It's been a weird week. After the Turkey Run debacle, we thought we'd have a nice getaway for July 4th, but not to be. More on that in a minute. I went ahead and took Monday and Tuesday off, even though we no longer had plans (due to the Turkey Run debacle), and since the 4th is on Saturday this year I had Friday off as well. A 2-day work week, nice. Missy had her actual birthday party on Wednesday, which was going with some friends to the Black Pine Animal Sanctuary (again). That place is so up her alley, she was just there a couple weeks ago and immediately changed all her plans for her birthday party to take her friends there instead of the Zoo, which we didn't mind because it was a lot cheaper. Tuesday we did some last minute shopping for fireworks at Tim and Katalee's shop, and made sure to spend a lot less than last year. Friday I finally got the truck in to the shop to have the power seat fixed; none of the buttons on it have worked in maybe a year, which means that Beth can't drive it. I finally got around to having that done because the brakes in the minivan need work too, and Beth will need to drive the truck for a bit. The power seat was $153 to get fixed, expect the brakes to be more. Now to July 4th. We thought it would be nice to get away for a bit, so (not early enough) we headed for Indiana Dunes for the day. It was a nice day, unusual this summer, but we headed out and upon arrival got stuck in a huge traffic jam miles from the entrance to the park. Seems everyone else had the same idea. We crawled, car lengths at a time, for almost a couple hours, only moving from the visitors center to the overpass to US-12, which ain't far. At that point, we could see the jam went on for the next couple miles at least, and at that point someone on a bike came riding the other way yelling at everyone that the parking lot was full, and they were only letting people in when someone else left. So the only progress we were making was when someone gave up and pulled out of the line. Which at that point is what we ourselves did. By that time it was almost 2:00. So, we headed down US-12 looking for something else to do. We decided to just head up the shoreline until we found another beach, which turned out to be New Buffalo. It wasn't easy to get in there either, but we did find a spot to park in town and walked quite a ways to the beach carrying a lot of stuff, but we made it, and had a pleasant few hours at the beach. Of course, the water was freezing with as bizarre as the weather has been this year. We made it back home in plenty of time to see the fireworks at the fairgrounds in Warsaw.