In the heart of the country

Monday was our first planned picnic, which worked out well since that had been three days in the hotel room and housekeeping was really anxious to get at our towels. We'd been rising too late to be tended on their usual routine earlier. We put the cheeses and apples and a couple sodas in the cooler and headed to a party store, which is Michiganian for a convenience store that sells beer and parties, to stock up on ice. It turns out bunny_hugger's cooler is really good, as there were still serious blocks of ice when we dried it out the next day. The store also had a Suttons Bay Official Snow Fall thermometer, which measured about 120 inches of snow last season. It goes up to 240 inches.

( Where were we going? What were we looking for? What didn't we see? What did we see? How was it linked to the TV series Community? And what didn't we eat? The answers may surprise you! )

Trivia: Mariner 6 was projected to return eight pictures from its far encounter phase and 25 from its near encounter with mars. It actually returned 50 in the far encounter and 26 in the near encounter, with 428 total useful pictures. Source: On Mars: Exploration of the Red Planet, 1958 - 1978, Edward Clinton Ezell, Linda Neuman Ezell. NASA SP-4212.

Currently Reading: Project Orion: The True Story Of The Atomic Spaceship, George Dyson.