Today is Day One of my six day vacation! Well not really…it really starts Thursday. I have no real “exciting” plans until Friday, when we will check in to our cabin at Harrisville State Park. Though I am kind of excited about being able to sleep in on a weekday Thursday morning (my bar for excitement is quite low these days, LOL)!  The last time I visited Harrisville State Park was in 1991, on a camping trip with my mom – we stopped there to camp after heading home from helping my brother move in to his college apartment in Houghton, MI. Harrisville is on the Lake Huron coast, south of Alpena – northeast of Saginaw/Bay City. My enduring memories of that trip are I was really into the group Digital Underground at the time (19 year olds…there’s absolutely NO accounting for their musical tastes) – and I remember seeing a Hustler magazine in the bathroom. Guys’ college apartment (go figure). Yes I leafed through it! Being more used to looking at my dad’s Playboy magazines, I thought Hustler was a bit too…how shall I put this?  It was a bit too (ahem) “gynecological exam” for my tastes (interpret that how you will). But a 19 year-old heterosexual female was hardly Larry Flynt’s target audience, was it? I actually enjoyed looking at dad’s Playboys – the cartoons, the interviews, and even the centerfolds (I liked the “turn ons” and “turn offs” section). Nine times out of 10, “rude people” was listed as a “turn off” – and “long walks on the beach” was listed as a “turn on.” I’m sure these women weren’t exactly allowed to be TOO honest in these questionnaires – if one of them tried to put down “burning my boyfriend with red hot pokers” or “being strapped to a wheel of pain” as turn ons, an editor would probably wag their finger and say “No, no NO, Tiffany! We don’t want you to scare the teenage boys and their fathers! Why don’t we change that to ‘long walks on the beach at sunset?'”

Unsure exactly where this photo was taken, but it was on this 1991 trip to Houghton and back. It may be a U.P. beach, judging from the levels of rockiness. Lord…black socks and white shoes? What the HELL was I thinking? The T-shirt is from the first Lollapalooza Music Festival, which I’d attended at Pine Knob (now called DTE Energy Music Theater) probably about a month earlier. Yes, that is a perm in my hair – it was the last perm I ever had. A year later I would start wearing my hair short.

Did you know Harrisville, MI is Michigan’s sixth smallest city (out of all municipalities in Michigan that are technically classified as “cities” as opposed to “towns” or “villages?”)? Around 500 or so folks live there. Michigan’s smallest city is Lake Angelus, which is in Oakland County.

I won’t be doing too many blogs while I’m on my vacation, but I’ll have a recap of Thursday’s game posted Friday morning. I’ll probably do some “mini posts” when I wander into WiFi zones.

That’s about it for now, I’ll catch YOU on the rebound!