Day 45,46: MI: Ann Arbor Solar Dragon, Coop, Sleeping Bear Dunes…

Hooray! Yet another local, thriving and supportive community in Ann Arbor, MI! We stayed on the floor of Bruce Jones’ bachelor pad for a couple of days. Bruce treated us to a wonderful vegetarian restaurant called Seva (314 East Liberty St) where all 4 of us passed our plates around the table so we could all taste a little bit of everything (Thank you, Bruce!). If we keep finding places like this, Ben might actually keep his promise to Woody Flowers to be a vegetarian for the rest of his life.
Before we left, we hit the food coop in Ann Arbor - here’s the quilt hanging on the wall, made of T-shirts from a bunch of other regional coops (several of which we have visited!)- and we also stopped by a local pool, heated by solar power: Sun Dragon Solar Energy Project. We spoke to its designer, David Konkle, an engineer with a lot of brilliant ideas that will be forthcoming in video format…

My hips are only just now forgetting to be sore at me for sleeping on the floor and that’s only cause my shoulders took over hollering, aching from our canoeing and climbing up sanddunes twice the height of the Statue of Liberty and nearly as steep. Ben bet that Mark could not run up and down one of the dunes 4 times in a row, only bc he knew that possibly Mark might try…here is Mark conceding defeat, and here I am taking it super slow…A bit later, we found another, smaller dune (maybe 150 ft?) and Mark actually did run up and down 4 times, much to the horror of some moms who were resting with their kids on the side. Ben said he was glad he hadn’t bet anything.

We found a fabulous little organic restaurant outside of the Dunes called Maybings, where we feasted and chatted up the owner, who told us that his mother is his inspiration. She makes only one brown grocery bag of garbage…per year. Per YEAR. We, with our one shoebox of waste per month, are properly humbled.

This entry was posted on August 19, 2007 at 5:04 pm and is filed under Travelog, Julie. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.