Post #62 – Where I grew up

Though I was born in Lansing, MI, I actually grew up in Lake Orion, MI since my parents moved there when I was about 3 months old.  Lake Orion, MI was a great place to grow up because it is “where living is like a vacation!”.  (That comment was both sincere and sarcastic simultaneously.)

Lake Orion, MI is one of the northern suburbs of Detroit, near Auburn Hills, Pontiac, and Rochester Hills.  It now boasts of Great Lakes Crossing, a large mall of I-74 (exit 84B to be exact), but this mall didn’t exist until I was in my teens or so.  When I was young, it was small.  I don’t even think there was a grocery store in Lake Orion.  I think we had to drive to Rochester Hills to go grocery shopping… I could be mistaken though.  Anyway, it was small and quaint.  My favorite place was one of the county parks a couple miles from my house.  I would go hiking and practice my photography skills with my dad.

I lived in a small neighborhood and was friends with several girls.  We would ride our bikes and play all the time.  It was fun.  I remember one fall when so many leaves fell in the backyard that we made a huge, long pile of leaves and played for hours.

Sadly, I moved away from Lake Orion when I was 12.  The rest of my memories, along with my formative teenage years, were from our house in Rochester Hills, MI.  But Lake Orion is where I grew up.

Post #52 – The best roadtrip

Ok, so this isn’t exactly post #52 because I’ve been slacking on the blogging front for the past month or so.  But I do intend to slowly finish the posts I have missed (I’ll back-date them so that they are in order) so that I can say I wrote 365 posts this year.  However, for now, I’ll just pick up where I left off without giving myself too much grief.

Today’s topic is to describe the best roadtrip I’ve ever taken.  Since I haven’t really gone on too many roadtrips, my selection is a bit limited.  I went to South Carolina the summer before sophomore year of college with my friends Sarah and Joel.  That was a blast!  On the way back, we had a couple days of freedom since we had requested so much time off of work, so we drove through a couple different cities, including Nashville, Louisville, Indianapolis, and Bowling Green (ok that isn’t so much a city, but I wanted to show them where I went to school).

Other than that, all of my roadtrips have been local – Ann Arbor for the day, or Detroit for the Jazz Festival.  That is, until about seven months ago.  My husband, John, and I drove out to Chicago for three days for our honeymoon.  It was fantastic!  The drive was long enough to really get into the zone of driving, and exploring downtown Chicago was a lot of fun!  We stayed above the Majestic Theatre downtown.

Two weeks later, we embarked on a more serious roadtrip.  We started in Bowling Green, OH by attending a friend’s wedding (it also happened to be where we lived) on a Sunday night.  After the wedding we drove to Kent, OH to visit some friends for the night.  On Monday, we headed through several states to arrive in Washington, D.C. (we were there to obtain our visas for our trip/move to China).  We left D.C. Tuesday (with visas in hand!) and drove back to Columbus, OH to visit my best friend.  Wednesday found us in Dayton, OH for a little over 24 hours.  We stopped back through Columbus to see my Grandma on Thursday on our way back to Bowling Green, via some town we met his sister in for dinner.  After a brief stop in BG, we headed up to Michigan on Friday to say good-bye to my parents, then rested in BG on Saturday before heading back to Columbus to fly to China on Sunday.  That is probably the best roadtrip I’ve ever taken.  It was fun to see so much of the country and see all our friends.  I can’t wait to roadtrip again!  And that might just be tomorrow!