the end is near...

...of summer that is. School starts Monday, amazingly enough, and so I have a few days left of carefree-ness at home before heading down to College Station. So the past few weeks I've been relaxing, doing some projects I've wanted to do and just enjoying my summer in general as much as possible.

The first week of August, I went with my parents to visit my sister, Amanda, and her family in Michigan and had fun seeing sights in Ann Arbor and neighboring cities and spending time with family, especially the newest addition, my nephew Andrew who is only three months old.

Andrew!!! He's so cute!

We spent a day in Frankenmuth, MI, about an hour and a half drive away. It is a little German town with lots of restaurants and neat little shops, many of which gave free samples of things lot fudge or chocolate cheese.

We ate at Bavarian Inn Restaurant, supposedly well-known for its good food. It was delicious, the best fried chicken I've ever tasted! It came with a several course dinner of lots of traditional German food.

The flowers were just so pretty that day despite the heat.

In Frankenmuth, there is also a very large store nearby, Bronner's CHRISTmas WONDERLAND. It is a HUGE superstore that sells Christmas stuff year round. It was fun wandering the aisles (they have to give you a map the store is so big), looking at nativities and ornaments in the middle of the summer.

Another day, we went to the Ford Museum in Detroit. It was also very large and even after an entire day, I don't think I saw all they had. A lot of it was cars and planes and trains, but they also had large displays of furniture and cultural events.

We also spent a day in Toledo, OH, at one of the top ten zoos in the nation. It was a really nice zoo with great exhibits and lots of animals.
We even took a ride on their mini-train, while I held Andrew on my lap and tried to keep his hat on straight.

We spent a day on the campus of University of Michigan where Amanda and Katsu both go. They had a really nice Natural History Museum with lots of displays of ancient animal skeletons and huge taxidermy displays. They also have a very small but thoroughly interesting Museum of Music that only has two rooms showcasing some really bizarre instruments throughout history. We also walked through another small museum that housed artifacts from Ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, including an apparently famous sarcophagus.

Katsu also got to show us his lab where he works.

We did spend a lot of time just having fun and talking at Amanda's apartment, and taking turns getting to play with Andrew.

Our last day there we walked around downtown Ann Arbor and got to go to a real Farmer's Market, where they had fresh produce, including peaches that were like nothing I've ever tried at the store. It makes me really wish they had Farmer's Markets close by here too.