Vacation, Visiting, and a Micro-brewery

Last week, Mick and I headed out to Michigan to visit a bit. I have to say right up front that we didn’t get to see all the people we would have liked to. We stayed at my one daughter’s house and enjoyed being with her family. I barely got to see my other daughter and did not see her kids at all. There were others that I would have liked to see, but it just didn’t happen.

The bad thing about a vacation like this is that time is of the essence. There just doesn’t seem to be enough hours in the day to do the things you want to do and see the people you want to see.

We spent hours by the pool and some time at the beach, but many of the things I wanted to do and people I wanted to touch base with did not happen.

One thing we did do, that I was most appreciative of, was we visited Odd Side Ales, in Grand Haven. This is a very small micro-brewery. There are no tours and you can’t buy a six pack or a growler, but there beer is so good you will certainly want to!

We took our grand-kids there and they enjoyed sitting at the bar and drinking their root beer and cherry sodas. They thought that they were pretty hot stuff, sitting at the bar.

Mick and I tasted a couple of their beers, but the one we really liked and settled on was called “Smokey the Porter”. If you like porters, this was excellent! It was one of the best beers I have tasted in some time! It was very dark, but for a porter, it didn’t have a real strong hoppy taste. Just enough to make you notice. I don’t know the alcohol content, but it was fairly strong. We had to take a turn around the downtown area to sober up a little before driving home.

Speaking of town, Grand Haven is a great place to visit! We lived there for eighteen years before I went into ministry and moved to upstate NY. Grand Haven has so much of what I miss in NY. It has something to do, like micro-breweries, coffee houses and a general sense of caring about their town. Where I live, Sodus, NY has none of that. New York is a beautiful state, but where I live is so depressed and, well, rural, that I often long for some culture.

It was nice being on vacation. I still blogged, but I didn’t spend hours on the computer like normal. Mick did not have to go work at a job that she does not like. It was worth every minute of it. If only we could have spent more time visiting!