Our friends Yuri and Aaron come to visit, along with their 3 year-old daughter Kaylie. Bree and Liya have fun playing with her at the park.
We spend the Fourth at not one, but two church potlucks: lunch with friends from Seattle Taiwanese Christian Church, then dinner with First Taiwanese Presbyterian Church. Everyone’s exhausted by the end of the day, but Liya and Jan walk down the street to enjoy the fireworks show put on by the tennis club down the street.
Jan joins friends Marc (pictured) and David on his first backpacking trip of the season. There’s still a lot of snow in the mountains, so the three head to the southeast corner of Olympic National Park, where much of the lower elevations are snow-free. They walk several miles up the North Fork of the Skokomish River, then turn up a side trail and climb up to Flapjack Lakes. The lakes are clear and — as they discover when they jump in — cold.
Jan, Marc, and David hike up from Flapjack Lakes to Gladys Divide, which is still covered in snow. From there, they scramble up to the modest summit of Mt. Gladys. Climbing in the snow requires a fair bit of work, but they’re rewarded with a 360-degree view of the Olympic Mountains. They slip and slide back down to Flapjack Lakes, and cool off with another dip in the lake.
Jan and his friends hike finish their three days of backpacking with a hike back down to the Skokomish River, then along the river to the ranger station at Staircase Rapids. Near the trailhead, they come upon some massive root structures on boulders. David poses for scale.
Bree turns 10! Bree and Angela spend the weekend on a mother-daughter trip to the Suncadia area with four other mother-daughter pairs.
When they come back, we have a small family celebration. Liya’s present to Bree (a Lego kit) includes over-the-top gift wrapping.
Bree’s first job. She babysits Kalyani, a 3 year-old girl of a neighborhood family. The girl’s grandmother is there, too — Bree’s job is to act as the grandmother’s helper, and generally run around with the active toddler.
Bree manages to beat both of her older sisters by being the first to make any money through work outside our house.
Jan and Bree leave for a long weekend in Au Gres, Michigan, to attend a memorial service for Jan’s Aunt Barbara. She passed away last fall. Lyn joins them for the trip; Jan’s brother Chris will meet them there.
The airline changed the outgoing flight, originally scheduled for 10:30 am, to the decidedly less convenient 6:00 am, so we all wake up at the ridiculously early hour of 3:30 am. We’re rather tired by the time we get on the plane. The flight to Chicago is uneventful, and we have a surprisingly pleasant meal at O’Hare at a restaurant called Summer House. Our next flight’s delayed a bit, but we eventually make it to Saginaw.
The airport’s in the middle of cornfields. We pick up the keys to our rental car at a small booth. The customer service rep says our car is waiting in parking spot #21. We got outside, find the parking spots for the company, and follow them down: 15… 16… 17… and then 18 – the last spot. Beyond spot 18: nothing but endless cornfields. We wander up and down the row of cars, and press the car remote a few times, with no luck. Finally an employee of a different rental agency suggests pressing the car remote’s panic button. We suddenly hear loud honking in a different section of the parking lot, where we find some additional numbered parking spots, including ours.
The drive to Au Gres only takes an hour. We arrive at the Cozy Cove Resort: a row of very modest cabins squeezed between US Highway 23 and Lake Huron.The tiny town of Au Gres is light on accommodations, so we take what we can get, but at least we’re on the lake.
For dinner, Jan looks up some restaurant options on Yelp. The closest is “Kelly’s Pizza”, which has a few good reviews, and it’s only 2 minutes away. The pizza place turns out to be a small part of “Kelly’s Marathon”: a Marathon gas station. Still, we’re hungry, so we order a pizza. It’s not bad. Even better, the restaurant side of the gas station serves a stunning variety of handmade ice cream flavors. The ice cream turns out to be excellent.
Jan and Bree go to bed early. It’s a little hard to fall asleep at first, because the people at the cottage next door keep setting off Roman Candles. Lyn stays up to wait for Chris, who pulls in late in the evening.
We drive into the town of Au Gres for breakfast at the H&H Bakery. The town has seen much better days. It was never really big, but like many small rural towns, it’s been hollowed out. A handful of familiar businesses are still there, including the IGA supermarket and Zanner’s Ice Cream, but others like the hardware store have closed.
Back at the rented cabins, we play on the beach. The water’s pretty cold, but we still all go for a swim. The beach has plenty of small, flat, rounded stones which are perfect for skipping. Jan and Chris coach Bree through the motions, and she spends much of the rest of our time on Lake Huron trying to skip rocks. She does eventually manage to skip a few rocks. Chris and Bree also have fun playing with a kind of pump-action water squirter, taking turns trying to blast apart towers of sand.
Our first visit for the day is to the Frey cottage, where we chat for a while with Barbara’s daughter (and Jan and Chris’ second cousin) Leslie. We walk up the beach to the cottage owned by cousin Dick Ramsay, and find him out on the dock. He invites us to hang out with him for a while on the patio. Jan and Chris spent many summer days in this cottage back when it was owned by their grandparents and, later, Lyn. Dick has updated the cottage a bit, but it still remains the small and charming beach cottage we remember. Meanwhile, Bree focuses on collecting rocks for skipping. She also finds a petoskey stone — a kind of fossilized coral with a pretty pattern.
We have lunch at the restaurant that used to be Dunleavy’s tavern. It hasn’t gotten better with age or the new owner. About half the menu in the local restaurants comes deep-fried. After spending the afternoon at the cabin, we have dinner at The Lodge, one of the higher-rated restaurants in easy driving distance. Our asparagus appetizer comes deep-fried, as does the perch dinner. We top off the healthy meal with ice cream at the Dairy Queen in Tawas, which is hopping on a summer weekend night.
The cottage next door to our cabins again sets off Roman Candles at night.
It’s beautiful weather for Aunt Barbara’s memorial service. We have breakfast up in Tawas at the Whitetail Cafe. We arrive just before the cafe opens, and there’s a small crowd outside. When the doors open, everyone streams in to grab one of the fairly small number of tables.
We spend the morning on the beach again, swimming, skipping rocks, and building sand castles. Lunch is at B’s Family Restaurant, where most everything comes served deep-fried. Afterwards, we stop by the Gammie cottage to reunite with that branch of the clan. Bree mentions that she’s collecting good rocks for skipping, and Helen Gammie says she’ll try to collect some for her.
The memorial service is at the Sims family cemetery. The last time we were at the cemetery was eight years ago, in 2009, for Aunt Ginny’s memorial service. A crowd of relations gathers, and the service starts at 3:00 pm. Barbara’s daughters and a handful of other people give a series of readings which had been selected by Barbara herself: a book dedication she’d written for her daughter Kate, some student and peer evaluations from her long years as a schoolteacher, some bits of Shakespeare, bible verses, and other remembrances.
There’s a reception after the service at the Frey cottage, along with a large family photo. After the reception, we drive back up to Tawas for dinner at G’s Pizzeria. It’s mobbed, but we’re lucky to get a table right away. Afterwards we stop at the Marathon gas station again for more handmade ice cream. It amazes us once again that a gas station would serve ice cream this good.
Back at our cabin, there’s a big family picnic that’s been going on all day. They stay up late playing music and talking, which keeps us all up for a bit, and of course the cottage next door again sets off Roman Candles. But after that’s all over, it’s nice to lie in bed and hear the sound of the waves.
Chris has to leave Au Gres very early in the morning to make his flight back to California. We have a final breakfast at the H&H Bakery, where we run into Kate and Laurie Frey again. We stop by the Gammie cottage to spend some more time with them. Cousin Helen comes back from a walk along the beach, and has indeed brought back some flat skipping stones for Bree. Our last visit for the morning is the Forks cottage, and then we head out of town. We have lunch at Wheeler’s in Standish, another old business that’s managed to stay afloat.
Flying back through Chicago, we seek out an airport restaurant we’ve heard is actually really good: Tortas Frontera. The fresh, hot food lives up to the hype.
Bree has a subscription to a mail-order series of small craft or engineering projects. The latest one is a small rocket propelled with baking soda and citric acid. She asks Jan to come with her to the park so she can try it out, and the two have great fun watching it shoot a modest distance (30 feet?) into the air.
Jan and Bree begin a 3-day backpacking trip to Toleak Point on Washington’s Olympic Coast. Last year they hiked the same area, and liked Toleak Point so much they decided to hike all the way in (6 miles) so they could spend two nights there.
Bree and Jan have lots of fun at a small stream that runs down the beach. Bree’s brought two little Lego mini-figures with her, and Jan makes a small kayak for the figures from a foam float Bree found on the beach. It’s fun to watch this kayak make its way down the stream to the edge of the water.
Bree negotiates a driftwood logjam on Third Beach on the way back to the trailhead. Including a 4-mile day hike she did with Jan yesterday, she hiked 16 miles on this trip!