Flashback Friday

Tonight's the summer solstice. There aren't that many summer solstices that are memorable for me, but in 2005 we were on a vacation in a remote place during the solstice, and I'll always remember it. We had dinner in a large old ship that had been turned into a restaurant and was permanently parked in a small harbor that didn't have much else in it. After a late dinner, the sky was dark and beautiful, lit up just by the stars and the moon. Here are the Harrison kids 20 years ago, in the ocean off the island of Yap. 

Flashback Friday

The Harrison kids in Paris, spring break 1999. If you don't believe me, check out the map in John's hand.
 

Flashback Friday

Our 1999 spring break trip to Paris was so much fun I'm going to post a picture from it in this week's Flashback AND in next week's! 

Flashback Friday

Today's flashback came from my curiosity of what we were doing ten years ago this summer, in 2014. A lot happened that summer, including we went to Oregon to visit Brad's parents who for yearsspent their summers there. Here we are on a beautiful stretch of the coast.

Flashback Friday

Here's another picture from 1999. This time it was from our first trip overseas, when we went to Paris for the kids' spring break. Someday John can show this picture to Lloyd and explain why he was carrying a paper map.

Chicago Time With Mary

Last weekend Mary and I met up in Chicago for a long weekend getaway while she had some extra time thanks to her spring break.

I delivered a sewing machine from Geneva's church rummage sale, so now Mary has her own machine.

We ate some yummy food. This was our night out for Japanese.

We took in a play at the Goodman Theatre called The Penelopiad.

We did a lot of walking, including one rather brisk day when we walked along the lake.

We went on the architectural boat tour along the river, which was fantastic and not as cold as it might look.

And we met up with our mutual friend Priscilla to visit the Chicago History Museum. 

It was a great four days in a great city with the world's greatest daughter!

Flashback Friday

Nineteen years ago yesterday, on October 26, 2004, the kids and I visited a temple in Bangkok called Wat Arun. In this picture Mary must have been our photographer. Brad had been to Thailand for work and loved it, so when the kids had their fall break and he couldn't go with us, I took them by myself. It was really interesting and I'm so glad we went.
 

Flashback Friday

Last week I looked at what we were doing 10 years ago, so this week I'll look at what we were doing 20 years ago. In July of 2003, Chuck and Geneva joined us in northern Minnesota for a week of vacation. We had a really fun time together in a beautiful part of the country. This picture was taken while we were on short a pontoon boat excursion on lovely Lake Itasca, which adjoins the town of Bemidji. 

Flashback Friday

Eighteen years ago this week, in June of 2005, we were on vacation. It was our last trip before leaving Japan and moving back to Wisconsin. Here's the family meandering around on Yap, an island in Micronesia. I like this picture because everybody's just meandering around and being a tourist. And Peter is being an accommodating son and smiling for my picture. 
 

Flashback Friday

It was St. Patrick's Day in 2002 that we were all in Prague with the American School of Warsaw Knowledge Bowl team. This picture was taken on our last day, after the competition was over (both Peter and John were on the team), and we were on a tour with the school group before heading home. Looking at these pictures makes me realize that yesterday was the 21st anniversary of when John refused to sign the score card at that event. A fond Harrison memory!
 

Get Used To It: Another Post Featuring Lloyd

Last weekend Brad and I flew to San Antonio. We traveled there via Sun City, where we stopped over for a night to visit Brad's mom (above) and give ourselves a head start to the Phoenix airport. Our short stay in Sun City included time for a coffee at Geneva's neighborhood Starbucks.

From there we flew to San Antonio to visit my brother Steve and his wife Amy for the weekend.

And of course no visit to Steve and Amy's house is complete without mentioning that we also got to spend time with their Great Dane, Kevin.

And we got to see some sites in San Antonio, including this pretty area in Guadalupe State Park.

So much for the opening act, let's get to the headliner. Here is Lloyd, who is demonstrating that at the tender age of two months, he is sartorically savvy enough (his words, not mine) to know how to dress for golf. I have a feeling that as soon as he's able to carry his own bag, he and his dad will be hitting the links regularly. 

In this picture, Sirius is telling Lloyd about the time when, eight or so years ago, a very small Great Dane puppy named Kevin came to visit. When Kevin walked underneath Sirius, Sirius peed on him. As a result, I think I'm correct in surmising that Lloyd is making mental a note to self to never crawl underneath Sirius.

Flashback Friday

Yesterday I promised some news and here it is: as of yesterday, John is one step closer to being an attorney! He found out yesterday that he passed the Colorado bar exam. Now all he needs to do is get sworn in at the end of the month and then it'll be official. Passing a bar exam is always a huge relief, and especially so after doing most of law school during Covid and with a baby due in two months. We could not be more thrilled for John and the career that lies ahead of him. Here he is 20 years ago when we took a summer vacation to Germany. 

Flashback Friday

This week Brad and I are in Denver dog sitting for Sirius. John and Troy were with us earlier in the week but now they're in western Colorado for a family reunion with Esther and the rest of the Bedik family. I was thinking back to our first visit to Colorado, which was in 1997. That was 25 years ago - yikes. We were also here for a family reunion (with the Harrisons), and we stayed in a place called Leadville. We did some side trips that week, and this picture is from one of them. I don't remember exactly where we were when this picture was taken (though from the look on Mary's face it was cold), but I remember we really enjoyed everything we saw in Colorado. And now 25 years later, John and Troy have lived here for over three years and counting.

Double Dutch

Happy Earth Day! I hope you'll agree that this post seems fitting for Earth Day. But before I get started, I need to give Jessa credit for sending me some pictures from spring break week in Holland. Thanks Jessa! After all this time in the pandemic, with not much other than necessary travel happening in the family, it does my heart good to know that Peter and Jessa got out of the country for the first Harrison overseas trip in well over two years. Their destination was Holland, where they did some good old-fashioned touring by bicycle.

They went with their college friends Brian and Julie. I believe that's Brian in the yellow, and either Jessa or Julie next to him.

It's hard not to think about tulips when it's April in Holland. And they definitely got to see some.

In addition to biking around the country and seeing beautiful flowers, Peter got to discover his long lost Dutch relative, Pieter van Der Harrison. No, not really. But the resemblance is striking, don't you think? This is a Van Gogh painting of a man named Joseph Roulin (who was actually French, not Dutch) and it can be found at the Kröller Müller museum in Otterlo, which was one of the stops on their bike tour. A fun fact is that this museum has the second largest collection of Van Gogh paintings in the world. (The museum with the most is the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.)  

And here's the entire group: Peter, Jessa, Brian, and Julie. Someday they can all tell their grandchildren about how they made it through this pandemic and after staying close to home for more than two years, they finally got to go on a dream trip to pedal past some flowers.  

 
 

Flashback Friday

Yesterday I posted pictures of our fantastic vacation in Idaho at a cabin on the water. It reminded me of happy summers spent at cabins on the water in Minnesota, where we vacationed  before, during, and after the kids' language camp stays in Bemidji. This picture is from the summer of 2003, when Brad's mom and dad joined us and we rented two cabins next door to each other on Lake Beltrami. It was a fun week exploring that beautiful part of the state around Bemidji. We haven't been back "up North" for a long long time, but have been talking about it for years now and last week inspired us that we really want to get one of these days. 

Idaho

Last week Brad and I were in Yellow Pine, Idaho, which is northeast of Boise in the Payette National Forest. Brad's brother Barry and his wife Wendy have a cabin there, and the four of us spent a very enjoyable long weekend together. The scenery was endlessly jaw-dropping (see above) and it was remote enough that we had the place all to ourselves.

Barry and Wendy are excellent hosts and they gave us a sampling of all the things to see and do near their cabin. We hiked, biked, kayaked, and fished. Brad and Barry did all the fishing.

Wendy and I did all the kayaking.

Although we ventured into nature each day, we could easily have spent all of our time on the deck at the cabin and been very happy. It overlooks the East Fork of the South Fork of the Salmon River and it couldn't have been more peaceful and relaxing. 

One day Brad and I went on a short bike ride along this river while Barry and Wendy hiked nearby.

We also sat in these hot springs down below that are along a river. The hot springs were super hot but the river water was quite the opposite.

Our trip was a wonderful experience. I have to admit, I had no idea Idaho was so beautiful. It was fun to visit a new place. And it was a treat to spend that much time in such a remote area. We came home so happy that we went and looking forward to hopefully going back again someday.

Finally

The final day of our road trip was our arrival in McGregor, which is not the town where my mom grew up, but is the town where I could find an Airbnb large enough for eight adults. Mary and Andy arrived at our Airbnb at the same time that Kelle and I did. I'm glad Kelle snapped this picture of me and Mary. It had been such a long time since I'd seen any of the kids, and for Mary it was the longest—since December 1, 2019. That's just too long. I'm so happy to have finally gotten our family together after this terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year and a half. 

As luck would have it, Kelle rented a house for her family around the corner from ours. But her family didn't arrive until the day after we did, so after she settled in she walked down for dinner at our house. Only, we had been greeted with some typical Midwestern summer weather that evening—in other words, a storm. She didn't bring a raincoat but she came up with a workable substitute.

This was our group the first night. Brad's flight was delayed  and so was John and Troy's. Brad got in late that night but John and Troy were so late in arriving that they got a hotel room near the airport, which for them was about 90 minutes away.

I got to go on some good runs on the trip, and on the first morning Peter and Jessa were my running buddies. McGregor is located on the Mississippi River roughly across the water from Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin.  It's a little hazy but that's the Mississippi behind us.

On our first morning we drove the 25 minutes over to Elkader, which is the town my mom is from. In this picture we're having coffee, but earlier, before John and Troy arrived, we went on a mostly self-guided tour of the town. We visited the Carter House Museum, which has a lot of artifacts from the history of Elkader. We also met with a local woman who has started a cross-cultural organization between Elkader and the country of Algeria, since Elkader is the only place in the United States named after a Muslim person. (In the mid-1800s its founders named it for an Algerian resistance leader named Abd el-Kader.) She taught us a lot about the connection she's helped to foster with Algeria. If this topic interests you, there are multiple articles about Abd el-Kader and Elkader in this issue of Islamic Horizons. In addition, there's a fairly recent book about Abd el-Kader. 

Also on the tour was the apartment where my mom was raised. She was one of nine children, and her parents raised them in an apartment that you accessed through this black door. Up a flight of stairs was a large loft-like unit (as I remember it from when I was small). Her mom ran a curtain down the middle of the unit and the kids slept on mattresses on the floor. While we were there we talked to an old family friend and she said it was like a dormitory in there. With the exception of a couple of years when, because they fell on hard times (though it's tough to imagine how times could get harder than this) and moved in with my grandfather's parents, my mom's family lived in this apartment continuously until my grandparents died in the early 1960s.

Since there are only a couple of restaurants in downtown Elkader, it didn't take much thinking to stay with our Algerian theme and meet up at Shera's, as it also has a terrific beer selection. John and Troy met up with us and we had a wonderful lunch overlooking Elkader's Turkey River. Troy could not believe the beer that was on offer, and she found a rare beer that she and John had been wanting to try. In other words, Shera's did not disappoint.

Afterwards, we all got our picture taken by the Keystone Bridge, which is without a doubt the most iconic landmark in Elkader. My mom had multiple pictures and paintings of the bridge hanging in her house. Here's the lowdown on it: at 346 feet long it's the longest keystone bridge west of the Mississippi. It took nine months to build in 1889 at a cost of just over $16,000. And it's made from locally quarried limestone. There, now you're an expert on Elkader's keystone bridge!

I just realized I haven't yet shown you a picture of the house we rented. Isn't it adorable? It was perfect for us as it had four bedrooms, each with its own bathroom. The firepit out back was the perfect gathering place for evening bonfires. And speaking of evening bonfires .....

Yes, we enjoyed sitting around the fire at night. And I enjoyed watching my children all try to show off their fire-building skills. They are actually rather good at it. We had a nice fire every night and better yet, a good time sitting around it and talking.

 

Driving East

Exactly two weeks ago, Kelle and I left Tucson to drive east. Both of our parents were being buried in Iowa and we felt it was safer to drive their urns to Iowa than fly them. The last thing we wanted was for TSA to tell us we were missing some paperwork or we had too many urns (our dad was in two urns—long story) or to have any other kind of mishap with the urns. We just didn't want to have any snags. So we loaded what Kelle called our VIP passengers in the back seat, filled the car with a set of Mom's china for Peter and Jessa (who were driving to the funeral from Philadelphia), and pointed the car toward the Mississippi River. Our first stop: Hatch, New Mexico for lunch at a local eatery that had a restaurant-themed sculpture garden out front, including Bob's Big Boy.

We stayed our first night in the most well-known location on our route: Santa Fe. (Other than Santa Fe, we drove through and stayed in places we'd never or barely heard of.) After checking into our hotel, we walked through the old city, including the Santa Fe Plaza (above), where we had dinner. It was pretty and charming and felt practically European. 

We spent our second night in Dodge City, Kansas. In preparing for the trip, it sounded like Dodge City might be an interesting place to stop. It was not. However, for the entire trip Kelle was enthralled with all things agriculture or, as I referred to it, corn and cows. The part of Kansas we were in had a lot of livestock, so her first fascination was with cattle. After dinner we went for a walk from our hotel and came upon a herd of longhorns grazing in a (fenced) field in town. I had more fun watching her watch the cattle than I did seeing longhorns up close for the first time in my life. They were definitely the highlight of our stop in Kansas. (Oh, and we also learned that even female longhorns have horns!)

I never liked comparing ourselves to Thelma and Louise as things didn't turn out so well for those two women, but when you get two females on a road trip together, a comparison is almost unavoidable. And when you have a bag of over a hundred of your mom's scarves in the backseat, you have props for a picture like this one.

There's not much at all along state highway 50 through Kansas. So we decided to make a little detour to a fairly large town called Newton. Kelle found a terrific coffee shop called Norm's and we went inside to get some sustenance. And in walk all this group of men and Kelle, who has never in her life been called shy, started talking to them about their overalls (don't ask) and within seconds (no exaggeration) they agreed to pose for a picture with her (see above). When she found out they had just left their Bible study group I was worried she'd never leave them, but thankfully they had a quick chat and a picture and we were on our way.

Just over the Missouri border on I-35 is the tiny town of Lamoni, Iowa. (And because I find this kind of thing interesting, it's pronounced Lamon-I, not Lamon-EE.) It has a small college so I figured it would be substantial enough to merit an overnight stop. (It was, but barely.) We stayed in a cute bed and breakfast called The Peppermill and couldn't resist taking a picture in our adorable room. We happened to be the only guests for the night so we had the entire place to ourselves except for our charming hostess who we enjoyed talking to at breakfast.

Remember I mentioned that my sister was fascinated by agriculture? This was the second time she had us take pictures in front of a corn field. (And there were many more times when she wanted to until I pointed out that we were either on a busy road or there was a huge ditch between us and the corn. Otherwise, we'd have taken pictures in front of corn and cows nonstop.) In Lamoni, right in town, was this field. She had us take about a half dozen selfie videos recreating the "is this Heaven? no it's Iowa" line. We were laughing so hard, and then when we got all done we got YELLED AT by some people at the retirement home across the street. (Of course, that only made the experience richer.) Later, when we met up with the rest of the family for Mom's funeral, we shared our videos and inspired multiple other family members to create their own "is this heaven? no it's Iowa" videos in local corn and soybean fields. 

We spent the last evening of our road trip in little Lamoni. We ate dinner at one of two restaurants in town—a Mexican place run by a husband and wife who sat in the dining room and chatted with us as we were the only customers. Then we went over to Graceland University to go for a walk through the campus and also on this walking path that traverses the town and the campus. It turns out that little Graceland is the alma mater of Caitlin Jenner, so it has some  phenomenal athletic facilities, especially (of course) the track. And then the next day, three and a half days after starting our journey, we reached our destination in northeastern Iowa. More on that tomorrow.