michigan | sarah, brad and avwee

Wow!  How have I survived the last 5 nights without internet.  Well I've had internet on my phone but not on my laptop!  I know, right! ARGH!!!

We spent our first 4 nights in Michigan with Sarah, Brad and Avery.  It was so good to catch up with Sarah and felt like we had never been apart, it was very easy to fit into their lives. 

Sarah and Brad have a gorgeous house on a big flat block.  Upstairs has two bedrooms with the lounge, dining and kitchen and downstairs (the basement) has a bedroom, storage room, bathroom and games room with the biggest flat screen TV for the Wii and Playstion/xbox.  As nice as the TV is, I think if they sold it, they could afford their tickets to Australia.  Its that big.  Sorry Brad!

Oh, and they have the cutest puppy - Monster!  

We caught up with Jude and Dan as well as Joe, his wife Jackie and their kids Elizabeth and Dani.  Jode, Mum, Bec and Nana, I have necklaces for you from Jude.  You just can't have the red one that I'm wearing in that photo with Sarah.  That one is mine!

This was my opportunity to do some shopping and I'm always blown away by how cheap things are in the US.  Glen could get a carton of Coronas for $4 more than he can buy a 6 pack of them in Australia.  My premixed drinks were about 1/3 of the price they are at home.  The fruit and vege options were pretty amazing too, much better than we get at home which is a bit odd when for part of the year here, the land is covered in snow.  Everything is big.  Packets of chips, cereal boxes, toilet paper, paper towel.  Big, big, big, big! They also sold wine in their own little wine (plastic) glasses. How convenient!  And there were coffee shops inside the supermarket which is why the shopping trolley has a coffee cup holder.  Neat!

I visited a few of the shops that I'd seen the party girls talk about on line and found my drink dispenser. $60 and $100 to ship so its still in the shop but I haven't given up the idea of grabbing one in LA and taking it on the plane with me.

We went to Avery's bible school play and dinner which was pretty cool. They had the cutest animals, Avery milked a goat and there was the most well behaved bunny rabbit I've ever seen.

Sarah and I went through her scrapbook and photos from her time in Australia. It was hilarious looking at some of the photos and reliving some of the memories - most of which I couldn't remember for some reason. These are photos of photos and newspaper articles so the quality isn't great.

On our last night, Sarah and Brad had some friends over for dinner.  It was a fun night, Sarah and Brad's friends are lovely.  We met some cute kids but the cutest of all was Hayden (I hope I've remembered that correctly) who couldn't yet pronounce Avery and called him Avwee.  It was adorable! The boys built a fire much to Sarah's disgust.  We won't got into all the details but suffice to say the boys had fun. J It should be noted that Brad's ribs are better than Famous Dave's.  Much, much better!

It seems that Brad and Avery are quite the ice skaters too!

It was sad to say goodbye, there were tears of course!