Clare, Michigan, has something over 3,000 people. There are a surprising number of good restaurants (and an unsurprising number of bad ones), an old hotel with an air of elegance and a 125 year old city bakery (now incarnated as Cops & Doughnuts, https://copsdoughnuts.com/) and a few interesting shops. We didn't go into this one so I don't know what mysteries were held within. It's main stock seemed to be minerals, geodes, etc., but I wonder if it glows on the darkest night.
Not a great photo but there isn't much going on. We were thinking of making a long day trip to sand dunes on the shore of Lake Michigan but got scared off by snow in the forecast. So we hung out and entertained kids.
In the air again later today. Thanks to a big schedule change by the *&$@# airline we would have had a forty minute connection in Chicago, the most direct way, and I ain't taking that chance. So we are going home through Washington, DC, the very long way around, but it works.
Audrey Christmas Crowe, 6, and, no, I don't know where the middle name came from other than that there is a town called Christmas in Michigan's Upper Peninsula that my son and daughter-in-law visited. She is in rapt attention, watching the movie version of Hamilton. She knows all the lyrics by heart.
It is appropriate that she has a shamrock on her knee. She lives in the town of Clare in Clare County, Michigan, which is twinned with County Clare in Ireland, where my father's family comes from.
We are pretty far up there by American standards, if you set aside Alaska. Although in Europe we are no further north than, say, Milan, the continental climate here makes for serious winters. The family went for a pre-Thanksgiving dinner walk on one of the many area trails. Snow was just beginning to fall as we headed back into town. The cold and damp isn't doing my pneumonia a bit of good.
This is my one and only grandson, Atlas Henry Crowe. He will be three in February and, like all the small members of this family, loves to get in front of my lens. I don't get to see him and his sister, Audrey, 6, often enough. In this picture we are at the side of the pool in our hotel but those eyes could just melt me.
Greetings from a hotel near beautiful Chicago O'Hare International airport, where the traffic, by air and by road, is of mythic proportions tonight. To make sure I get something posted, here's another view of Henry Shaw's house at the botanical garden as the light projections proceed.
On to central Michigan this afternoon.
As every year, pictures of the light projections on the 19th Century home of Henry Shaw, founder of the Missouri Botanical Garden. They are quite remarkable and ever changing. The projections don't even get on the neighboring trees. May have a bit more of this.
Travel day today as we head out to see our Michigan division for the Thanksgiving holiday.. Chicago tonight and Clare, in the middle of the state, tomorrow. Been a while since we've seen Audrey, 5, and Atlas, who is close to 3.
