From zero to blue in four days

My "skiing career" began in 8th grade at a landfill posing as a mountain in Pennsylvania. It lasted for just one day, and then I took an approximately 15 year hiatus.

But this past week I went from landhill skiing to safely making it down the blue slopes of the Wasatch Mountains in Utah.

All manner of people taught me how to ski this week, (although unfortunately no Austrians), including my patient mother-in-law who taught me everything I need to know about speed control, a retired construction manager turned ski instructor, and an instructor with only one arm!

I'm still immersed in post-vacation chores, which include filling out my NCAA brackets ... time to end this post!

Our weekend "Up North"

As I mentioned in my previous post, nearly all Michiganders, it seems, live to go "Up North." Many go nearly every weekend in the summer. And many brave souls venture north in the winter, too. Which is what Matt and I did this weekend, at the invitation of some of our good friends who invited us to their lakehouse.

And I'm beginning to understand why! The majority of the state isn't occupied by automotive plants, but by farmland, and there are lakes of all sizes scattered around. It seems to get better and better the further north you head. We were on Crystal Lake, which is situated on the northwest corner of the state.






And we did indeed enjoy the lake, despite the cold weather, as you can see from the pictures above. (Actually, it was surprisingly warm, about 30 degrees.) We snowshoed across the lake to get a good look at what the ice fishermen were up to, and to get a little exercise.


We also did our fair share of reading, resting, enjoying time with friends and eating well.

While I think I'll still do my fair share of traveling "Down South," I'm already looking forward to seeing more of our upstate treasures!

Finally!

I can't believe it took me a year and half to finally make it "Up North" in Michigan, a favorite pastime of nearly every Michigander. These photos from this past weekend are a bit of a teaser ... I'll blog more later!

Charleston pictures

As I mentioned, these aren't the greatest, but I thought I'd post a few. Seems like we never had the motivation to take a picture when the lighting was just right, the sky was blue and we were standing in front of a gracious Southern mansion flanked by palm trees and magnolias. But when it was foggy and rainy, well, that's when we wanted to take pictures!

(Also, for anyone who tried clicking on the links to yesterday's post, my apologies! They are fixed now.)


This bakeshop was absolutely something out of a movie ... sinful chocolate brownies, pink cupcakes, almond tarts, butterscotch cookies ...

The one "blue sky" photo we snapped.

The entryway to our loft condo on King St.


My dream kitchen that I never cooked in because we were always eating out!

Not quite as pretty in the fog, but you get the idea.
Our running clothes aired out nicely up there.


Matt liked this tree by the College of Charleston.

Thawed out

Well, as I was falling to sleep on Thursday night, I was beginning to believe we were headed to Portland, Ore. Not for any particular reason, other than that I couldn't think of any other place in the country that might be experiencing a high of 50 degrees, and I was forcing myself to think out of the box, since Matt said I would NEVER figure out where we were headed.

When we jumped in the car on Friday morning, though, we began heading in exactly the opposite direction of the airport. So that eliminated Oregon. Matt pulled over at the Donut Cutter up the street from our house, because "we need snacks for the trip." How could I protest? I'll have a honey-dipped chocolate donut, please.

As we continued on our way, Matt asked me to pull out the U.S. atlas, as apparently he needed help navigating. His home state? That sounds suspicious. Then he said "What's that piece of paper," which lay on top of the state of South Carolina. Well, it happened to be my boarding pass for a flight to Charleston, SC.

Interestingly, over the past few weeks, Matt had listened to me moan over these photos of Charleston. I tried to not want to go, tried to be content with all the wonderful trips and things I have gotten to do this year, but that didn't get me very far. So I just tried to forget about what I had seen. After all, I had been to Charleston when I was young. I didn't need to go again, right?

Wrong! It was most certainly where we needed to go. Despite the fact that Charleston was experiencing record cold temperatures, we turned on the optimism switch and declared that we were quite fortunate to be skipping out on record cold temperatures in metro Detroit, where the weekend low was -15 degrees.

Plus, record cold temperatures in Charleston affords visitors like us plenty of time to walk a little, eat, eat, run, eat, eat, drive a little, eat, eat, run ... eat. That basically how the weekend played out. Oh, and we shopped.

Matt's coworkers told him he was setting the bar high when he planned a first anniversary trip to one of America's most romantic cities. They're right. But is that really such a bad thing?

(We didn't get too many good pictures, but I'll try posting a few more this week.)