Episode 28: August 2007
Highlights of the month include:
• Bay City Pig Gig
• Mike, Faith, and baby Hannah visit Midland
• Neal completes his first duathlon
• Deb’s trapeze and spa weekend
• Canoeing in Oscoda, Michigan
Someone told me that if you want a true slice of the Midwest, go to a festival. So that’s exactly what we did. On the first Saturday in August, we attended the Bay City Pig Gig, a festival dedicated to, well, pigs. It features everything from racing baby pig, petting animals (pigs included), eating pork ribs and other barbeque, and watching local variety performances. The festival attracted an “interesting” slice of humanity – you could pick out any of the festival workers by their haircut (mullet) and the occasional missing tooth.
The highlight of the festival is the rib cook-off, which attracts contestants from all over the U.S. Each barbeque company sets up a large outdoor kitchen where they cook up their best barbeque for the competition and for sale to the public. My decision about which company to try was made easy when we saw the Australian contingent: Aussom Aussie BBQ. All the way from sunny Sydney, the one token Aussie on the team, complete with Acubra (wide-brimmed hat), greeted patrons at the cooking station, laying the accent on thick, and then called out the orders to the many Americans who were actually doing all the work. Now that is what I call Aussie entrepreneurial thinking! Regardless of the “authenticity” of Aussom Aussie, we had to admit that the ribs were wonderful! After getting our fill of the Midwest, we met up with our friends, Patty and Michel, at their new house for dinner.
The following weekend, our good friends, Mike and Faith, came to town to attend the wedding reception of some friends of theirs. For those who have followed the Shorgs from the beginning, you may remember Mike as the friend of Neal’s who traveled with him to Australia in 2002 just after Neal and I started dating. Since then, Mike has left Dow Chemical, gotten married, and welcomed a new baby (Hannah) to the family. We caught up with them on Friday night for dinner and then had them and some other friends over on Sunday for brunch at our place. The rest of the weekend was relatively quiet besides a round of golf and watching some movies at home.
We have been maintaining a fairly consistent exercise program this summer through a combination of Ultimate Frisbee, cycling, golf, and the occasional jog. Neal decided to take things one level further this month by completing his first duathlon. A duathlon is like a triathlon but without the swimming leg. Neal’s duathlon had two running legs (the first was two miles, or 3.2 kilometers, and the second was five kilometers) and a biking leg (10 miles, or 16 kilometers). The race was in Sanford, about 15 minutes from Midland, and was impressively well-organized and well-attended. Neal did great! He said that his goal was just to finish the race, which he did while even hitting his target time. Me, being the good wife that I am, did not join him in the race (out of fear of totally embarrassing myself given that I am not in the greatest shape), but I did cheer him and the other competitors on. I was proud as punch when he crossed the finish line!
Immediately after celebrating the race, I headed into northern Michigan for a girl’s weekend away with my friends, Lynn and Stephanie. Our destination was Boyne Mountain, a resort that boasts a spa facility, small village, and one of Michigan’s largest mountains. I personally chuckle at the fact that it is called a mountain – it is a hill at best – but it does offer the locals a place to ski in the winter and some great hikes and mountain bike trails in the summer. We were grateful for its fabulous spa facilities and very impressive trapeze set. Yes, you read correctly. The girls and I specifically went to Boyne Mountain for a two-hour trapeze lesson, which provided another reason for why I did not opt for a life in the circus. But it was so much fun to try! By the end of our lesson, all 11 of us in the class were able to grab the bar, swing, hang upside down with our knees over the bar, and get caught by one of the instructors while hanging upside down. After getting over the initial fear that one has when jumping to a bar that is hanging over a 30-foot drop to a net below, I found it to be totally exhilarating. We finished our lesson with hugs and high-fives for everyone (I think we were amazed we were all alive and, besides a few bruises, relatively unscathed) and headed off to a restaurant for dinner. Lynn drove back that evening while Stephanie and I stayed the night so that we could complete the weekend the next day with a few spa treatments before driving back to Midland. We vowed that we would make the trapeze class and spa an annual girls’ weekend away, provided that the resort gets the trapeze people back.
Regarding work, I took a day trip to Chattanooga, Tennessee this month. Travelling in style, I hitched a ride on the corporate jet along with five members of the HR leadership team, including our Executive Vice President. We went to Tennessee to visit the electricity provider Tennessee Valley Authority to discuss benchmarking with their team. The trip was relatively uneventful, though I wonder how executives ever go back to travelling on commercial planes after being spoiled with no waiting lines, immediate take-off on demand, and the ability to fly into small towns rather than major airports. That is the life! Outside of travel, I was quoted for the first time in a major publication. Business Week magazine wrote an article about the U.S. recruitment market and contacted yours truly for an interview. Okay, so they spelled my name wrong initially and got my job title wrong, too. Still, it was a great experience! (If you are interested,
click here to see the article.)The final weekend of the month began with a lovely night out for dinner followed by a viewing of “The Bourne Ultimatum.” The next morning, we awoke to the sound of a rain storm and, therefore, decided to give our credit card a workout at the Birch Run shopping mall. Located about 45 minutes from our place, the mall is home to literally hundreds of shops, including some of our favorite brands. Naturally, we bought far more than we needed!
We had an early start the next day as we decided to take another drive, this time two hours north of Midland, to the town of Oscoda. After a stop at the Lumberjack’s Memorial (complete with statue and gift shop), we arrived at our destination: a kayak rental shop along the Au Sable River. Home of the best trout fishing in Michigan and a popular spot for water enthusiasts, the Au Sable is the most famous river in the Midwest (or so we were told). We chose to rent a two-person kayak and paddle our way down six miles of the river. The paddling was easy given that the river’s current is quite brisk and pretty much did all the work for us. Along the way, we witnessed first-hand the water sports that the river is famous for, most of which consisted of tubing down the river while drinking cans of beer! Unfortunately we did not see any animals along the river besides two families of swans, but the two-hour cruise was very scenic, with beautiful trees and flowering reeds as far as the eye can see.
Following our river adventure, we visited the town of Oscoda and had an ice cream cone while sitting along a perfect sandy beach that went as far as the eye could see. I had to keep reminding myself that the massive body of water in front of me is actually a fresh-water lake and not the ocean…though it looks the same to me!
While the drive to and from Oscoda is not really worth writing about, we did drive through some very questionable cities where we decided it best not to stop. Two stops of note were Omar, where the locals proudly display a sign that says that the city is the smallest in Michigan (now that’s saying something), and Standish, a non-descript town that, oddly enough, is the home of an awesome roadside taco stand!
