Our Time in South Haven

As our time in South Haven has drawn to a close, I thought it would be a good time to recap some of what we've seen and done here in Michigan.

Good food knows no single location.

• We found excellent Mexican food in Michigan, which I never would have expected.
• We also found some really good Chinese food in Mattawan, which was also a bit of a surprise.

Neither does poor food.

• We definitely found some "interesting" definitions of what passed for Chinese food.

We have really seen some of the small-town experience.

• High school football here is not only prevalent, but an experience which dominates the local towns.
• This was the first place we had lived where we had a really large group of trick-or-treaters.
• We saw some of the emptiest shops ever for a Black Friday. Whether or not it was related to the economy, or to it being Michigan remains to be seen.

Hitting a deer is apparently not as unusual of an occurrence as it should be.

• You would think that this would be a very unusual occurrence, since there are towns all over this area. Apparently not so much.
• Also it is amazing how much dead deer can really continue to smell. The car will still smell like it even now, almost 2 months later.

People are different elsewhere, but not in a good or bad way.

• We have met some of the nicest, most welcoming people we have ever seen.
• People are generally just expecting to be treated the way that they want to be treated.

So what have we learned so far?

• IT is truly amazing how much free time you have when you are not planning a wedding or a cross-country move.
• It is also amazing how little there can be to do in a town when you don't have a built-in social structure there.
• Travel is as interesting as the next place to explore.
• When we went exploring the areas around South Haven, we really enjoyed what we found.
• Once we had explored the majority of the areas within a reasonable distance, we quickly found ourselves borde and not really feeling too much adventure out of it.

I think that one of the biggest things we have learned is that we have lived in large cities for far too long at this point to be able to live in a small town for very long. Or at least a small town that is not very close to a larger city. I am hopeful that we will find out some more things when we get to Kentucky.