Alexis and I just got back from 3 days in Upper Peninsula Michigan; the part of the state that is actually part of Wisconsin; and area that has called itself “The U.P.” for a lot longer than that stupid TV show has been on; an isolated and rural slice of middle America.
We went to attend a friend’s wedding at their family cabin on the shores of Lake Superior. Turned out to be a very small, very informal event, with about half of the event’s 30 or so guests staying in the 500 square foot log cabin. It really was right on the shore though, and very peaceful and relaxing.
Alexis was an attendant for the wedding, and I busied myself hopping around taking photos, filling in for what the pro photographer didn’t catch. After the ceremony, dinner, and tremendous drinking, the family rolled out a $1000 stash of fireworks they had collected for the event. Let me just say, California fireworks suck compared to what you can buy in Michigan…Giant artillery mortars with huge sky-bursts, flat-pack boxes with 350 to 750 to one thousand different explosions that you light once and that go on for over 20 minutes. The brides father and his old army buddy took it upon themselves with a couple of other folks to coordinate the best damn amateur fireworks display I’d ever seen, eclipsing even some of the “professional” displays I’ve seen at various fair grounds and parking lots over the years.
Wednesday we drove an hour back to the small local airport, caught a puddle jumper back to Minneapolis, had a 4 hour layover where we got dinner with a high-school friend of Lex’s at the Mall of America, then finally arrived at SFO about 8:30pm. We were supposed to then be immediately getting on a plane for Sydney for a week and a half of work/vacation in Australia and New Zealand, but due to mounting work piles for some upcoming events my boss asked me to postpone that trip (along with the week in India afterwards), which actually worked out very well because Alexis wasn’t feeling very well by the time we got home and I developed a pretty nasty head cold the next day that kept me sprawled out on the couch.
Rand Wacker 
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