My Summer Vacation

So here's the official post from my week away from the desert during the final week of June. The Cliff's Notes version of the itinerary went as follows:

Wednesday - Danielle and I traveled to Columbus via Southwest Airlines and stayed at my sister's house just visiting with my parents, sister and her family.

Thursday - We all went to COSI in downtown Columbus. A fun time was had by all! Later that night, Danielle and I went to Matt's house to spend the night and get up in the morning for Comfest!

Friday - COMFEST!!!

Saturday - COMFEST!!!

Sunday - Went back to my sister's to celebrate my nephew's fourth birthday and then made the drive with my parents to Sandusky. We stayed at my parents for the next three nights.

Monday - We all made the planned trip out to Kelleys Island in Lake Erie. My parents took the van over and drove around the island while Danielle and I went on two separate hikes and also walked the island for a while. We had a great dinner there at the island's microbrewery/restaurant. However, the boat ride to the island and back made Danielle sick. Nevertheless, we stopped at Tofts on the way home and had the best ice cream in the world!

Tuesday - The planned day at Cedar Point was called off due to Danielle being sick and also the fact that it was supposed to rain on-and-off the entire day. Instead, we had a great lunch at a local favorite pizza place (Chet and Matt's) and had a fun dinner at a Japanese Steakhouse. We also stopped over at Tony's house to visit for a while and see their new baby twins! In case any Sanduskians are wondering, we were originally going to go to Cameo instead of Chet and Matts, but Cameo didn't open until 4pm and we already had dinner plans to the Japanese place. I slightly prefer Cameo over C & M, probably due to the atmosphere of the old place.

Wednesday - Drove back to Columbus and flew back to Vegas on another non-stop flight on Southwest.

Here are some pictures!

Oh, before the pictures start, I want to say that there is a pic below of a band called TV Eye, who we saw on the Friday morning of Comfest. Actually, I think they were the second band we saw as we fled some horrifying screaching chick on the main stage and made our way to the closest secondary stage. Feel free to check them out at their myspace page here. There are four songs that can be streamed on that page. Of the four, Take it All and Catch the Breeze are my favorites and I'm pretty sure they played them both at Comfest. According to their page, a recording is in process, which I will be purchasing as soon as it becomes available.

The very first picture of my summer vacation on the Friday morning of Comfest.

The second band that we caught on Friday were called TV Eye. They were pretty damn good!

From left to right is Michele, Mike and Matt. Mike shaved his "Jack Shepard on a bender" beard between Friday and Saturday.

Here's where we set up camp near the Main Stage, which is where we spent the majority of our time on both days. It was home-base!

After we parked on Saturday morning, I found this sign on the side of the road. I guess the original maker of the sign found his ride.

I guess there was some sort of crazy decorating car contest. I'm not sure, I was pretty drunk when I stumbled onto this scene.

Just a random shot of a bunch of people at Comfest!

Skip ahead to Monday when we took the ferry out to Kelleys Island.

The sign to the state park welcoming visitors. Things to do in the park include a great campground, beach, hiking trails, the glacial grooves, boating/fishing, etc.

Here are the glacial grooves on Kelleys Island. These are the biggest example of glacial grooves on the entire planet!

A view down the other end of the grooves.

Near the glacial grooves is the trailhead for one of Kelleys Island's two hiking trails. This is the North Shore Loop Trail (by far our favorite of the two). It was a little over a mile with almost no elevation change. It was a nice walk through the woods and much of it hugged the north shore of the island.

This is my favorite part of the trail. It's a little side trail that leads to the shore. There is no beach on this part of the shore, just rocks that you can go out and stand on. If you can enlarge this photo, you can see South Bass Island off in the distance, which is where Put-In-Bay is located. It's also where Perry's Monument stands, which can be faintly seen in the picture (a little above and to the right of Danielle).

I'm out on the rocks looking east in the pic.

Just walking along the North Shore Loop trail.

At one point, there was a little side trail that led to this creepy looking old building......so we thought the best idea in the world would be to walk right in!!!

And this is what we found. Pretty much nothing.

As we walked from the North Shore Loop Trail to the East Quarry Trail, we stopped in the campground's bathroom. I thought this sign was funny.

Here's a picture near the beginning of the East Quarry Trail. I guess this trail was kind of interesting, but it wasn't as nice or as well maintained as the North Shore trail.

This is actually part of the trail. The grass in the part reached over Danielle at points! We had a map of the trail while hiking it, but it was hard to follow and it just seemed like hardly anybody ever used this trail. It was about this part of the trail that the mosquitos started making an appearance!! That's a variable that we don't have to worry about in southern Nevada! There were a couple of other turnoffs that we could have explored, but the bugs drove us off the trail and onto the island streets to walk back and meet my parents.

One thing that happened each night we stayed at my parents were fierce games of Scrabble! This is from one of my impressive victories. The key move of this game was placing 'risk' on the triple-word score while the 's' turned 'haven' into 'shaven'! Also note the very first word of the game in the middle. :-)

Some crazy fire tricks at the Japanese Steakhouse!

Here are my parents enjoying the steakhouse. Danielle's nose is enjoying things as well!