Back From Mackinaw City

I am back from four days in Mackinaw City, my first real vacation in about 5 years, and my first break from work since starting my current job almost a 15 months ago. It’s amazing how short a time four days can be when you are on vacation and how long it seems when you really need one. I went up with high hopes of taking my bike out on the Mackinaw City to Cheboygan bike trail and generally going comatose the rest of the time. Those plans didn’t quite work out.

I left on Friday and the weather spat rain the whole way up, not quite making up its mind whether it wanted to stop or go. When I arrived it had settled on a steady misty drizzle and that meant my evening would be take out dinner, grocery shopping, and taking stock of the house I was staying it. The house, Sinclair House, is a nice 4 bedroom done in semi-rustic decor with three of the most floppable couches I have ever enjoyed. My brother and his wife own the house, so I will thank them publicly here for the generous donation of their summer house for my weekend use and allowing me to break in their new couch (it was magnificent). It’s not a large house, but it is open and very conducive to rest and recuperation and stocked with all the amenities of home, except for Internet access.

The house sits right in the sweet spot of about ten wifi networks, like the center of a huge Venn diagram. Nine of those wifi access points are labeled as public, one private. Of those, I was not able to connect to a single one. In most residential places you can sort of count on finding at least one LinkSys or D-Link access point, someone who bought a base station and didn’t configure even the most basic security settings. Not Mackinaw City, every access point was locked tight, even the public ones. There are a lot of hotels, restaurants, and stores around town, most of which advertised free wifi. I did manage to find a strong signal in downtown Mackinaw City, courtesy of the Court Plaza Inn. Thanks to them for having the best wifi signal in town.

In addition to biking, I had hoped to spend a bit of time working on this website: getting the portfolio and resume sections finished and maybe setting up some other sections and maybe writing some entries too. That didn’t quite work out either.

It rained on Saturday, which once again washed out my biking plans. Not that I was too upset, it proved more difficult than expected to sleep in a bed that wasn’t my own and the sun coming through the windows at 8am woke me up several hours too early. Instead I cooked, played with the new iPod Nano I bought before going on vacation by making walkthrough videos of the house to send to my girlfriend, and watched a Star Wars anniversary marathon on cable until the rain finally stopped in the early evening. So I went for a drive to find a good pastie (that’s with a short ‘a’, by the way) shop, picked up a few for lunch and dinner on Sunday, and took advantage of the good wifi downtown to attend to email.

After getting back to the house and putting away the groceries I decided to walk to the bridge and enjoy the scenery for a bit, since the sun was setting and there was a heavy fog bank pushing across the straits, I figured it would be quite pretty down on the beach. The fog had mostly fallen apart by the time I walked the two blocks to the beach, the wind had kicked up off the lake and it got quite cool. The sound of the cars on the bridge, the waves lapping against the rocks, and the other tourists talking quietly as they moved along the walkways and sand gave the whole visit a rather lonely quality, but in a good way, lonely but peaceful. I took this video while out. I’d hoped the lights on the bridge would be more prominent, but they kind of got lost.

The weather forecasters had been calling for 80 degrees and humid on Sunday and not being a particularly warm weather person, I decided to stay in until later in the evening, before venturing out to find the bike trail. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to sleep much the night before either and the vodka grapefruit juice I had the night before to help me sleep left me with a monster headache. I ended up watching a MythBusters marathon for nearly the entire day, except for when I took a video of the outside of the house and did my nightly wifi and email run. I was feeling better after dinner and decided to investigate Cheboygan since they had a Walmart and Walmart would have a cable to connect my iPod to my car stereo. That was the third time I’ve been in a Walmart and by far the most depressing, but they had the cable I needed. And now I’ve been to Cheboygan. One more thing added to my list of things to do and promptly checked off. The rest of the night was cleaning up and putting the house back in order before leaving the following morning.

Slept better the previous night, but the lawn people showed up early and I woke up to a lawn tractor and weed whip buzzing outside the window. When I left it was 65, clear, and breezy. As I drove south for the first 15 miles the temperature rose 1 degree for each mile and progressively more humid. It got 10 degrees warmer over the next 3 and a half hours of driving and when I arrived home it was steamy and 90. I kind of wished I’d stayed up there a while longer.