Thursday, September 08, 2011

Ox Roast 2011

Hope your Labor Day Weekend was fun! We drove to Lawrence, Michigan for the annual Ox Roast and Homecoming.



Pete's dad grew up in Lawrence and Pete's grandma and aunt and uncle and cousin still live there, along with about 50 other 2nd cousins or whatever relatives of your great-aunts are. In other words, we went to the ORIGIN OF THE RED HAIR!! It was like visiting the Weasleys - every picture on every wall at Great Aunt Ruth Reinertson's house featured someone with red hair. On Monday Pete and I walked by the Lawrence High School alumni association's booth at the fair and a man in his 80s took one look at Pete and said, "Are you Carl Crawford's son? I was good friends with your grandfather." It was so cool! He knew just as soon as he saw him that he was a Crawford.



We arrived Saturday afternoon after driving up from Indianapolis. We stayed in Paw-Paw (pop. 3300) because Lawrence (pop. 1000, total area 1.8 sq miles) doesn't have any hotels. We spent some time with Pete's grandma and introduced her to Ellie - her first great-grandchild! Carl and Estelle arrived Saturday evening and we all watched Pete run the Ox Roast 5K Sunday morning before heading over to cousin Danielle's house for dinner. Audrey and Andrew had also arrived by Sunday afternoon and we had a great time with them causing all sorts of shenanigans in the hotel Sunday night :)

Monday we went to the parade and fair before heading over to Aunt Ruth Reinertson's house for the reunion.




this is the ENTIRE band! Carl said when he was in high school he had to play all sports and be in the band so that they'd have enough players to make up teams :)


tractor train - I think there were six tractors being pulled by the front one


any time we talked about Ox Roast both Pete and Audrey brought up the elephant ears - as fried dough goes, they did not disappoint!



Here is Grandma Crawford with her side of the family - two children, three grandchildren, and one great-grandchild! It's quite different from visiting my grandma who has eleven great-grandchildren, but fun nonetheless!


1 comment:

Tammy said...

what a great trip!!!