A Walk Down Memory Lane...

Today, we had to bring Jared to meet Grandpa & Grandma Kingma at Rush Lake, so he could hitch a ride home. Since we were going to be making the 2 1/2 hour drive, we decided to make a day out of it, and visit some of our old vacation and "special" spots. First on the list was Battle Lake, Minnesota, where I had gone with my family for 2 weeks every summer from the time I was born until sometime in my 30's. Tom & I became engaged while on one of these vacations, and later took our family vacations here, though only for 1 week.

While in Battle Lake we had to visit some of the old favorites. We started at Sand Bay Resort (the place we always stayed at in cabin #15, 4, & 6) where we walked the dock and chatted with Wade, the current owner. Next we hiked to Shoreline Cafe, where we had a great lunch (but with slightly higher prices than we remembered). We then walked up town and hit the Bead store (an old favorite) and a couple of new gift shops and the art gallery. We had to go to Granny's for some of the best ice cream in Minnesota (and candy for the kids). Next on the agenda was Ben's Bait shop for a little fishing gear. We then headed out of town, but stopped to say "hi" to the Chief Winonga statue.

We left Battle Lake (after having snapped lots of pictures), and drove out to West Lost Lake, to show the kids where mom and dad had gotten engaged, and check out WesLake Resort. We had stayed at this resort for 2 or 3 years after our years at Sand Bay. Jared & Seth remembered many things about Sand Bay, but the girls mostly only remembered what they had seen in pictures, and Leah remembered the Bead store up town. She also had a couple of memories from WesLake. We think it's been about 9-10 years since we left this area for our family vacations.

After taking our trip down memory lane, we headed over to Rush Lake (around Ottertail Lake), and met Mom & Dad. We toured their cabin and then walked over to take a look at my Uncle Jim & Aunt Eileen's cabin. Mom & Dad were all packed up and ready to go, so we loaded up Jared's stuff and said our good-byes. We are sad to see Jared go, knowing he'll miss out on the fun, family week, but also realize he has to get in a little more work before he leaves for Australia in just a couple of weeks!

We left Mom & Dad and headed up to Perham to have a look around the downtown area. There were some cute little shops which killed some time for us, as we wanted to eat out at Zorbaz, but none of us were hungry yet. Around 6:00, we got out the Mapquest app, and found our way to the Zorbaz on Little Pine Lake. This is the 4th different Zorbaz we've been to, and definitely one of our favorites! We sat at a picnic table on a deck overlooking the lake. The weather was perfect and the pizza and Mexican food was delicious as usual! This Zorbaz looks like several cabins hooked together, and has many open-air rooms, which is great on warm summer evenings. The place was packed (being 6:00 on a Friday night), but we got in right away, and had hardly any wait for our food. Kinda' wish it would have taken longer, so we could have enjoyed our Zorbaz experience just a little bit longer. But we were all stuffed, and ready to hit the road again...back to Birch Villa we go.