Don’t judge a book by its cover or even your skim of the pages.
I thought I’d seen it all in the Midwest after more than a decade of visits to see your Mom’s extended family. We mixed things up this time and met everyone at a beach town called Three Oaks on Lake Michigan.
Lake Michigan has Hawaii-quality beaches. I couldn’t believe it.
It doesn’t compare with Hawaii’s climate, scenery, cultural aspects, etc., but that window of late summer was hard to beat. The beaches were large and clean. The water was, of course, salt-free and warm. You and Matteo could entertain yourselves for hours, building sand pies and teasing crashing waves. We also enjoyed the cute towns of New Buffalo and Sawyer, where we memorably ate at Greenbush Brewing BBQ and got our morning fix at Infusco Coffee.
We stayed at an Airbnb cottage with Grammie and Popa, and your Uncle Ty, Aunt Amber, Abby and Mason made a day trip to visit us. It was important to see Uncle Ty has he’s been fighting and beating cancer.
We bookended the trip in Chicago. On the front-end, we went to Shedd Aquarium and on the back-end we visited the free Chicago Zoo. You can guess which I thought had the best bang for the buck.
In addition to the sightseeing and family visits, it was nice to be traveling again as a family. We were delayed a couple of hours leaving Chicago, which made for a 12-hour travel day. You kids took it like champs. That’s about the same amount of travel as getting back to Europe. Picture me shopping airfare with that in mind.
Love,
Dad