Practice walk and Oscoda County

Practice Walk: June 18

The weekend began last Saturday with Hannah and me doing a 15 mile practice walk in Ann Arbor. These walks are run by 3 day volunteers. Most of them have walked numerous times before and give up their time to help us train. It is kind of weird to me to walk with a bunch of people since I'm a "do your own thing" kind of person but that is definitely something I have to get over since I'll be walking with lots and lots of people in August. Just think, if you're walking in a big pack of people and you drop your water bottle and stop to pick it up. It would be much worse than a 20 car pile up. So there are "rules of the sidewalk" that people who haven't done the practice walks don't know. I was very glad when the 15 miles were over with!!!

Oscoda County: June 19

My niece has a house up in Montmorency County (which is way up north). Her mom, who is my sister Connie and I left on Father's Day morning to spend a few days up

there and get some more counties under my belt. The logical thing to do was to

get a county done on the way up so we stopped in Mio.

Mio is a masculine kind of place with lots of hunting, fishing, canoeing going on.

I also am pretty familiar with it since my parents and four older siblings lived there back around 1940. My dad got an offer of a job working as a mechanic at a car dealer so they all went up there but that didn't last long and they ended up moving back to Monroe.

We started off walking on a trail back in the woods south of town. It was out of the way and kind of creepy. Connie and I just did about a half mile there and headed back to town.

We took a walk down memory lane but it wasn't a long walk since downtown Mio isn't big. Here is the school my sister went to when she was a little whippersnapper.

I started up and down the streets and met her at the supermarket parking lot. I then went to a little park next to the Au Sable River and got the rest of my 5 miles in.