Ann Arbor Michigan

We spent a day in Luddington, MI while Bob played disc golf and I visited White Pine Historic Village. It was so hot that we went swimming in Lake Michigan before returning to our campsite. The next morning we headed south and east on blue highways through Michigan. Boy, you can really see the effects of the recession in abandoned houses and really decrepit houses that are inhabited. We arrived in Ann Arbor by dinner time and did a wash to get Bob ready to leave for the Amateur Disc Golf World Competition in Ohio. The next morning I got to watch grand-daughter Elsa enjoying her rice cereal. She was really getting into it. What a happy girl.

After Julia and Bob left, Andrew and I painted their kitchen white. It was a great two person job - one person masked all the purple areas while the other person applied the first coat of primer. The second coat of primer and the coat of paint was divided between one person doing the edging and the other person rolling on the paint. It was a good day's work. We went out to Ypsilanti to the Sidetrack Bar and Grill for really great burgers at the end of the day.

On Sunday we got up to wet, cloudy weather and headed off to pick sour cherries. The trees were pretty picked over, but we found that if we got into the centers and pulled down the branches we could get plenty of cherries. We also weren't so picky about bruised fruit. You can't climb into cherry trees as they are very brittle and break easily. As long as we were willing to get wet, we were successful. We picked 42 pounds of cherries and paid 25 cents a pound to have them pitted. Then we returned to Ann Arbor under a tornado warning which resulted in a very heavy rain storm for about 15 minutes. Once we got home we started processing the cherries into jam. 36 jars later and five different recipes (four were iterations of the basic recipe), about 4 jars of cherry jelly (we tried to get a lot of fruit into each jar of jam) and boiling down the juice to make about a quart was the result of our efforts. We also froze five bags of sour cherries for Julia to make into pies.