Happy New Year to me! I received a wondrous phone call in the bathroom at 7:30 this morning (I allowed myself to stay in bed until 7:00). I answered HELLO a bunch of times but the caller was not there. The GG, who was in the next room, thought I was trying to wake him up and answered HELLO but I didn’t hear him. Happy New Year to me. I eventually connected with the caller and that person thinks it is absolutely hilarious that I was in the bathroom when she called and I won’t say who it was but it is okay with me… Should auld acquaintance… Oh never mind.

So, we hung out at the Group Home @ Houghton Lake until the late morning and then we saddled up the Frog Hopper for a long slow trip up to Bobwhite Way in Gaylord, aka Bob and Gay’s beautiful new home. For the most part this was a fun trip over the back roads and I was working on the Sunday NYTimes xword (easy but I finished with a small error). Anyway, I was fine with the seasonal roads. The Frog Hopper is not quite like The Indefatigable but it is all-wheel drive and so it can handle snow and mud and stuff pretty well. A lot better than my beloved Ninja but we won’t go there. But then, the GG, who was navigating via the GPS on his iPad, (yes, while driving) took a wrong turn. Why he decided that this particular route was correct I do not know but we did actually drive up this power line access goat track. It was much scarier than it looks in the photo.

Yes, I was freaked out!!! I was even more freaked out when we hung a louie at the military artillery facility and headed up yet another utility line goat track. I really didn’t want to backtrack at that point so I went along with it for a few minutes but then we were going up and down and UP and DOWN and I finally freaked out and made the GG turn around. Wouldn’t you know, there was a parallel road that was a piece of cake. And we took it…

Anyway, we eventually arrived at Bobwhite Way and The Beautiful Gay helped sedate my nerves with some wonderful red whine. And this is the view from her chitchen window.

Of course we were all multitasking: talking up a storm, hanging out on the internet with friends and relatives who weren’t there with us, and watching the Lions and the Packers. Well, some of us were watching football… Not me…

And then it was time to head back to Houghton Lake. A lot of snow came down in the Gaylord area today and this is what Bobwhite Way looked like as we left today.

And then we headed south on old US27 and this is what it looked like as we approached Waters. I’m trying to figure out how long those old boxcars have been sitting there…

The driving looks terrible there but it actually wasn’t that bad because we were on the old road that parallels the freeway and there weren’t too many other cars around and it wasn’t (very) dark yet. After a brief stint on the freeway, where it was pretty awful, we got off onto old US27 again, even though I think the Higgins Lake stretch has got to be the bumpiest piece of highway anywhere in the Great Lake State. Ka-whomp ka-whomp ka-whomp. It was dark by that time and this is about what we could see.

Fortunately, those conditions abated quickly and by the time we got close to Houghton Lake, we were dealing with light snow. So we are *home* (one of our homes) and life is pretty good for the moment. I hope yours is too…

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