BLUE LAKE & MICHIGAN PART TWO

Alice at the main entrance to Blue Lake.





The Symphony Orchestra and Concert Orchestra. Alice is in both pictures, but it's difficult to find her.



Alice in official Blue Lake attire on concert day.



Woodwind Ensemble.



Piano practice cabins named Do, Re, and Mi.



Bartlett Shell is one of the performance centers scattered throughout the woods at Blue Lake, and where all of Alice's concerts were held.



The performers were performing and the instrument cases were at ease, in the shelter house behind the band shell.



One of many beautiful practice areas in the woods.




Pam found a great knitting shop in Holland, Michigan.



Cooperative Models.



Pam in Paradise!



Friends of Wool - A Shop for Knitters. Holland Michigan.

BLUE LAKE & MICHIGAN TRIP

This past week we took Alice to Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp in the Muskegon, Michigan area. The camp is situated in a beautiful pine forest.


"Schubert" is the cabin in which Alice bunked.


A panoramic shot of the inside of Schubert Cabin.


A note from Genevieve, a Blue Lake camper who bunked on Alice's cot during the first Summer session. She stayed over for the second two week session but had to change cabins. Alice and Genevieve quickly became friends


The cluster of cabins which make up a unit.


Getting some last minute texting in before cellphone use is forbidden at camp.


Pam and Alice at Texas Roadhouse for lunch before heading back to camp for the duration.

THE REST OF OUR MICHIGAN TRIP:

After leaving Alice at Blue Lake, Pam and I drove to Eastern Michigan to visit Pam's Uncle, but before leaving the Muskegon area we drove to the beach along Lake Michigan.

The Eastern shore of Lake Michigan. It was a beautiful day and the lake was absolutely stunning. This was the first time I had seen it, and to say I was awestruck is an understatement.


I'm sitting by the lake, looking like I do this all the time.


Pam and her Uncle Kenneth


Pam's Uncle Kenneth has twenty six varieties of apples in his orchard.

Kenneth lives near the beautiful town of Frankenmuth, "Michigan's Little Bavaria."

One of the highlights of Frankenmuth is Bronner's Christmas Wonderland, a store the size of 1 1/2 football fields filled with Christmas gifts and trimmings.



"Merry Christmas" in Russian and "Happy New Year" in Ukrainian.





To top off our trip to Frankenmuth we had dinner at Zehnder's, a restaurant I highly recommend and intend to return to someday to eat the entire portion of the "Chicken Liver Plate," with all the sides.

SUCCULENT SEDUM

Sedum growing from a strawberry jar in our garden. The plant sits out in the garden all Winter with total neglect and still comes forth with beautiful flowers.

IMPERIAL DEBONAIR

One of the oddest looking cameras in my collection is the "Imperial Debonair", A Herbert George Co. camera. It has a single plastic lens and takes 620 film which one has to respool from 120 film, (no big deal). These can be found on eBay quite inexpensively. Don't you just love the little lens shade above the lens?

Most of the photos I've taken with this camera were done before I had a film scanner and so were processed as prints in the darkroom and never digitized. The bottom photo is one of my favorites taken with the Imperial Debonair. It's not a film scan but just a scan of the small print. I need to look up some of those old negatives and scan them, someday when I have time.

CLEMATIS

We have a clematis in the middle of our garden. I used a close-up filter that I got at Christian Photo's bargain bin (a complete set of 3 for $5.00,) and got some nice blur from leaves in the foreground and some decent bokeh.

LIGHTNING BUG

Cone Flowers are out in full force. They don't get much time to be beautiful on a stand alone basis before they get eaten up by bugs and baked in the sun, but even in the bedraggled state they soon come to be in they're still pretty. I like them especially in the Winter when they wear a cap of snow on their cones.

I caught a lightning bug on this one, just biding it's time till dark so he can then do whatever it is lightning bugs do.

INDEPENDENCE DAY

It's been nearly a month since I posted anything here. The time that I interrupted posting, coincides with the time I started cutting out wood pieces for 35 birdhouse kits, that was to be one of the craft projects at our Vacation Bible School.

Once my mind wanders off in a different direction, it just kind of meanders, and until now it didn't find the fork in the road that would return it to the ol blog. What better time to get back at it than Independence Day weekend.

The top picture is the door to our local American Legion Hall and the bottom photo is a dill plant in our garden that I thought looked kind of like fireworks.