Valentine’s Day Weekend
Posted by Jim at February 26th, 2005
Though it seems a million years ago now, Kristen and I went to a bed and breakfast on Valentine’s Day weekend. We went “up north.” In this case “up north” meant Bellaire, a small town not far from Traverse City.
The bed and breakfast was named the “Applesauce Inn.” In talking to the owners I’ve learned that the name was largely chosen because it was in the “A’s” making it that much more likely to be found in a list of bed and breakfasts. If so, it worked. I think that’s exactly how Kristen discovered it.
We’d been there before, but that was during the summer and we brought bikes along to entertain ourselves while we were there. Bikes and entertainment only go hand in hand if your definition of entertainment includes sweat, hassle and pain. Mine does. Biking to Alden, a nearby small town seemed to take at least an hour and included a lot of hills, leaving us desparate for water by the time we were done.
This time we had hoped to do cross country skiing. Unfortunately there wasn’t enough snow for that. Instead we drove around the Leelanau peninsula looking for a cheese shop that we’d run across a few years earlier. They made their own cheese there and we’d enjoyed it. Unfortunately we didn’t remember precisely where it was and though we did enjoy driving through the small towns in the process of looking, I was getting a little annoyed with how things were going.
Some actual dialogue from the trip:
Me: So, this cheese shop… Do you remember if it was out in the middle of nowhere?
Kristen: Yes. I think so.
Me: Then it seems that we’re going in the right direction.
We did find it eventually. Much like the cheese shop in the Monty Python sketch, it turned out to be empty of cheese. Unlike the Monty Python sketch, the old gas station it had been in was abandoned, making it empty of shop as well.
By the time we had driven past the 45th parallel (halfway between the equator and the north pole) we’d decided that we’d had enough and began to drive back to the bed and breakfast, resolving to stop at one of the many winerys we’d passed along the way.
On the way back we saw a sign that wasn’t visible going north. The shop had relocated into a combination winery and bed and breakfast. They were having a wine tasting. We stopped, bought cheese, and tasted some wine.
It’s good to step out of normal life and do something like that.