We walk down the street in the evening to watch the modest Fourth of July fireworks launched by the tennis club. This satisfies our desire to watch fireworks without having to fight our way home for two hours afterwards.
Years ago, we saw a kind of toy boat called a “pop-pop boat” featured in the anime movie Ponyo. We later learned that this was a real kind of toy boat that seems to be more popular in Asia than in the U.S. Three years ago we tried making pop-pop boats from raw materials but they didn’t work, so Bree ordered some real pop-pop boats online and gave them to Jan for a birthday. They’ve been sitting in a cabinet since then.
Today it’s a nice day, so Jan and Bree decide it’s time to try launching the pop-pop boats. We walk down to one of the pocket beaches near our house and give them a try.
This doesn’t go well. When we light one of the tiny candles that go inside the boats, the wind instantly snuffs it out. If we manage to light the candle for a moment, then sticking the candle inside the boat causes the candle to go out.
We retreat to the house to try the boats in our big kitchen sink. This goes much better!
After lighting one of the candles and sticking it inside a boat, the little flame takes a moment to heat up a tiny boiler filled with water. Somehow this causes the boat to move forward with little “Pop! Pop!” Sounds. The internet does not agree on the physics of how this actually works, but it’s fun nevertheless to watch the boats putt around the sink.
Our friends Leora and Paul host a Bastille Day party at their place on Camano Island. Angela and Jan drive up to spend the afternoon hanging out with people on the deck looking out at the beach. Near low tide we go for a walk along the beach — the water has gone far out from shore, stranding dozens of boats on the tidal flats.
Bree has gatherings with friends all week long to celebrate her birthday. She starts with a group of friends from Holy Names.
Bree is 17!
Angela leaves for a week on the East Coast. She spends the first part of the week with her longtime friend Sarah in the area around Lenox, Massachusetts. They enjoy two days at the Miraval resort there.
Angela’s birthday present to Bree was a dress form. It’s adjustable, so Bree’s able to dial it to her size, and the dress form makes it much easier to create clothing pieces. She’s delighted to begin using the dress form by making a corset for a cosplay outfit.
Angela flies to Virginia to spend a few days with her parents in McLean.
Angela’s mom, E-moon, has been keeping orchids as a hobby for a little while. She’s had four plants, each named after four of her five grandchildren: Evan, Liya, Anthony, and Brian. Bree has wanted to know why there isn’t a Bree orchid.
Angela reports that E-moon has now acquired a fifth orchid named Bree.
Jan’s trip to Michigan, Day 1. I pick up my mom early in the morning for our flight to Chicago. We’re on our way to meet up with Chris, Skye, and Skye’s family for a week in the small town of Au Gres, Michigan. A large number of relatives used to own cottages in Au Gres on the shore of Lake Huron, and a number of them still do. So we’ll be having a small sibling reunion as well as stopping by to see some extended family.
Chris has scheduled his flight from Portland to Chicago so he connects to the same flight Mom and I are taking onward to Saginaw. As Mom and I are walking through O’Hare to our next gate, on my phone I can see Chris’ dot coming up behind us.
When Chris has almost reached us, I stop and suggest to Mom that we take a selfie. I take a picture and then say, “Let’s get this guy in the picture!” and make room for Chris, who’s come up behind us. Mom’s delighted with the surprise.
We only have a few minutes to grab a quick fast food dinner before boarding our flight to Saginaw. We pick up a rental car there and drive through the cornfields to US-23, then north to Au Gres.
Skye, Jared, Leif (now 10), and Auden (7) reached our rental cottage earlier today. We’re staying at a cottage called “S’mores Beach”, which happens to sit right next to the cabins Bree, Mom, and Chris stayed at the last time I was in Au Gres in 2017. Skye and her family are there to greet us when we pull in at 10:00 pm.
The house is full of kitschy knick-knacks that AirBnB owners order in bulk online in a misguided attempt to add charm. Case in point: a “Lake Rules” sign, which contains “rules” like “Go fishing” and “Enjoy every sunset”.
There’s some negotiating over bedrooms, and then we all fall asleep listening to the sound of the waves.
Jan’s trip to Michigan, Day 2. Skye and I are up early before everyone else, and then over the course of the morning the rest of the family (all still on Pacific time) get up and have breakfast.
Our cousin Helen comes by mid-morning to take mom for a walk. It’s great to see Helen again – I think the last time I saw her was 2017, when the extended family all gathered for a memorial service.
We have a late lunch in Tawas at G’s Pizzeria. This makes the boys happy, although Leif doesn’t like cheese so carefully picks all the cheese off his pizza. Pizza is followed by ice cream next door at Marion’s. Auden gets a giant scoop of his favorite flavor: “Blue Moon”, a bright blue flavor mostly found only in Wisconsin or Michigan. Jared braves a taste and attests that it tastes vaguely like an orange creamsicle.
We shop for groceries at Neuman’s Market, then drop those off at the cottage. We head to the summer home of our cousin Gail, who lives in Au Gres for roughly half the year. She’s hosting a number of even more distant relations there, so we meet some cousins-of-cousins. Skye’s boys have fun playing in the lake with a younger boy belonging to a woman named Kelly, who seems to be a distant cousin-in-law.
For dinner Chris cooks a baked bean dish that’s quite tasty. Leif again picks all the melted cheese off the top of the dish.
Jan’s trip to Michigan, Day 3. Chris, Mom, and I head into the tiny town of Au Gres for coffee at Cauffee. (The “au” in the store’s logo are highlighted to emphasize the connection to the town’s name.) Cauffee is the first new business in town in a long while — they opened before the pandemic, managed to scrape through, and apparently are doing well enough to make it through the very slow winters. The coffee is, sadly, nothing remarkable, but we’re happy to give them our business.
Back at the rental cottage, we spend the morning swimming and playing with the cottage’s kayaks. Our cousin Helen comes by mid-morning to take Mom for a walk, and we get a chance to briefly chat with her.
For dinner I make a panzanella salad with watermelon. Yesterday I was happy Neuman’s Market had all the ingredients I needed for it — the only ingredients in the cottage itself was oil, salt, and pepper. And as I begin to cook, I discover that even the salt and pepper shakers are nearly empty; I text Chris, who’s made a run to the store, to pick up some more.
The “S’mores Beach” cottage does include a package of fixings for making s’mores on the beachside fire. The boys generally burn their marshmallows immediately, but still have a great time.
Jan’s trip to Michigan, Day 4. Chris and Mom head into town, and Skye and Jared go out for a run, so I spend the morning watching Leif and Auden. I’ve brought the two pop-pop boats Bree and I played with earlier this month, and the boys have fun playing with those in the bathtub.
Afterwards I direct their attention to the stream that runs on the north side of the cottage property down to the lake, and as expected they’re happy to play around in the stream. This naturally leads to the idea of making a dam, and the three of us spend a long time damming the lower part of the stream. Leif tries to fill in the gaps between the rocks with sand, and is surprised how quickly the water wears the sand away.
In the afternoon, Chris guides the construction of an even bigger dam slightly further upstream. At the moment, the boys’ favorite word is “skibidi”, which means roughly “stupid” or “silly”. (The word comes from what looks like a horrible TV show.) The dam becomes known as “Skibidi Dam”.
In the evening: s’mores again!
Jan’s trip to Michigan, Day 5. We spend the morning at the cottage of Catherine and her husband Gordon. Catherine’s mom to my second cousins, including Helen (whom we saw earlier in the week) and Alison (who’s there now with her husband Mark). Chris and I have fond memories visiting their cottage when we were young – it was about as far north up the beach as we would normally walk. It’s great to catch up with this side of the family for a while. Before we leave, we help Mark move a rowboat down to the beach so people can take it out.
We go into Tawas for lunch at a Mexican restaurant called Mangos. Afterward the boys are eager for their annual shopping spree at the Ben Franklin gift shop; they get a dollar to spend on cheap knick-knacks.
In the afternoon I go for a long walk up the beach from the rental cottage to the area that once was the site of a steakhouse called The Bear Track Inn. The restaurant used to be a summer favorite of the extended Sims clan, and each summer we’d have at least one big family meal there. Sadly, the restaurant was sold about 20 years ago and was replaced with a giant condo building.
After dinner: Yet more s’mores.
Jan’s trip to Michigan, Day 6. Chris and I take Mom up to Huron-Manistee National Forest. We stop first at Iargo Springs, where there’s a 300-step staircase all the way down to Cooke Dam Pond. Mom decides to stop halfway down and wait there, while Chris and I continue to the bottom. The springs are pretty, as is the view out over the pond and surrounding marshland.
We also stop at the the Lumberman’s Monument, an homage to the manly men and their logs. Chris and I have fun playing with a peavey: a pole with a spike and hook used to move logs.
We stop back in Tawas for lunch at Augies on the Bay. This is one of the only local restaurants not dedicated to pizza, burgers, or deep-fried food. I order the perch, a small fish Chris and I remember fishing for as kids.
In the late afternoon all seven of us make the short drive down US-23 to the Sims Family Cemetery. It’s nice to make a casual visit on a trip that’s not the focus of a memorial service. We take a while to explore gravestones. Most of the stones are grouped roughly by area of the family, but we spot one stone we hadn’t noticed on previous trips. It’s far off on its own, oddly placed just next to the low rock wall marking the cemetery’s southern edge. We later learn from Gail that the man buried there apparently had a difficult relationship with his mother – his stone is placed such that it can’t be seen from his mother’s stone.
We want to eat out again, but there are very few options in the area that cater to Skye’s vegetarian family. We settle for pizza again, this time at Tawas Bay Pizza. They have a pretty view of Tawas Bay, albeit one that looks directly over a two-lane highway.
Jan’s trip to Michigan, Day 7. We all leave the cottage around 9:00 am and make a brief stop for coffee again at Cauffee in Au Gres. From there we continue south to the small town of Omer (“Michican’s Smallest City”) and the Riverside Campground. We’ve made arrangements to spend the morning floating down the Rifle River on inner tubes.
It’s a nice Saturday in mid-summer, so many, many other people have the same idea. A full school bus transports us up the river a bit. We select inner tubes from a giant pile of tubes. These inner tubes are quite nice, with a bottom to keep you relatively dry, an inflated backrest, and cup holders. We make our way down to the river and hop in. At the moment, something like 60 other people are doing the same thing, and we all begin floating down the Rifle River.
It’s quite a party — a very loud and raucous party. Most of the people are traveling in large groups that tie their inner tubes together to make giant rafts. Each giant raft has a large Bluetooth speaker blaring music. In some places, the giant rafts spread out far away enough that we can actually here the birds and the wind in the trees. For most of the trip, though, it’s like sitting next to a frat kegger.
After floating along for a couple of hours, we break out PB&J sandwiches for lunch. Sometime later we pull aside at a sandy beach and go for a swim. We’d been told to expect the trip to take 2–3 hours, but at the 3 hour mark the pull-out is nowhere in site. Finally, sometime into our fourth hour on the river, we float around a bend and see the Riverside Campground. We pull out and make our way back to the cottage to shower off and change.
Our cousin Dick has invited us all over for happy hour and dinner. His cottage is the one that had originally belonged to my grandparents, so it’s fun to see the place again. Dick’s updated some parts of the cottage, but it’s still very much recognizably the same as Chris and I remember it. (His sister Kelly has expanded her cottage next door to the point where I can barely recognize the original part of the house.)
Chris and I make a walk back up Dick’s long gravel driveway to the main road. In the woods along the way we can still spot traces of the old 9-hole golf course our grandfather and uncle had built on their property. It’s now long overgrown. Walking back, we also enjoy seeing an old tree in the middle of the turning circle at the end of the driveway. This tree used to have a number of signs pointing to the towns where various family members lived and giving the distance to those towns. Those signs are also gone, and many of the old tree’s branches have fallen, but the tree is still thriving.
Dick’s invited the other extended Sims relations, so we have another chance to chat with Gail, Catherine, Gordon, Alison, and Mark for a while. At one point, Dick has some fun with Mom: Dick starts singing some old song by The Four Tops or the Everly Brothers, and Mom immediately joins in to sing with him. I’ve never even heard most of the songs, but she knows all the lyrics pat. Despite her amnesia, she apparently still remembers these songs perfectly.
After we say goodbye to Dick, we get back in the car. Family tradition dictated that departing cars had to tap on their horns as they left, so we do that too.
Back in Seattle, Sabriya spends the day at the Washington Midsummer Renaissance Faire. She wears a corset and dress she recently sewed for a cosplay she plans to wear next year. The highlight of the day is a class in sword fighting with a longsword.
Jan’s trip to Michigan, Day 8. Skye, Jared, and her boys have to leave for Oregon early in the morning, so they wake us up to say goodbye. Chris and I finish the cottage’s check-out chores, and then we get into the car with Mom for the drive back down to the airport near Saginaw.
We stop for breakfast at Wheeler’s Cafe in Standish, a restaurant that’s never been amazing but still manages to stay in business. From there we leave US-23 and take the back route to the airport through miles of cornfields.
The three of us are on the same flight to Chicago. There Mom and I say goodbye to Chris as he heads to his flight back to Portland, where he and Julie are living for the moment. Mom and I have an uneventful (if bumpy) flight back to Seattle, where Angela picks us up to take us home.
Liya presents a research poster about her work on viruses at a conference in Montreal.