Off to Mackinac City

Due to work and a lot of family sickness this year, everyone is looking forward to fun and adventure and an escape from the blahness that comes with too much scheduled, too much work and too many bouts with the flu! My wife, myself and our four kids were really looking forward to some down time. (Well, you know, maybe not the 20 month old ~ I think he was just enjoying the ride.)

We got our start an hour later than intended, but that didn't set us back too much. We hit a Quizno's for the parents and Wendy's for the kids and started the trek. Our 7 year old daughter is enamored with water towers and has an exuberant, excited squeal every time she sees one! It was a blast pointing all of them out, to the great annoyance of my 10 year old son.

After a few pit stops and being a couple hours south of Mackinac we made our 2nd stop at one of the Michigan "Rest Areas". Holy Cow! The state has done an awesome job cleaning them up. The bathrooms were clean, the grass outside was cut. We even had races with the kids to stretch everyone's legs. The 4 year old just loved racing Dad to the "tree" and beating me, but when he raced Mom, he made a big deal of being out of breath and how he couldn't move another step! I think she got a bit of favortism there.

Due to past experiences with too small hotel rooms and not enough sleeping space, we rented a "suite". (Well, that brings up one cool thing about credit unions... For some reason, the money for the room wasn't there the first time. One short phone call and they corrected that and the transaction went through seamlessly.)

Well, dinner was now in order for the evening. We crossed the street for Nonna Lisa's. The restaurant was full of fun stuff to look at, with the inside looking like a view into one of the northern parks and animal habitats! This was topped off by great food and wonderful service. Two small pizza's was too much for our 4 kids with healthy appetites and the parent's tastebuds were tantalized with delicious entree's of Rosemary Salmon and Chicken Parmigiano! After packaging up our pizza and paying the bill, we all walked out of the restaurant, refreshed and ready for a refreshing dip in Lake Huron.

After going back to our hotel room, I did a quick check of e-mail and found out I had some work waiting for me. I then sequestered myself to my laptop with copies of Active Directory 2nd Edition (for Windows 2000 & 2003) by O'Reilly Press, Microsoft TechNet, Windows Server 2003 by Mark Minasi (the CD version) and Inside Windows Server 2003 by William Boswell (hey Addison Wesley...where's the CD?"). I emailed my rep that I would have things caught up by the end of the day Tuesday, after completing two-thirds of the work sometime in the early morning. I was very greatful that she sent back saying I could complete things the upcoming weekend. Ahh, vacations, always more than they are meant to be! ;-)