I’m going to be selling my desktop PC in order to get myself a laptop. I don’t do much on my computer except for browse the internet, blog, and listen to music, so I can clear up a a lot of space in my room, as well as give myself the convenience of mobility – all by buying a laptop.

This means formatting my HD (removing windows) and installing Ubuntu Linux just to give myself something to do while it tries to sell. If I do post, it won’t be from Windows Writer, it will be directly from WordPress. So yeah, don’t expect me to post for awhile. But it all depends on how soon I sell this bad boy, and get a laptop.

When I do return, I’ve got a few post ideas I’m ready to write about, a few examples: Toy Story 3 review (finally), What I Expect for WebOS 2.0 (Palm Pre OS), Black Dynamite review, There Will Be Blood review, and a review on Up in the Air.

See ya!

If you didn’t catch the loose reference, I tried to make the title sound like a Lewis and Clark adventure, but whatever, on with the story…

Our story begins with Lindsay wanting to go to the beach. She chose Holland State Park, one of the most popular places to go to the beach around West Michigan, and it’s also where I spent my 4th of July. Our original plan was for us to go and take both of your younger sisters with us. However, they all made plans, and things got complicated. Suddenly going to the beach seemed impossible. But Lindsay persevered and got us to go.

It was just her and I going to the beach, which I suppose was good. I printed off directions from Google Maps, otherwise getting there probably would have been impossible, and getting back…don’t get me started. Anyway, we got a little confused as we got closer, so we ended up turning around, then turning back again after realizing we were on the right track to begin with. We got to the beach A-Okay. We went in the water a little bit, and she took lots of pictures (which I’m still waiting for her to upload…lol) but we left after about an hour because we didn’t want to get stuck in traffic. That’s when things got interesting.

Now, I’m new to using maps and all, so on the way back, we were pretty much winging it. I wasn’t aware that exits were the same going to and from a destination, which threw us off completely. We knew our exits would eventually say Grand Rapids, so we started taking all of the Grand Rapids exits. During all of this I’m texting my dad, and we’re realizing that we missed our exit as we pass by it. But taking all of the Grand Rapids exits didn’t end up too well for us; it took us into the heart of Grand Rapids.

So there we were, in a big city, lost and confused. We’ve been to Grand Rapids before, and from the outskirts of it we could have easily navigated our way home, but we’re not used to downtown. I was trying to find a way home by using the Google Maps app on my Palm Pre, but because we were constantly moving it couldn’t track our location (it’s not cool like Android where it follows you as you move) so I didn’t know what to do. Poor Lindsay was stressing out hardcore. Eventually I saw a ramp towards Kalamazoo, so I figured that should be a good one, I checked with my dad just to be sure, and it was just the exit we were waiting for. Trouble was, we had already passed it, and were going in the wrong direction. So Lindsay wanted to get turned around. We come to an intersection that was a 1 way street. We even looked at the sign. Lindsay, for some random reason, exclaimed that the sign was lying and that the street was not 1 way. She turned right on a 1 way street going left. Fortunately, it was empty, so we got ourselves turned around and back on the exit home.

So, the morale of this story is that I am a horrible passenger to be with when I’m giving directions. I get confused, and I never know what’s going on. Because of my errors, I turned a 1 hour drive into one that lasted probably 2 at the least.

After school got out, I was almost immediately driving down to Ludington State Park with Lindsay and her family to go camping for a week. I took a few pictures with my phone, so for this post I’m just going to be presenting a picture, and explaining it. I created the panoramic photo above with some of the pictures I took.

This is everything I had to pack. Now, it may seem like a lot, but when you’re going away for 7 whole days, that takes a lot more clothes than I thought it would. I could have squeezed it all into the trash bag and soccer bag, but I wanted to bring my soccer ball in case I got bored, so that required another backpack. Sadly, I didn’t even use the soccer ball lol.

This was the only picture I had of our campsite, and all it shows is our clothesline and the hill and trees behind us. I don’t know why I took this picture, but I guess this will have to suffice, considering I don’t have anything better. We camped there for a week, and it was pretty awesome. At night, raccoons would come down from that hill and make attempts to get into the food (they were unsuccessful). You can’t tell, but slightly below the shot is a table where we’d eat, play card games, etc.  To the right, you can see a small part of the pop-up camper we used. Behind that was one of the cars, as well as some bikes. To the far left of the shot there are more bikes, 2 kayaks, and a truck. So yeah, that’s basically the campsite.

The picture (shown right) was taken at one of the many (and by many, I mean like 4) fishing spots we went to. Lindsay’s mom noticed a lot of fish were keeping close to the shores, so we fished there. Unfortunately, and you can’t really tell from this picture, there was a lot of stuff in the water that snagged our hooks. We ended up leaving after 20-30 minutes because all of our poles had lost their hooks. Either that, or it was because we ran out of worms. Anyway, we did do a lot of other fishing that week, we also went fishing off of the docks shown in the panorama picture above. We went to that one a lot more because it was like right by our campsite.

This picture was taken by Lindsay at the shore of Lake Michigan. In the picture you can see the shoreline, as well as a building in Ludington that was basically a restroom/gift shop/historical landmark. Lindsay and I walked around the beach for awhile, and Lindsay even found a $10 bill in the sand. We bought ice cream with it lol.

The three pictures above are from a lighthouse in Ludington. We had to ride our bikes down a 2 mile road of sand, which sucked. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried riding a bike in sand…but even a little sand makes it awkward. Anyway, we rode our bikes down there, and I took some pictures of it before we went inside. We learned a bit about its history and checked out the gift shop.

And finally…

The sunset. On the last night I stayed there, we all went out to the House of Flavors, which is this really awesome restaurant with great food and tons of ice cream.  Afterwards, we headed back for camp, but on our way we noticed the sunset was really quite amazing. So we pulled over by the building on the beach (above) and I took a couple of pictures. The pictures didn’t turn out too great, and the best part was before this picture was taken. But oh well. I also took a picture of Lindsay in front of it, and while I think it’s an awesome picture, I don’t want to put it up while she’s at Blue Lake, only to have her come back and have me take it down (or not, idk if she approve of it or not, I can’t ask her).

So yeah, there’s Ludington for ya. All pictures can be seen @ Photobucket.

The password is: ludington