S.O.A.R! Evanston; Purple Cars? Church-munks; Surf's Up! This is art? Super Scones!

While Suzanne was leading her S.O.A.R! Workshop, I took the opportunity to recon

Evanston. It’s another upscale North Shore city along Lake Michigan, and is lovely and sedate, with wide, tree-lined streets and more young moms pushing baby strollers than I’ve seen since San Diego. I was baffled, though, by the large number of purple cars... as it turns out, Evanston is also home to Northwestern University. I finally “got it” when I saw banners with a “888-gopurple” telephone number. I drove past the stadium and found the Vanderbilt Commodores football team tractor trailer parked outside. Using my razor-sharp sense of deduction, I determined that there was a football game today between the Commodores and the home town Northwestern Purple Wildcats. I have always impressed Suzanne with this uncannily accurate ability.    

The Northwestern campus is impressive, and so are the neighborhoods bordering the school. Most gratifying for my tour mates, Rudy and Gretchen, were the squirrels to be chased up trees. They are still hyper after almost catching one little beast that has evidently not advanced as far up the evolutionary ladder as his nest mates. He was so slow that I almost caught him; he kept looking over his shoulder (do squirrels have shoulders?) to see if we were gaining on him. Not real smart, Squirrely... he made it to the tree with 5 feet to spare. Had Rudy and Gretchen been off lead, he would have been squirrel-toast.

Next stop was the Grosse Point Lighthouse. It was once "Grosse Pointe", but the US government dropped the French "e" on Point, but kept the "e" in Grosse. (I suspect they wanted to insult the French but not drive away potential tourists with a foul-sounding adjective). It was built in 1873 after several disastrous shipwrecks of sailing vessels headed for Chicago convinced legislators of its need. Gee, forward thinking by the government was a problem then, too. 

The beach below the lighthouse was almost like those in Florida; it had sand, sunbathers, a swimmer or two, and a solitary surfer who was trying his best to hang ten on the occasional 2 foot wave. (In this photo, he demonstrates the rare surfing technique called "eating a wave".) Unlike Florida beaches, there are no sharks, sand fleas, stingrays, undertow, or serious sunburn here. I guess you can get a sunburn in Illinois, but I haven't seen anyone with anything more than a farmer's tan here. Well, except for the girl who must have fallen asleep on the tanning bed...

I needed a “culture fix”, so I stopped in at the Evanston Center for the Arts. You may notice the two young girls on the steps with their heads in their hands. 

The girls are not ill... well, at least not in the medical sense... they have only just completed touring the modern art exhibits inside. This was one of the better pieces. 

This was the worst... well, at least this is where I gave up and sat down on the steps with my head in my hands...

I needed coffee, so a stop at Starbucks was in order. But, first I had to walk past the Great Harvest Bread Company. I didn't make it. At least not without a loaf of Asiago cheese bread and a “nibbly”, in this case a blueberry scone (healthy, right?) as big as a baseball and covered with thick sugar frosting. Yee Ha! Can you spell “sugar high”? It's a good thing Suzanne wasn't around or I'd have been eating a small whole bran muffin...  

I brought lunch back to Suzanne at the workshop, and while we were eating on Unity’s patio, Rudy and Gretchen were sitting quietly at our feet. Well, they were sitting quietly until a chipmunk ran by a few feet away, causing a major yelp-fest among the four-legged members of our lunch group. Reverend Kurt was rolling with laughter at the dogs’ reaction to his “church-munk”. Fortunately, he (the church-munk, not Rev. Kurt) was quicker than Rudy and Gretchen. 

I thought taking them for a walk would quiet them down, but just down the street was this cottontail. Yes, they chased him, too. This is what Rudy would call “a target-rich environment”. He has even applied for Illinois citizenship because there are so few squirrels, rabbits, and chipmunks back home in The Villages.