We took our planned midwinter break but abbreviated it by a couple of days due to the kiddo’s illness. It was a 4-hour drive to our rented cottage through Michigan winter and we drove through a variety of weather – warming melt, rain, fog, freezing rain, snow. Everything except frogs fell from the sky. The kiddo managed to get in a few hours of snowboarding, and Brandon did two full days of skiing. The strange weather continued and one afternoon the ski lifts closed for thirty minutes due to lightning – a crazy contrast to last year’s trip when we were skiing in temperatures dipping into the teens Fahrenheit.
Light on the ski hills; the drive; our favorite ‘up north’ craft beer in the cottage hot tub; exploring local bookstore and coffee shop when the kiddo felt too tired to snowboard
So the drives there and back were stressful and yet compelling. I find the starkness of Michigan winter roads beautiful. I grew up among them. They can be bleak and sometimes despairing but since my Pinterest board has filled up with images that brought that same feeling, even if they are not technically Michigan made or inspired, I’ll let you decide for yourself whether they appeal.
Seeking the snow last weekend, our first stop was my mom’s house – almost 4 hours north, on the west side of the state. Snow was knee-high (conservative estimate). Brandon and I woke up Saturday morning to run the Betsie Bay Frozen 5k, which is one of my favorite events. It hasn’t been run since 2020, before the world shut down. In the olden days I would have posted a full separate race recap with my time but in today’s world, post-50 years old, having survived a pandemic, menopause, teenage kid years, the Orange Menace and his Nazi cohorts attempting to ruin democracy as we know it, and various other life events, just getting out there and running it is enough.
We then drove 2 hours further north, to the village of Walloon Lake, which is most famous for being young Hemingway’s Michigan playground. We found a historical marker, and there’s a statue of him somewhere around, but the wind was blowing fine snow into whiteout conditions everywhere so we gave up looking. Instead, we skied at Boyne Mountain (the kid snowboarded) and enjoyed our perfect little Vrbo. As we get older, my ability to stay in a hotel has decreased significantly. I hate being cheek to jowl with mass humanity, having to either pay for every meal and snack or rely on hotel coffee and crumpled snack bags. Give me an AirBnB or a Vrbo every time. I know they’re wreaking havoc on small communities but selfishly I want exactly what we had this weekend. Which was a cozy cottage on a private lot with a fireplace, hot tub, separate bedrooms for us and the kid, a beautiful living space and kitchen, fully appointed. We cooked, we had good coffee, we had a fire, we watched movies, read books, I knitted, and we had privacy. I threw caution to the wind and ate what I wanted to eat, drank Horny Monk from the Petoskey Brewing Company, and made a fool out of myself on the slopes. (I fell. A lot.) The snow was almost claustrophobic – piled higher than street signs and just continually sifting down. The drifts outside the Vrbo were up to the windows with paths cut into them to access doors and the driveway – if you don’t have a snowplow or a snowblower running constantly, you would have big trouble.
All in all, it was a perfect swift getaway with my two favorite people. The world is hard right now and being away for a bit is a luxury. We don’t have a lot of travel planned for the year, so the times we do have together will be all the more important.
Six Ten 