Later blogging: vacation edition

Hi all! I took longer to get this posted than I would have liked, but such is life. We spent a lovely bit of time at the beginning of July in Traverse City, Michigan for our vacation. I unknowingly planned it during the Cherry Festival, and was told by coworkers that I’d hate it because of how busy it was. But we actually had a really good time, festival and all!

We went north with very little in the way of plans, more like goals of things in the area we’d like to see. I resisted my need to overplan everything, so there was no daily schedule dictating what we saw when. Instead, we just went with the flow and it was the best decision ever. Sunday was spent at the festival, where Declan rode some rides, we watched the air show, and spent some time walking around downtown. Monday we made a trip to Sleeping Bear Dunes, with a pit stop at Wool & Honey on the way there to pick up birthday yarn (since I turned 35 while on our trip), and then after the dunes we visited Glen Arbor to have lunch and pick up wine at Cherry Republic. Tuesday, our last day there, we drove around the peninsula looking around, stopped by the lighthouse where I spent a stupid amount of time obsessively digging in the shore to find Petoskey stones, and then headed back to a park near our AirBnB where Declan played on the playground and I found certifiable Petoskey stones (the ones found at the lighthouse might be more fossils than the real deal, but they looked cool so I brought them home anyway for further inspection).

Since coming home the rest of the time has been a bit of a blur. The first week of work was pretty rough after spending the last few weeks part-timing it while my mom was away. There has been raspberries picked from the garden, some time at the pool, but, mostly, getting back into routines.

I feel like I need more time off, but at the same time I feel pretty rejuvenated and ready to tackle some things around the house. I always seem to want to declutter and downsize more things when we come home from vacation – something about living away from all your crap reminds you of how little you actually need to be happy. So, I’m trying to run with that as best as I can. I’ll never be full on minimalist, but it IS really nice to look around and not see so much clutter everywhere, or the reminders of long-forgotten projects never to be finished. A bit of refocusing on the things that matter was exactly what I needed! <3