As promised, some pictures from our recent trip to Gaylord, MI, where Mark’s family has a vacation house that his grandparents built. This is the second year we’ve gone up, so it looks like this might become an annual tradition. From Mark’s perspective, the point of the trip is for him to set up a bunch of targets and get to shoot guns with his friends from home. From my perspective, I get to be on vacation somewhere that isn’t our house and hang out with Heather. Last year we went hiking at Sleeping Bear Dunes. This year, our intention was to go to Petoskey, where there is also some hiking around the lake. Alas, this year it rained pretty much the whole weekend, so while Mark did manage to get everyone in his shooting group to go shooting in the rain (for 9 hours), Heather and I opted to do our sightseeing from the car.
As it turns out, the towns of Charlevoix and Petoskey both have some interesting architecture to look at. Charlevoix has a collection of houses built by architect Earl Young that are known as the “mushroom houses.” (Wikipedia also notes they are referred to as “gnome houses” or “Hobbit houses,” which I like better.) This one was my favorite:
An Earl Young gnome house
If you click for the bigger version, you can see they actually have a little gnome sitting on the side of the house.
One of the other houses was actually for sale, and when Heather looked it up, it turned out to be the house that Young had built for himself and has been in the architect’s family ever since. Sadly, it was not quite as Hobbit-esque.
In Petoskey, there is an entire neighborhood of Victorian vacation homes, all replete with gingerbread trim.
The best colors
The most trim
By the time we finished driving around taking pictures of people’s houses in a hopefully non-creepy way, it was still rainy and cold, so we went to a coffee house to have lunch and then went back to Gaylord, where we spent the rest of the afternoon (and most of the rest of the weekend) in front of the fireplace, which seemed like an excellent use of our time. Maybe next year there will be more hiking.
