How long was I gone anyway?

Long enough for mysterious things to happen to the potatoes…Whoops.

We had a lovely visit in Michigan.  I'll share more in the upcoming days but right now I wanted to show some pictures of a fabulous B&B we stayed at in Marine City, MI.  It's called the Heather House and it was just amazing.

It's located right on the St. Claire river so we had beautiful water views and watched a few ginormous freighters go by. 

We had the entire house to ourselves.  The owner's mother (the original Heather) met us there and gave us the keys and left us to our own devices.  Her daughter (the innkeeper) was recuperating from hip surgery so we didn't get the breakfast portion of the B&B (they did knock the price down because of that) but they had breakfast pastries and fresh fruit for us along with coffee makers ready to go. 

We had two rooms but the rest of the rooms were open (and no other guests were staying there) so we explored the whole house.   

It's one of those houses with staircases all over the place and rooms tucked into turrets and balconies off of most rooms.  A big wrap around porch (for freighter watching) and a lovely garden out back.

The house has a really interesting history.  When Heather came back the next morning to collect the keys from us she told us how the house was originally built by a shipping magnate named Sauber in the late 1800's.  He used to play cards with the town's Lutheran minister who had a tendency to cheat.  When Mr. Sauber found out he insisted that his daughter call off her engagement to the minister's son.  Either the son or the minister snuck down into the basement and set the house ablaze.   The damage was extensive but not fatal to the house.  They fixed it back up and added on the wrap around porch at the same time.

The minister cleaned out the church's coffers and disappeared and was never caught.

Here's an old picture they had showing the damage the fire caused.  You can see the broken window and parts of the roof burnt out.

I'll post some more pictures later on, once I've had a chance to down load them all. 

Evan's surgery is scheduled for this Wednesday.  I'm nervous and happy they are finally doing it (initially they scheduled it for June 9th.  Sheesh.). I'll try to post something before then but no guarantees.  

It was a lovely visit but it's nice to be back home.

Edited to add:  I got a very sweet email from Sherry and because I am a dolt with my iPhone I accidently deleted it before I could reply.  I just wanted to say thank you for keeping Evan in your thoughts (and for helping to allay some of my fears).