Yesterday was the longest leg of the trip, and probably the least interesting one in the car. The highlight of course was meeting up with my good friend, Scott Greenlee. Scott was the 2007 president of Junior Chamber International (JCI), and I’ve known him since at least 2002, when he was a JCI USA National Vice President assigned to Nebraska. Scott showed me around downtown Grand Rapids, which has a vibrant city center. ArtPrize is currently going on, so it was neat seeing several of the exhibits while we were wandering around.
Given my love of craft beer, we of course first stopped at Founders, then on to Grand Rapids Brewing for dinner (the street tacos were great!), and finally HopCat – one of 15 beer bars to see, according to one publication. I’ll hit one or two more of the ones on that list during this trip.
One productive thing I’m doing on this sabbatical is attempting to learn basic spoken Japanese. I’ll be traveling there again at the beginning of November for the JCI World Congress and the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the first local chapter, in St. Louis, Missouri.
Today is a much shorter – but scenic – trip to Traverse City. It is also day three of not shaving…we’ll see if I can stand not shaving for three weeks. If I was ever to attempt to grow a beard, this is the time to try it.
- Miles traveled: 625.0
- Time in car: 9:13
- States: Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan
- Exercise: ran 3.15 miles at 8:02/mile; 13,090 steps
- Learning: Completed unit one of phase one of Pimsleur Digital Japanese
what’s “Pimsleur Digital Japanese”?
It was a course for learning Japanese that I could use in the car. Too much background noise, though, to make that very effective.