From Dayton we headed to Milwaukee but gave Chicago a wide berth. The idea of driving a motorhome towing a Jeep Grand Cherokee up the Dan Ryan Expressway makes us break out in a cold sweat. We found a county park just north of Racine that was just great....we had a quarter acre all to our selves.
Before the reunion festivities began we were able to get together with Don and Sandy Hempson who we had not seen since their daughter's wedding in Washington about five years ago. Don and Bill served in the Navy together and were carpool mates. It was really fun to catch up with their lives. Staying in touch with friends and family is a major reason for our travels.
The reunion was terrific. This was a Leck family reunion, Gisela's Mother's side of the family. They came to Wisconsin from Germany in the late 1800's. The patriarch, Ludwig (say Ludvig) was a brother to Gisela's grandfather Cornelius Leck. Gisela's mom and dad were sponsored by Ludwig and came to Wisconsin in 1957 when Gisela was five. Ludwig and his wife, Millie had six children so that five generations later there is a pretty good bunch of Lecks available for a reunion as you can see from this group photo. They came from as far away as Arizona...and Gisela's first cousin, Anne and her husband, Michael came all the way from Germany.
During the weekend a large group of us toured the Harley Davidson Museum, had a reunion picnic in a park on the shores of Lake Michigan and hung out at the hotel catching up on everyone's lives and meeting the newer generations of the family.
After the reunion, Michael and Anne stayed with us in the motorhome for a couple of nights. We took them to Lake Geneva and to Summerfest in Milwaukee. They are fun loving people and we really enjoyed our time with them. We were able to send Inge, Anne's older sister, birthday greetings back in Germany.
Gisela also had the time of her life at the best bead shop she had ever been to. Bill called it the $100 store but what the heck....it was priceless.
As Anne and Michael headed north toward the Minneapolis airport and their flight home, we headed south... acutaly southwest to avoid Chicago again so we could go east to Michigan. We paid another annual visit to Camp Opperman near Bill's hometown of Cedar Springs. We had a great time, enjoyed Ivan's mom's baked goods (at 91 Marie still bakes a mean apple pie.), visited with Don Koster, and spent the fourth of July in Ludington at Ivan's brother, Steve and his wife Karen. They have a really neat log home in the woods. It was a real treat to see some of our European traveling companions, Jim and Louise Opperman and John and Jan Simmons. We also had dinner in Grand Rapids with high school classmates, Chuck and Mary Crosby, Gaylen and Diane Demarest, and Ivan and Janis. We were having such a good time they nearly closed the restaurant with us still inside.
As instructed by Bill's daughter, Ann, we spent many hours in the Grand Rapids Library and at Saint Andrews Cemetery tracking down Bill's mother's side of the family...the MacGregors and the Rogers and Giblins from Scotland and Ireland respectively. We also made a day trip to Saginaw to meet up with Bill's cousins Bonnie and Jimmie MacGregor who he had not seen since the late 1980's. Bonnie had a treasure trove of family pictures that are just fabulous. We made plans to meet next summer at Ottawa Beach near Holland, Michigan where Grandpa MacGregor had a cottage.
After a whirlwind week with Ivan and his lovely wife, Janis, who also knows her way around the kitchen, we headed south to Kalamazoo to have a much smaller family reunion of Pollocks. We visited Bill's brother, Bob. Our sister-in-law Pat Pollock (brother Mac's widow) and her friend, Mark came down from Leland in her motorhome. We really had a nice time together.
In mid-July we left Kalamazoo to head back to Virginia to visit Gisela's mother who was in an assisted living facility. On the way we stopped in Lima, Ohio for a Beaver Ambassador Club rally. The highpoint was Gisela winning the appetizer competition with her famous Italian Cheese Terrine. Bill was amazed to discover what is left of the once proud Kewpee Hamburger empire in Lima. They were one of the two earliest fast food chains in America founded in Flint, Michigan in the 1920's. They were hurt by the depression and rationing of beef in WW II, but one of their customers of their Kalamazoo location was a young boy named Dave Thomas who used their square burgers and Frosty (nee Frostee) as the foundation of his franchise...Wendy's. Kwepee's in Grand Rapids was a big part of Bill and his brothers' childhood memories. That speaks volumes, doesn't it?
When we returned to Virginia it became obvious that Gisela's mom's dementia had progressed beyond the point where assisted living was appropriate. It took a couple of weeks but we were able to find a new facility specializing in Alzheimer's disease with which we were very favorably impressed. We saw some that were pretty bad so we were really pleased to find Greenfield Reflections in nearby Strasburg, Virginia. It was kind of rough emotionally to go through this but we feel good about it now that it is done. Alzheimer's is really tough on the family as anyone who has been touched by it knows.
In early August we headed up to Maine. What did we have for dinner the first night we arrived?
We will fill you in on that part of the summer in our next post including more on the Guy in the Lobster Hat.
