One of my favorite memories as a kid was taking an annual or bi-annual trip to Boyne City to visit family. Mimi would take myself, cousin Terha, Nicole and Stephanie to Boyne City to visit our Aunt Gaynelle, Uncle Dan and cousins Jonah, Jacob and Joey. She loved going there a few times a year and it was always a great getaway for us kids. We would go during school vacations or summer vacations.
The car rides were always memorable. We would all either meet at Mimi’s house in Oxford or she would pick some of us up at our houses. From there, we would drive up I-75 north. The alphabet game started and always ended by the Zilwaukee bridge unless we saw a license plate with a Z on it. Other car games included guessing the title and artist of the song on the radio and the question box. Mimi was always the one person we could tell anything to so as kids so we took it upon ourselves to put ‘anonymous’ questions in a box for her to answer. These ranged from how Mimi and Papa met to who her favorite kid was (She has 9) haha.
One of the things I’ll always remember is stopping at the Cracker Barrel for lunch on the way there or on the way home. Papa would give Mimi 4 film containers filled with quarters to give each of us. That was his way of being with us. We would have lunch then use our quarters in the giftshop. It was always a treat!
When we were at Aunt Gaynelle and Uncle Dan’s house, it was always a blast. There was always something going on as they ran a daycare during the day. If we went on the weekends, we would go to church with them. We would get into adventures with the boys, either playing outside, playing with their black lab named Dozer, or going to the beach. We would get into heated tournaments of Mario Cart. Someone always ended up getting blisters on their palms from the competition games. They lived about a mile from Lake Charlevoix and on good days at the right time of year, you could see the lake from their front yard. We would travel into Petosky occasionally to shop in the downtown stores and have lunch. It was quite a handful to have 6 kids in one house plus 3 adults but it was always a blast.
We continued this tradition until we all were in high school and started to spend our vacations with friends instead of family. This was such a great tradition I am happy we did as a family.
