Not SST: Adventures in Northern Michigan

My apologies to those who tuned into my blog this morning in the hopes of seeing of the traditional Sesame Street Tuesday post. My last two posts were SST and I wasn't about to post three in a row. I absolutely love picking out Sesame Street clips and writing up the posts, but it has gotten to the point that Sesame Street has taken over my blog. So I declare that henceforth Sesame Street Tuesday will only appear every other Tuesday. I know it will be hard on all of us, but just like the current economic recession, if we make a few sacrifices and pull together we will get through it alright.

So, how about catching up on some adventures from my real life? I mentioned a few weeks ago (in an SST post, of course) that I was going up to Northern Michigan to participate in my first 5K , under the guise of one Mike McMurtrey. I had no idea how I would perform in the race since I had never quite run the whole 5K distance beforehand and since I had never made an effort to time my previous runs. So my two goals for the race were (1) to run the whole time without any walking and (2) to finish the race in under an hour. I accomplished both goals, and my official time was actually 28:54, much better than expected (and, coincidentally, exactly one minute faster than my fastest-ever Mario 2 full run - it makes me feel more macho and less nerdy to know that I can run a 5K in less time than it takes to beat Mario 2). I can honestly say that on that day I ran farther than I ever had in my entire life and I was pretty beat afterwards, as seen in this picture taken moments after I finished the race:


Besides the race, it was a great chance to head up to a beautiful spot in Northern Michigan. The town of Charlevoix was adorable, with harbors full of sailboats, a lighthouse on the Lake Michigan shore, and a row of petunias along the main road that stretched on for miles and miles. After the race all my buddies and I headed over to nearby Petosky to hit the beach. Normally I'm not a really beachy guy and I tire of it really quickly, but it was a gorgeous day and the sand, sun, and water were all perfect and I had a great time just hanging out.

After that most of the group headed back down to Ann Arbor, but Brady, Amy, and I headed across the Mackinac Bridge to the Upper Peninsula to go camping. I had never been up there and I didn't want to miss out on an opportunity before my time in Michigan runs out. It turns out that the U.P. is really beautiful and scenic, but it has one major drawback: it is owned and operated by the mosquitoes. The second we first stepped out of the car we were greeted by a swarm of at least three hundred thousand of them. Mosquitoes have always found me much more delectable than anyone else in my company, so I spent a lot of time with sitting near the smoky campfire or walking around with dozens of layers of clothing, including a hood cinched tightly around my face to try to keep them at bay, but the pragmatic mosquitoes still found plenty of ripe places on my face and hands to bite regardless my precautions.

In spite of the mosquitoes, we still had a fun trip full of camping, hiking, geocaching, waterfall-looking-at-ing. The latter was my main motivation for joining the excursion since our main destination in the U.P. was Tahquamenon Falls, one of the largest waterfalls east of the Mississippi. Incidentally, we chose it as our destination not because we are great geographers, but because "Tahquamenon Falls" is the name of an instrumental composition on the album Greetings from Michigan by singer/songwriter and Michigan native Sufjan Stevens.

Speaking of Sufjan, Brady put together a slideshow of our U.P. trip featuring the aforementioned instrumental composition. It features cameo appearances from Melanie and Tim, some Ann Arbor friends who met up with us in the U.P., and also includes pictures from the Charlevoix area, Whitefish Point on Lake Superior, and sites around Lake Huron:



I hope you enjoyed this non-Sesame Street post on this Tuesday morning. Hopefully this new SST format will encourage me to get back to blogging more about my real life. If you think you can't stand to wait a whole week for your next Sesame Street fix, head over to Youtube and you can spend hours watching the thousands of Sesame Street clips they have up there. (Although, if I had included a Sesame Street clip today it would have been this one. I spent the 24th of July down in Ohio and I missed out on the Pioneer Day festivities back in Utah, so I lit a single sparkler by myself to commemorate the holiday.)