Petoskey

John and I took a short trip up to Petoskey this weekend in hopes of having a little mini vacation and also to do some geneological research for the Kuberski family tree. John booked us a very nice room at the Terrace Inn which is an historic bed and breakfast. While the building is definitely old, the stay there was very nice. John and I would definitely go back. John wants to stay in the haunted room next time though. We'll see. A few pictures of the outside of the inn, one of John and I together and a picture of part of our room.

So, we headed up to Petoskey in the rain on Saturday afternoon. It rained all the way up there, sometimes harder than others but we made pretty good time. We checked into our room and then went to a very nice restaurant called the City Park Grille for dinner. After that it was already after 9 so we just went back to our room and crashed.

The next morning we went to church at St. Francis. The church is beautiful and has amazing architectural details. Father Denny was very nice as well and let me take whatever pictures I wanted from pretty much wherever I wanted. The service was a alright. The parishoner's children were all over the place. Father Ed would have had a fit! It's a much more laid back atmosphere than what we are used to.

After church we went back to our room and then for a quick walk to a nearby beach before it started to rain some more.

We stayed in our room for awhile and then finally around 3 we went and had lunch and just decided to brave the rain and did some shopping while we were downtown. John found a very cool hat for Thanksgiving but I'll save the details of that until the holiday. We scoped out St. Francis cemetery just to see what we would be workign with and we were glad we did. It gave us a better idea of what we needed so that we could get a lot accomplished on Monday. We also made a quick stop at Greenwood Cemetery, which is HUGE. It's over a 100 acres and a beautiful setting. We actually found a few stones we were looking for and then headed back to the Inn. We spend most of the rest of the night making lists of people to look for the next day at St. Francis.

This is a view from the front of St. Francis Cemetery

Monday morning we woke up to a gorgeous day. After breakfast we headed over to St. Francis and began to work our way through the entire cemetary, taking pictures of every stone that was related to John's family in some way. This also meant cleaning a lot of them and some of these stones have not been cared for in some time. We were prepared for this and had brought a bucket, gloves and scrup brush. We took over 150 pictures in just that cemetary alone. We made really good time though and were done by around 1:30. After that we head back to Greenwood to talk to their office staff about the best way about going about finding names at that location. The staff there were VERY helpful and even gave us a printed out list of everyone in their cemetery!! So with that list in hand we spent about another hour there before heading into down for a little more shopping before heading home. We left Petoskey around 4 and made it home by 8, which included a spot in Cadillac to have Ponderosa for dinner. We so miss having one in our area so this was a very nice treat for us. I'm sure the waitress thought we were crazy when I asked her to take our picture but it was special for John and I.

Overall a very nice mini vacation. We now have to sort through all the photos and attach them to the person's record in our family tree software but that won't be too bad and we were able to get quite a bit of information we didn't have so it was very successful as well.