Sunday "Blah"g

Well, here's my weekly update! Not a super exciting week for us here - we seem to be settling into the winter blahs. Same old routine, day after day. This is usually the reason I hate this time of year. We've got snow, but not enough to get excited about. We had some sun, but it was super cold and windy outside when it broke through the clouds. Blarg. I'm glad to be so busy with school since it gives me something to focus on. We tried to break out of the routine this week by going hiking on Wednesday night at Egypt Valley - we actually had a lot of fun, although I was thinking about all of the studying I should have been doing while we were out there. We also went out for dinner on Friday night and got treated like dog crap at the restaurant we went to so that didn't help much. I'm officially boycotting One Trick Pony downtown - the food was TERRIBLE and the service was even worse. No wonder there were at least 7 empty tables (on a Friday night!) when we were there. Even worse, the manager was falling all over himself to make the people next to us happy but didn't even bother to ask us how we were doing during one of his 10 trips over to check on them. We left there pretty disappointed, especially since we don't really get to go out that much anymore :(

Today was great, though. We got up early and drove down to Saugatuck to hike on the dunes. We had originally wanted to go snowshoeing but there really wasn't enough snow to justify it. We made our own trail up and over some of the dunes and eventually got to the beach. The waves were big and we could see big snowstorms out over the lake. We also saw some mountain bike tire tracks along the beach which gave us a new goal for the winter - to ride our bikes on the beach! The tricky part will be figuring out where to ride from, since most places involve a significant hike to get down to the water. We're considering a night ride since we'll be able to be a little less obvious because evidently it's illegal or something. We hiked along the beach for quite a while and went back into the dunes along a pretty well-worn trail. The trail took us to a county park as well as the site of a former minimum-security prison. The building is still standing and is covered with grafitti. We hiked over to it to get a closer look. It was so eerie and bizarre - all of the windows were either boarded up or smashed out, there are still beds and various other pieces of furniture in it, and there are absolutely no signs telling anyone to keep out. We got halfway back to the car and decided (after asking some people what the building was) to go back and go inside. It was really creepy - we went in through a window and into a big room that must have been the common area for the prisoners. There were two split level wings of cells and a few smaller rooms that must have been offices. The inside of this place was trashed - everywhere you looked there was graffiti, broken glass, paint cans, charred remains of fires, etc. I would have taken some pictures but my camera batteries were dead - plus it gives me the chills just thinking about it. Wonder what I'll dream about tonight? The wierdest thing, though, was that we only found one bathroom in the whole place - a single toilet and sink. No showers anywhere. Ewww. The whole place was bizarre because outside of the prison, there was a basketball court, an old BMX-racing track, and a gigantic brick mansion (the Felt Mansion) surrounding the county park. We left there scratching our heads as to why any of these things were out in the middle of the dunes and why someone would have thought to stick a county park out there with them. At least it was a good adventure to end the week! Since I don't have any pictures from today, I'll just post the one we took at the end of our Cannonsburg hike -