So in 1917, great grandma emma’s immediate family bought some land to live on around lake herring (a little lake off of lake Michigan) and named it Watervale They fixed the place up, made an Inn and it’s been a resort/vacation get-away since. She died a month ago, was cremated and sent from Atlanta, Georgia to Watervale for her ashes to be buried. On Sunday her ashes were buried at the family cemetery and it was pouring warm rain, humid outside, and the mosquitoes were out. These are better pictures from the memorial where lots of people shared memories of emma. I spoke, but I still have that fear of crowds and ended up butchering a few words and turning red.
It was a pretty sad day and the 11 or so kid-cousins and I stayed indoors playing card and board games until it cleared up. They’re from Florida/Georgia and they’re accents are adorable!!
After it cleared up we went to the lakeshore and played catch with the football and went in the cold water a bit. Here are the adorable cousins/second cousins
That night we went to a French restaurant in the closest town (Frankfurt) for a family of 25 dinner and dessert. It was a nice place and I got to hear lots of stories about emma from the older relatives. Now that I’m 20 I didn’t get to sit at the kid table… they looked like they were having more fun there so I’m a little jealous.
OH! The bathroom at this place was soooo cool. The mirrors were tinted a blue so all those vain women who stare in the mirror too much only had a small one.
After the dinner we walked around the old style town and down the pier. The waves would splash up on the edge like you can kinda see in this picture. 
From the pier you could see the fog rolling in and it looked like something from a spooky ghost town.
I got a few cool pictures of the waves spraying up on the end of the pier, the larger waves got to be about 7 ft tall. I wanted to have a kid stand near the edge so I could take a picture of how tall it was but no one wanted to get wet.
I think this one was pretty
Also a pretty sunset. It’s different up here in Michigan, there’s about 14-16 hours of sunlight a day so we’ve got lotsa time to play outside.
The next day was the memorial, and then a lunch at the watervale inn. The theme was lavender because it was emma’s favorite color.
After lunch we went swimming in the small lake herring and then took uncle Charlie’s boat to the canal into the big lake Michigan. The big lake was sooo much colder and had more rocks. On the small lake, off of duncan’s dock there was a water trampoline!!! Water + trampoline = fun. I couldn’t jump high enough to do any flips or anything, but it was still fun to jump/dive into the lake.
The boat is cool, but doesn’t go fast enough for water skiing/wakeboarding/any fun tubing. There were canoes and kayaks but we didn’t take them out that day. Dial up is soooo slow, but atleast I’m updating. Hopefully I’ll be able to update in Europe too.
