A Little Vacation

Last week, I went to Mackinac Island for a ladies conference called Win-some Women. I went with Jake's mom (Barb), my sister-in-law Elisa and our friend Sandy. It's such a fun retreat! We were spoiled at the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island that propels you back in time when people dressed for dinner and a horses and carriage brought you to your hotel door.
In addition to being treated like queens, we had some amazing speakers that we listened to. Tony Campolo was the keynote speaker and he was so great! I was pretty excited to hear that he was going to be at the conference and he didn't disappoint. Another great speaker there was Gracia Burnham. She was pretty happy to have 'ran into' some fellow New Tribers in Elisa and I. We loved listening to her speak and enjoyed sharing dinner with her. It was nice to just hang out and ask her questions.
These are some pictures from the trip. The first one is the view of the hotel as you walk up the sidewalk. It was rainy when we got there, but it cleared up the second day. There's also a picture of our room which was small but nice. We felt like princesses in our canopy beds. :) The flowers in the picture with me on the porch (the world's longest, I might add) are geraniums. At the Grand Hotel, practically everything is decorated with geraniums!
Here's a link to the Win-Some Women website if you're interested in checking it out.
~Erin

http://www.win-somewomen.org/

The Cows are Out!

First of all, I have to say that I'm so sorry that I didn't get a picture of this!
A little background info: for those of you who don't know, we're currently living on a dairy farm just north of Battle Creek, Michigan. It's a pretty big operation where they milk about 600 cows 24/7. There are in total about 1,000 cows that live on the farm.
Last night, my sister (Sarah) came over to help us unpack some boxes (no, we still aren't unpacked yet). I was trying to explain to her what life on a farm is like. Like how LOUD cows can be. Occassionally while we were unpacking things in the house I'd stop and say "can you hear that" and sure enough, there'd be a really loud "moo" coming from our back yard.
Sarah asked if the cows were close by and if they ever got out. To which I responded "no". She then said, "well, there's some in your yard right now". We looked out the window and saw about eight young cows 'running' around in our front yard!! What do you do when the cows get out?!?! Well, it didn't take long and we saw a Gator come speeding by and they quickly rounded up the cows back into their barn.
Quite an exciting night for us! :)

Training.

So in the spring, there's this race called the 5/3 River Bank Run and Jake and I have decided that we're going to run in it. At least a 5K (3.1 miles) and maybe a 10K (6.2 miles). Now, neither one of us are in the best of shape, but we're motivated and have some friends who will be running with us to keep us accountable! We live in an old farmhouse on a beautiful country road which is awesome for training. It's hilly and curvy with very little traffic and it's pretty much a runner's dream! We've also discovered a couple of great websites for tracking your progress and tips for training.

Anyway, that's our new venture. We're having fun training together and are hoping to keep it up even through the winter months. (Southern Michigan doesn't get nearly as much snow as Durham does!)



http://www.53riverbankrun.com/

http://www.runnersworld.com/

http://www.livestrong.com/