We Interrupt This Silence

Hi my minions!  Have you missed me?

Sorry for the bit of silence.  Last week became entangled in work agenda and then I went away for the weekend.  Oh yes, a weekend away with my best girlfriend ev-ah!  It was glorious.

Where did we go?

See the red thumb??

Door County!  It's the Thumb of Wisconsin, a peninsula heading out into the waters of Lake Michigan.  This doesn't make it sound very attractive, but it is lovely.  Rolling farms, beaches, water as far as the eye can see, the changing colors of fall....ahhhh.

There is the Party Side of the peninsula (where you can shop until you drop, among other things), and then there is the Quiet Side, which is my preferred side to sleep on.  There is no sleep on the other side, apparently.

This is where we stayed:  Orphan Annie's Schoolhouse Inn  It is lovely, the old school in Bailey's Harbor, WI.  The suite we stayed in was once the library, and it was bigger than the downstairs of my house.  Wowza!

Our dining options were adventurous:  We went to the world's saddest steakhouse.  This establishment should have been labelled as a "supper club", and it looked like it peaked in the late 1960s.  It has an undulating bar, that appeared to want to be a craps table or where feather dancers would be performing.  Frank Sinatra was crooning, endlessly.  I felt like I was in a caricature of a dried up alcoholic lounge act.  But hey, the salad was pretty good and the bartender made an awesome Brandy Old Fashioned.  It made up for the seediness.  (Or at least, I didn't care as much after the alcohol kicked in.)

We did a bit of shopping on Saturday, and visited the best place on the island:

No, it didn't snow.  I borrowed this photo from www.eggharbor.org

That's right, we found the only thrift store in the area.  Yahoo!  I came out with four handmade Swedish Weave stitched placemats, in pinks and purples.  They were only 99 cents a-piece, and I got to leave a bag of donations I happened to have in the back of the truck.

Lucille Laverne once again demonstrated her necessary role in my life, as having a honkin' huge truck allowed us to swerve to the side of the road and snatch up some made-to-look-old-but-its-brand-new furniture left on the curb in a hoity-toity neighborhood in Sturgeon Bay.  Apparently, it was purchased solely for the purpose of "decoration" at a family wedding, and when the wedding was over, nobody wanted to keep it.  So between Amy and myself, we loaded up two large dressers, a vanity table, and an overstuffed, oversized wing back upholstered chair.  We left off a couple of bottles of my homebrew ale for the homeowner, who seemed startled but appreciative.

I may be the only person to return home from a vacation trip with free furniture.  My uniqueness knows no bounds, apparently.