This weekend I fled up north with a friend from college to go back home with her. We grabbed lunch at Wild Chef and then started the trip up to Frankfort, which is a really small town on the lake about 3 hours north of Holland.
There were two things I really liked about Frankfort. The first one was that cell reception was terrible up there, so I had a great excuse to turn off the cell and data radios on my phone. I would have turned it off entirely but I wanted the camera on it. The other awesome thing was that it was about 10 degrees cooler up there than it was in Holland, which meant that it was quite comfortable on the porch.
Friday and Saturday nights we went to see productions put on by Lakeside Shakespeare Theatre. We saw Midsummer Night’s Dream on Friday night and Macbeth on Saturday, and the location was awesome for both. The performance space was a clearing in the middle of woods, and people just brought chairs and blankets and wine and beer and sat and watched the show. Awesome.
Saturday morning we went for a run, but we only went a couple of miles. It wasn’t super hot by 10am, but the sun was still pretty intense. I’ll admit that there was a certain amount of walking. I need to start running seriously again.
Saturday afternoon we took a ride on the Lynx, which was a reproduction of an 1812 Baltimore Clipper with the same name. We went on a two-hour sail out to Lake Michigan and back, and managed to make pretty good speed.
This was apparently the same ship that they used to train the cast of Pirates of the Caribbean on for the boat scenes. I stood on the same boat as Kiera Knightley and Johnny Depp. Be jealous.
And because I would be doing the Internet a grave injustice without saying it, I was on a boat.
That night before Macbeth we fired up the grill for one of the more delicious meals I’ve had in recent history. My friend’s a vegetarian, and her parents have a Performer…go figure.
For an appetizer, we had a warm Focaccia with cheese, black olives, basil and tomatoes. Dinner was grilled marinated flank steak with goat cheese wrapped in romaine lettuce, oven-roasted summer veggies, and steamed corn on the cob from the grill. It was so good.
On the way back down to drop me off, my friend taught me how to drive a stick shift again. I had learned one afternoon in drivers’ ed when I was 15, and figured I would not pick it up that easily, but I managed to drive from Frankfort back to Holland and only stalled once at the light right after the drawbridge in Grand Haven. That was a little nerve-wracking, but I made it…and now I want to ditch Jetta for something with a manual transmission. Perhaps in a few years…
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