Starting Travel Journal, Volume 2, gave me more confidence to push my artistic license. I decided to capture this trip as a fairy tale, rather than how I organized trips in the past. This was a study in frustration by the end, because I had made a huge mistake, putting the possum on the scary monster spread rather than on the spirit animal spread. Add that to how little time I had to paint – which meant a lot of white space that felt daunting – well, I abandoned this project for another time. Will the heroine ever return to complete the tale? Your guess is as good as mine!

I really had fun trying to translate the day’s events into some sort of fairy tale quest. That took some time, and I had to wait until the day was over, as I had planned only one day per spread sand thus would need to summarize the whole. For the opening pages, I meant to return to this little inset to add a rendition of our wedding day.

A hike during the evening, which led into blackness gave us an awe-filled surprise. I kept seeing sparkles everywhere and eventually we sussed out exactly what they were. Creepy!

Boy knew I was excited to see the night sky with little pollution. I wouldn’t have gone without him, as the walk was a bit long to find a clearing, but it was vast once we saw it. Something I wasn’t prepared for was the neck pain! Ow!

Most of our anniversary trip was internet signal free, so when we hit somewhere en route and Boy’s phone blew up, it was quite a startling problem. We sat alongside the road right there with signal for him to patch into his servers, call people, and suss it out. Was not a highlight of the trip, and that sort of thing is the reason he hates leaving town.

Boy wanted to find a watchtower, but I recognized he didn’t understand how to be safe navigating in woods without trails. He has more to learn before I allow him out there on his own, I tell you that! When I realized that I was not going to be able to find the car if we kept walking around in circles as fast as he was going, looking for it, I demanded we head back. I don’t think we were ever near any danger of getting lost, but it is that type of behavior that can get otherwise intelligent people in trouble, and I put my foot down. I mention this only because in that moment, my confidence in my own solo hiking spiked. Plus, let’s be real… I was hungry;)

This page won’t make any sense whatsoever unless I tell you that we brought the Nintendo Switch with us and were playing DragonQuest, with characters we named after out cats:)

Until this day, we had done what Boy wanted to do – driving off road in his new SUV. It is so rare for him to get out there and take a vacation, and he had plenty of fun. However, I had planned that we do one of my day hikes at least once, and this was it. And wow, once again I was shocked to discover that Boy was ill-prepared! Here I am, pack and emergency supplies and food and water, and he winds up with none of it, just his camera bag and a half drank bottle of soda. For a full day hike? He said he misunderstood me (aka he thought I was exaggerating), and I think it hit home finally of what I’ve been doing down at Shawnee all these years! So, anyway, we cut the hike shorter than I would have liked, but we had a great time nonetheless. Even if I had to share my lunch:P

Here’s the page that made me too mad to press on with the others. This should not show the adorable possum, but instead, I’m not sure what it could show. We were at the picnic table at night, and something was in the woods nearby. A pig maybe?

We stopped by a WesCo for gas, and toured the towns along the coast. In one shop, we spoke to a transplant from our state, and she was certainly winning us over to the Michigan Life. Alas, if only…

Here, the possum is appeared.

We stopped at Grand Rapids and had the most marvelous pizza at Quarantino’s. Can’t wait to go back! We love our Pizza Quests;)

Boy was hooked – he even told me to look for property so we can have our own retreat. His highlight was my “day” hike. Now that is a resounding compliment to how much he enjoyed our vacation!