The Really, Totally Awesome, Rad, W-O-W Yosemite Wedding

I was totally stoked when my bachelor friend de jour announced he was getting married late last year. The consummate good guy who never got the girl, he finally found a beautiful Vietnamese woman who was the Asian female version of himself. Ann is about 90 lbs soaking wet, and could easily pass for a co-ed. Then Sean told me they were planning to get married in Yosemite. Yosemite, for me, falls somewhere in that vague ambiguous area between the West Coast and middle America.  Lucky for me, it's in Northern Cali. Even better, I would get to reminisce with a few of my best MIT girlfriends and be openly geeky in the most beautiful natural setting I've seen in America.

Because the ceremony & reception were on Sun night, I spent the majority of the weekend as the most gosh-darn cool third-wheel to my best friend, Kristie T, and her Obama-look-alike boyfriend, Manish. Also, flying into SF and driving to Yosemite is a serious endeavor. I calculated that, door-to-door, it took me about the same transit time from my Chicago home to the Wawona Yosemite Hotel as it did to fly from LAX to Sydney, Australia. Kristie T and I agreed that the Wawona was a shoo-in for the Poconos resort depicted in "Dirty Dancing", aka "The Best Movie of All Time."

Since we had all trekked considerable distances for Sean's wedding, we decided that the appropriate activity for Saturday would be a hike. I mean, how would you feel if you went to a place as beautiful as Yosemite and never walked amongst MOTHER NATURE. She would hate you. We decided that a leisurely 1.5 mile walk would do the trick. As the navigatress, I failed to follow the easy course and led us on a 4.5 mile to a lake that didn't exist. Way to pull a fast one on us, Mother Nature. On the positive side, we felt immeasurably accomplished and very hungry.

As photographer extraordinaire with a camera the size of a 1-mos baby, Kristie T diligently documented our trials and travails as we braved the wilderness. The wedding was simple, the scenery stunning, the company priceless. I enjoyed hanging out with the sorority sisters I never get to see (Teresa, Cat K), agreeing to be silly AND amazing at the same time, and seeing how happy Sean and Ann were to be together. Mazel tov!

Labor Day Getaway to Traverse City

And........we're back!

Speaking of which, we have done so much between our last post and today that to cover it all would be overwhelming. First off, we road-tripped it to Traverse City, Michigan for a rainy Labor Day weekend. If you're anything like me, when I think of "Michigan", I think "Detroit". This conjures up unattractive images of boarded up ghost neighborhoods, urban blight, factories, and other depressing ideas. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that, on the whole, Michigan is beautiful.

Traverse City is a 6 hr drive according to Google Maps, which I always take as a challenge to "beat" this number. With the impending storm, we saw lots of beautiful clouds on the road like these:

 

Lots of our colleagues had grown up/summered in various lakeside Chicago towns, and gave us enthusiastic recommendations for various eateries. Us being the couple who focuses on the local food more than any other attraction, got to work very quickly at an adorable French eatery.  (Dan is eating chicken pot pie. I went with the flatbread pizza.)

We drove up Friday during the day, and were pretty wiped out by the long drive. Our bed and breakfast was literally the only one in Traverse City proper that had any availability left for the holiday weekend. It was also the oldest B&B, with 2 amiable and adorable senior citizens who ran their cozy inn. It definitely smelled like "old people" and we swear we never saw the husband proprietor change clothes, but it had character!

The next morning, the downpour had really kicked into gear, so we made a strategic decision to spend our day indoors. In wineries. And sampling rooms. Along the way, we "re-discovered" that Michigan is all about the cherries. Note the cherry apron that Dan is modeling. Great Christmas present idea! Cha-ching!

 

We ended up traveling all along Old Mission Peninsula, hitting up almost all the wineries on that small piece of land. Starting early in great spirits, we learned all about the kinds of wines that the land/weather lends itself to (white wines like rieslings, Gewurztraminers, roses). And every permutation of cherry wine you can think of. Note the picture was taken at 10am in the morning. And already we're happy.

After about the 5th wine tasting, we got very happy. We might have misbehaved on a vineyard / winery tour by climbing on top of the grape crusher and trying to squeeze into a fermentation tank. I'm not saying we did. I'm not saying we didn't either. Below, a picture from one of the tamer moments.

The weather cleared up and Dan got the great idea to sneak into one of the great sand dunes of Lake Michigan and climb it to watch the sunset. Great idea, bad execution. First of all, the wind gets pretty merciless on the shore. Second, it is a serious hill with some bad ass angles. The payoff only comes at the top after you've huffed and puffed and shot evil looks of DIE! DIE! to your oblivious partner who is scampering up the sand hill. It also got cold very quickly. As Numero #1 wuss, I didn't wait until the sunset, but we did take in the beautiful scenery.

The next day, we went hiking along the (easy) Empire Bluff Trail. It's breathtakingly beautiful, and reminds me of the northwest coast of Kauai. Still very windy, but the view is completely worth it.

After that, we made our way home (surgeons don't get Mondays off). Other highlights of the Labor Day Weekend included eating at Stella, an amazing restaurant in Traverse City, touring their former asylum turned commercial / retail shops, coming back to Chicago and heading straight to the Vampire Weekend concert with matching red Converse shoes, trying Al's #1 Beef for the first time, trying to not scare young children at the Shedd Aquarium with our verbal predictions of whether any particular fish was "delicious", and eating Korean BBQ at Cho Sun Oak and ice cream floats at Margie's Candies with Suj, Shamita, and Amee. Dee-licious.