Vacation

It seems a bit odd to me, but that's Julie smiling at 5:00 in the morning on Sunday. The alarm went off at 4:00. We had loaded the car Saturday night, but still had to load the bikes, food and kids. The smiles weren't to last very long, but more on that in a minute. We rented a cottage in Saugatuck, MI for a week. It's a cool place with it's own beach on a nice little lake about 5 minutes from lake Michigan. Saugatuck is a resort town so it has lots of restaurants and shops and stuff and it is also close to all kinds of other things to do.

This is just before we hit the road to head down to the dock to board the Lake Express.

I'll be the first to admit that this is one happenin' boat. It is a twin hull catamaran style vessel with four 3000hp diesels powering it. It cruises at a land speed of 40mph. Anyone familiar with boating knows that that's pretty fast, especially for a boat this big.

My brother and his family took it last week for short vacation in MI and they really liked it. They must have had smooth sailing.....

We did NOT have smooth sailing. Apparently, a front had come through during they night, and had kicked up some serious wave action. The boat is meant to cut through waves at a right angle no problem but the front had kicked up the waves in a NE-SW direction. Imagine 2 1/2 hours of the riding an out of control roller coaster. This thing was pitching and yawing god only knows how many feet. There were 220 some passengers on board and I'd bet that 90% of then were puking. Even people who had taken Dramamine were puking it was so bad. For our family, Maddie was the first to go and I was the last. That was the first time in probably 15 years that I have ralphed. Brutal. I had to laugh, thinking about the big group of rough and tough (looking) Harley riders waiting to get on the boat when we docked in Muskegon. The thought of them hunched over barf bags was amusing to me.

All's well that ends well however. The resort is even better that we expected. Hey, they have shuffleboard! What more can you ask for? Except a high speed wi-fi connection for free. Oh yeah, they have that too...