Busy Weekend: Thomas in Connorsville, Family in FtWayne, and Sister Trip to MI

  Friday was The Best Day of the Year.  We took both vehicles, a first, and drove to Connorsville to ride with Thomas the Tank Engine.  The weather was perfect, though too sunny for really good photos.

Driving to Fort Wayne

  After lunch at Pizza King, Boom drove Max home in the van while MyGuy and i drove to FtWayne to try to see his ailing aunt.  She didn't feel up to seeing visitors, which we knew was a possibility, but we visited with his sister, who has been pretty much living in the hospital room, and his uncle, the aunt's brother from out of state.

MiniVacation

  Saturday morning my sister and i set off for Michigan.  We had wanted to see the play, The Screwtape Letters*, when it was in Indianapolis, but hadn't been able to.  This was the closest presentation, and our guys said go for it.

  Well, we went for a bit more too.

  Leaving at 8am from Indy, we didn't make our room near Grand Rapids until 5pm.  Girlfriend trips involve adequate potty stops, and we spent a couple of hours enjoying South Haven - and a couple more hours probably fighting the South Haven traffic, because we arrived on the day of their one-day arts festival!

Screwtape Letters

  Both of us had read C.S.Lewis' book more than once.  It was hard to imagine staging a book of letters (epistolary novel), but they did it very well.  We sat next to a gentleman who came alone, and he invited us to his church Sunday morning.

  One of the people we spoke with there asked a wonderfully penetrating question.  "What was  your take-away?  Was it just good entertainment, or did you learn something?"

  Well, what we saw was essentially the book on stage, dramatized.  But there were good things to remember.  Guard you mind, we are distractable critters, there IS spiritual warfare going on!  

  The pyrotechnics were minimal, just enough to keep our attention for a 90 minute talky play with no intermission.

Holland, MI

  Sunday after church we shopped in Holland.  Actually we began looking for the Visitor Information Center.  (Windmill Island is like Rome: all roads lead there.)  We wanted to have our lunch at a place with a Dutch sounding name, but they closed ten minutes before we arrived at their door, so we went to Crane's in the City, a branch of a local orchard business.

Notice the wooden shoe the fisherman has caught!

  The main thing we wanted to do in Holland, though, was visit the Dutch Village and recreate the stork photo from our kidhood.  We spent a lovely couple of hours wandering the village, before going to look for the Crane's Market (another would have suited just as well, and been closer to the highway), and heading home, to arrive by 11.

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*If you go, be sure to purchase your tickets through the local box office or Ticketmaster.  We paid not only a handling fee but $15 per ticket to have two computer printouts  FedEx'd  to us, causing cheap seats to cost more than all but the very best ones in the theatre.