Summer ritual: Day trip to Birch Run Outlet Stores & Frankenmuth

207/365 Tuesday, 07/26/2011
This is a picture from the interior of the "Bavarian Inn" at Frankenmuth, MI. My friend/neighbor and I make an annual trek here every summer. We've been doing so for about 5 years. We shop at the outlet mall and then drive into Frankenmuth (past the World's Largest Christmas Store) where we always eat way too much food before we tackle the outlet mall one more time before hitting the road back to Albion. This was the first year we had other people join us--another neighbor and her daughter who had never been to Frankenmuth. We were surprised how many out-of-state license plates there were in the restaurant parking lot--Frankenmuth is a bit of a destination. It's very cute and hypes up its "Germanness" or more specifically its "Bavarianness". (Lots of flowers, blue and white flags & cheesy knickknack stores everywhere). Even the McDonalds is a bit germanified.  The food in the restaurant is somewhat German - I had the Jägerschnitzel which is traditionally served with a mushroom sauce (with lots of mushrooms in it). The sauce at the Inn tasted nice and creamy and mushroomy but there was only one mushroom in it....

Nevertheless we had a good time and enjoyed our meal. I came away with a few bargains including a lovely new orange backpack, which I'm sure will serve me well when I'm in Ohio. 

148/365 Saturday, 05/28/2011

Not a very exciting picture of Bill shopping at Meijers except for the fact that it is the very first picture on this blog taken with my new LG Optimus V smartphone. Once it became clear I'd be moving to Ohio in August we both quickly realized I'd need a better phone. With it I'll be able to quickly check my email and send texts etc. Since I'm not planning on getting the internet hooked up at the apartment it will be my link to the connected world. I hope it doesn't mean the already pretty average quality of my photos will go down even more--I'll try and do a better job of taking some pictures with the camera. It's just so easy to take them with the phone...

15/365 Saturday, 01/15/2011

I have been known to linger and look at the items on these shelves longingly...they remind me of home...And even though buying something here is the antithesis of buying "local" I do. I like the dark, chewy German bread and now and then I buy a jar of red cabbage. We also like the little sauce packet for "Jäger-Soße--"hunter's gravy" You make it with your meat--pork usually, mushrooms and they say "heavy cream" but we want to try it with half and half to see if that works as well. This all goes well with the Spaetzle you can pick up there too.