Christmas and New Year's adventures of Bragg Family South



Hard to believe 2016 has come and gone, and we're now almost a week into 2017!!  Bragg Family South had an enjoyable if all-too-brief Christmas and New Year's break this year.  Once we got past the mid-December adventures (see the last blog post), every thing else went pretty smoothly.  As you can see from the picture above, Christmas in southern Michigan worked out to be a snowy white one...The image shows Rick Pruden and his grandkids enjoying the slick surface of his frozen pond. 


We had several Michigan area-related adventures, including a quick day trip to Canada to get poutine for lunch, and a later one to Toledo (Ohio), to see the Detroit Red Wings-affiliated Toledo Walleye minor league hockey team play.  The picture above shows our dinner stop that night--Tony Packo's for Hungarian-style food.  The hockey game turned out to be an exciting (if losing) effort by the Walleyes, for which we had great seats:


Our kids also had a great time playing in the snow, which eventually got "packy" enough to make snowballs for a "battle" with some of their Michigan cousins:


Christmas morning was spent opening gifts with Rick Pruden:


While the evening was spent with the rest of the extended Pruden clan:


The picture below is of our kids and their numerous Michigan cousins of similar age:


We left Michigan the day after Christmas to drive the 500+ miles to northern Wisconsin to visit the Bragg family.  We arrived in time to catch my brother John and his husband Jim (picture in the back of the photo below) for more gift opening and visiting:


We had expected to only have a few hours to visit with John and Jim, but an airline "snafu" at the Rhinelander airport extended their stay by a day.  Our kids loved that, because they got more uncle time, including playing board games with uncles Bob (on left) and John (on right):


We had lots of "grandma" time, including taking my mom to a 3-D showing of the new Star Wars movie:


My mom also accompanied us on our "pilgrimage" to the Houghton, Michigan, area to visit some of our old college-period haunts.  Below, Stephen shows off the depth of the snow in Calumet, Michigan (they had a record amount of snow this December):


We also did some shopping up there, buying pasties, smoked salmon, and pickled herring, as well as a number of birdseye maple related items from a shop in Mohawk, Michigan, and a different one down at the Ford Forestry Center south of there.  Below, Hope and my mom buy items from Dave Stimac, the store's owner and someone we knew from 20+ years ago when we were forestry students at Michigan Tech:


The Ford Forestry Center has a special meaning for Hope and I--it is where we met and started dating almost 25 years ago.  The picture below shows the old sawmill, which Henry Ford and Ford Motor Company used to saw lumber back in the day when most cars had a lot of wood in them:


After celebrating New Year's in Rhinelander, we started the long drive home to Arkansas with a short detour to western Wisconsin to visit my sister Lisa, her husband Jon, and their 3 kids, Leila (left), Emma (middle) and Michael (right), pictured below with our brood:


They had a lot of fun playing games together (Kenny got some more chess pointers from Michael), but our visit was brief, as Lisa's kids had school the next day, and we had to drive back to Arkansas so ours could return to school as well:


Today, much of the state of Arkansas is experiencing winter weather, but not where we live (besides some cold and a few snowflakes).  I'm using up some leave at home, so I've got a fire going in the fireplace, and I'm catching up on things (like this blog).  If we didn't see y'all in person, I hope you had a merry Christmas and happy New Year, and we hope to catch you in 2017!

Comments

Anonymous said…
Nice blog post , Donnie. Sorry we missed seeing you, but good thing y'all didn't try to swing by last Tuesday---Mark's surgery (at least the wait time) took a lot longer than anticipated and he was pretty out of it once he started taking the painkillers!!

Lulu
6:06 AM
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