Not much to say, other than I can’t thank Jody enough for sharing her family’s beach house with us.  It’s always a great time and the scenery is so beautiful.

Thanks Jody!

Jody invited us to go camping up at Ice House Reservoir, near Placerville.  We borrowed a tent and headed up.  Despite the threatening weather (thunder and lightning), the weather turned out to be great.  We tried to do a little fishing, but the recent hot weather apparently drove the fish down to the bottom of the lake.

We stopped on the way out and grabbed some linguica, potatoes and onions.  The built a nice fire and threw our cast iron skillet on top.  The food was great, and beat anything you get out of a camping package.  Full and happy, we sat back, at some smores and drank some beer.  I finally realized why people go camping, and lamented the fact that Tahoe is so close, and we have never gone before this.

After hanging out until around midnight, we finally packed all our food into the coolers, piled them on the tables and headed to our respective tents.  About 30 minutes later we are just about asleep, and we hear the cooler fall off the picnic table.  “Must be racoons,” I comment to Allison, and then her cell phone rings.  Because of the poor cell reception, we can hardly hear her, but we finally understand the following, “There’s a BEAR outside my tent!” Aaaaaaahhhhh!  Definetly not racoons.  Allison and I start making noise, clapping and hollering as we put our shoes on.  We unzip the tent and I poke my head out and look up the path and standing there staring at me is a full grown bear.  I’m not sure what the ‘appropriate action’ is when dealing with a bear, but some more hollering and clapping finally convinced the bear to move on to other campsites.  And since we knew we weren’t going to sleep, and we were only an hour from home, we decide to grab everything and head for home.

In retrospect, cooking greasy food and leaving it sitting next to our campsite was foolish, and we all should have known better.  There were no warning signs around the campsites, and no bear boxes.  Next time we will be eating  the backpacking meals and storing all our leftovers far from camp.  I expect that I’ll never see a bear that close again, but I’d rather play it safe.  I don’t actually think that we were in imminent danger, but I believe in the unpredictability of wild animals.  And I don’t need to end up like the guy who got mauled by a bear at Ice House 30 days before we were there.

We headed out to Michigan on somewhat short notice to help celebrate Jeff’s graduation from the Masters program, as well as his 40th birthday.  The party was an absolutely blast and it was great to see all Jeff’s old Michigan pals, drink regional cherry vodka, and sing some karaoke.

We spent some time up in Traverse City fishing, boating, and we even headed out to the beach at midnight to check out an unusually low occurrence of the northern lights.  We had so much fun and it was extremely relaxing.

After a few days we headed back down to Grand Rapids and ate a TON of really great food.  G.R. has really expanded its culinary treats since the last time we were there.  It seemed like every place we ate wasn’t just good, it was fantastic.

As always the trip was too short and we can’t wait to go back.