctively, every outcropping of land we went around seemed like it might be the proper departure from the mainland. Logically, you just have to keep paddling until the lighthouse and the island are squarely to your side. At that point, unless there is obvious land jutting out infront of you, you’re probably starting to turn and move away from the target.

Also, since I failed to mention, there is a lighthouse in the channel. Island & lighthouse – this was a two-for-one trip.

This is what much of the mainland shoreline looked like, with Linda for scale.

The crossing itself is about seven miles with the lighthouse roughly in the middle. For the most part, the waves stayed under 1ft. and the wind wasn’t anything to horrible.

If Todd gets to stop and take pictures, so do I!.

Perspective is a neat thing, but don’t let it fool you – those dunes are huge.

This is the closest clear shot I have of the lighthouse. It’s not really in the best condition, especially noting the poop covered solar panels on the second level.

Made it to the island.

After the initial landing on the island, we paddled up the West coast a ways. There was a very nice campsite up there (as Todd and Linda has speculated) but beacuse of the winds and waves, the water near it was quite churned up. Too bad, because watching the sunset from a tent on a bluff would have been kinda cool. It would have also added three miles to Sunday’s return trip, so given the options, we headed back to the South end of the island.

Cruising back toward the South end of the island for the night.

It rained overnight and this guy took shelter under my kayak. And then I chased it down for a picture.

We didn’t waste much time in the morning, because the best weather was slated to be early on in the day. It was overcast and raining in places – we got to see South Manitou consumed by rainclouds while on our return trip. The weather held well enough, and we only got sprinkled on briefly.

These clouds looked more concerning than they really were – there was no lightning. I found it neat how you could see how they were sitting on a pocket of lower air.

Back on the mainland – I think this was the tallest and it was definitely the steepest bluff we saw. Obviously some daring people have climbed it.

As we were getting back to the launch site I grabbed this picture of Sugarloaf. Too bad they’re no longer open for skiing.