The Story Continues...

My mood was testy as we left behind our totes in the garage and headed for the freeways of Chicago on the morning of Memorial Day. Traffic was, fortunately, light, and we headed east and, ultimately, north to the state of Michigan.

We were heading to Cadillac, where we had traditionally spent our summers during our time in Alaska. The previous summer, however, we had sold our house to the friends that were renting it from us, because we were not moving back to Michigan. My wife's mother and stepdad had moved to Alabama, and we were going to try to spend some time in both places in summers to come.

One summer's experiment with that and an infant convinced us that we were going to have more of a stationary base of operations, so we rented a house in Traverse City, one of the finest places that one could hope to recreate in. Two months off, two blocks away from Grand Traverse Bay. What a fine plan!

And we had knocked it off the table. I was lucky that someone had rented the place for July, so we got that month's deposit back. I was not so lucky for June. Coming back here involved a lot of trade-offs like that. Less income, different benefits, less time off. On the other hand, real weekends off, more opportunities for Alice to do new things, and convenient stores with reasonable prices easily accessible if we needed supplies.

We spent the first week at my wife's aunt's house, and driving around getting some furniture into the apartment that we had rented. We also got about the business of finding all the stuff that we has stashed around here in various locations. The apartment actually had a basement, so that we had some real storage available without renting a storage locker any more. A week of laundromats convinced us to buy a washer and dryer.

Gradually, we began to settle into life back here. We took Alice to the city park, where she learned that she loves splashing water from a fountain. We enjoyed concerts at the pavilion on Lake Cadillac, and began to explore businesses in town that had opened since we had left. We brought Val and Miranda, and showed them what real trees looked like. They got to see Lake Michigan and Mackinac Island, and some of the things that make this part of the world wonderful...