Tom & Brenda's Family Journal

The US Coast Guard icebreaker Mackinaw heading up the river on Wednesday Visiting with my Aunt Elsie with my parents Music in the Park is a weekly concert at the Locks Park. Almost always a great time. You may wonder what we do while we are at the Cabin. Although I often write about boatwatching, we do have many other activities that fill our days. Visiting with friends and loved ones seems to be the number one focus of our days. For example, yesterday we started our day with our normal coffee with our neighbor Lodie. After that, we had a visit from my sister Kathy and my brother's grandson. We decided to take them out to lunch because Kathy had never been to Lockview-one of our favorite spots for whitefish. And every trip to Lockview requires a trip to Zak's. Zak's is an ice cream place on Portage Avenue a block from Lockview. After Kathy and Scottie left, my niece Ashley stopped by. We took her out to Bay Mills to get fireworks for the 4th. We had to make a stop ...

We have been here at the cabin almost two weeks. What have we done in that time? We don't spend all our time relaxing but we enjoy every second we are here. Boat watching is a favorite activity. Here are two 1,000 footers out front. Graham, our cat, does spend almost all her time relaxing. She goes from window to window to keep tabs on the goings on in our yard. I have to say that we haven't had any chipmunks in our attic so far so maybe her patrols are helping. We did get to observe a lamprey release in the St. Marys River last week up close and personal. The sterilized males are released at spawning time to try and control the population. Lampreys are a big problem in the St. Marys River. We continue to work on the fallen trees and also weeding the flower beds. I am looking for another way to control the weeds in my sea wall flower beds. Every year by the time we get here, the weeds have a big head start and I spend many days cleaning them out. I am thinking of cov...

We were greeted by tree problems from the moment we drove into the driveway. A freak wind storm during May had left many trees down on our property and also on our neighbor's. In fact, two of our trees landed on our neighbor's roof. This pine tree lay across the driveway so that became Tom's first project after unloading our belongings. Tom made fast work of this one since it involved no climbing. There was another small tree down in the side yard. Tom made that into firewood very quickly. Our neighbors had taken one of our trees off their roof and left the brush which we cleaned up. The big project was the tree that lay on Nancy's roof. It was one of two that fell on her house-cracking her picture window and damaging her chimney and putting two holes in her roof. Tom studied the tree and came up with a plan to winch the tree up and have it land on our lawn. We brought out the lawn chairs for the spectators-all the women-and Tom and Rich set to work putting a chain...

You may have noticed that I didn't post on this blog too often while we were away. The problem was lack of Internet. Due to some unexpected technical difficulties, I wasn't able to have Internet often. So I will try to make up for it now that we are home. We arrived home on Monday, April 4. We had gotten on the road on February 26 so we missed the entire month of March in Michigan. March in Florida was wonderful. The temperature was in the high 70's most days. Here is a quick recap of what we did since our trip to Disney World. Car shows-a favorite past-time of retirees and we saw some good ones. Here Tom is enjoying a 1957 Chevrolet with our friend from Alto, Butch Nordhof. Butch and Sheila's place in Avon Park was about 10 miles from us and we had many fun times with them during our time in Florida. Eric was able to fly down from Minneapolis and spend a weekend with us. Here we are at Highlands Hammock State Park where we walked through a swamp on a boardwa...

We are having a great time in Sebring Florida. Our days seem full yet relaxing. On Wednesday, we traveled the 80 miles to Orlando to visit Epcot Center. March is their flower festival and as everything is at Disney, it was overwhelmingly beautiful. We went with Tom's cousin Dianne and her husband Charlie. I think that was the most fun part being with them. We hope to do more things together while we are here. This is the Canadian exhibit. We wanted to eat in their steakhouse but their reservations were taken for the entire day. We learned that you should make your food reservation first and then start doing the activities. The topiaries were outstanding. This is from the movie Lady and the Tramp at the Italian exhibit. Although this looks like an English country garden, this is the Norway exhibit. This is the week of the 12 Hours of Sebring-an American LeMans Series race that I am covering for Insider Racing News. Should be an exciting week.

Tom and I have now settled into our rental unit in Sebring Florida. It is a duplex and the other half is rented to a lovely couple from Manchester England. They are recently retired and just loving the weather and golfing here. Last weekend we spent time at Sebring International Raceway which is about 7 miles from us. I will be covering the 12 Hours of Sebring on March 19 for Insider Racing News. The race this past weekend was vintage sports cars-a new type of racing but we really liked seeing the old cars and the old drivers. They were very friendly and open to questions. One thing I've noticed here is Bunny Bread brand is available. That brand was very popular in the Soo when I was growing up but I haven't seen it in years. Do any of you remember Bunny Bread?

After two longs days of driving, we spent yesterday getting settled and resting up. Our home here is quite comfortable but we headed out to Walmart to get groceries and a few supplies. The coffee pot provided with the house was a 4 cup model. Definitely not big enough to get us through a morning. We replaced it with a 12 cup model. That fits our style better. We stocked up on groceries and then stopped and bought new walking shoes for Tom and I. We hope to do lots of walking while we are here. In the evening, we stopped for a bowl of soup at Panera. Then we headed to Sebring International Raceway. It is the home of the 12 Hours of Sebring- a LeMans race to be held in two weeks. I hope to cover the race for insiderracingnews.com. There is already lots of activity there with the Jaguar team setting up. Maybe today we can get back to watch some testing. On the way back into town from the track we saw some ball field lights. We followed them to a sports complex where there were...