Back from vacation

Adam and I went away for two weeks --- to see his family, in Norwalk, Iowa, and then to spend time with my parents, and my brother and his fiancee, at a cabin in southwestern Michigan they've been renting for like 25 years. There's just one other cabin between the back door and the waves of Lake Michigan, and it's on a slight rise, so you can see the water and the sunset. It's a place I've gone to almost every August, even just for a day or two, since I was seven years old. It's rustic: not insulated, there's only one real bathroom (there's a toilet and sink in the basement, but they're rusty and a little icky), and the original builders did all the wiring themselves! It was built in about 1940. That's a photo Adam took of the family sitting on the lake porch, where we'll sit and talk or read... for hours sometimes. Note the rummage-sale style furniture! Terrific.

We spend a lot of time focusing on good food when we're at Grapevine -- here my brother imitates the posture of the "beer-can chicken" he's grilling (chicken grilled sitting with a half-full can of beer up it's behind). (Sorry if that's a bit crass.) He and Laurie, his fiancee, also made us some amazing eggplant parmesan with a puttanesca sauce (tomato sauce with olives and anchovies), and homemade BBQ sauce with orange zest, fennel, and other punchy ingredients. We also had blueberry pancakes, goat cheese rolled in roasted strips of zucchini, lots of good wine and German beer, and of course, ears and ears of sweet corn.

With all that eating, we also try to keep moving. We usually head down to sit and swim at the beach every day after the sun comes down in the sky, around 4pm. My parents try to do a three-mile walk every morning, followed by a swim in the lake. We younger folk tend to sleep in, but Adam and I did a couple hikes that week, too. Here, we hiked out into the dunes to see "The Big Tree," which is a 200-year old white pine, left behind by lumber companies at the turn of the century, for some unknown reason. If you climb to the top, you can see Lake Michigan. It's super-easy to climb -- like a great big ladder. We used to climb it all the time when I was little, but your hands get covered with pine sap and scratched-up with the bark, which also gets in your mouth, nose and eyes when you look up at the person climbing above you. Bleh! So we just took a picture this time. Small note: when I was a little girl, I romantically decided that the name of this pine was "Four Winds." Ah, young precociousness.

We also spent a morning in Saugatuck -- an art colony that has become a tourist trap. We looked in at a couple of galleries -- this is Constance Petter Gallery. It was alright, but I think I've been doing this for too many years (maybe since I was 12?), so it's sort of predictable now. And the town is just so kitchy.

(That's a quilt! My brother loves it. It's $10,000, unfortunately.)

So, that's the nutshell of week 2 of our vacation. I'll tell you about Iowa in another post!