Grave ride

I took some time Monday to visit local cemeteries on my bike ride.

Kind of morbid, I suppose, but I enjoy the quiet of these small cemeteries. Maybe it's like Linus and the Great Pumpkin -- it's not the biggest pumpkin patch that will get the visit, but the most sincere.

The above image is from Hutchins Cemetery on 124th Avenue (M-89), just west of home. That's my bike against a tree.

I had never been to this graveyard before. It's visible from the road, but has no access road. I climbed up an embankment, bike on my shoulder, and looked around. The main claim to fame of this site is it has stones from the Hutchins family. This was one of the original families in the area and, yes, Hutchins Lake is named for the family.

One of the family members was out harvesting apples -- the orchard is just south of the cemetery -- when I was looking around. He wanted to know if I was a history buff or a fan of the dead. I told him a little of both.

I had a nice chat with him. He is in the process of crafting a new beam for the original farm house. He's using wood from a huge sassafras tree that a recent storm felled down by the lake. Seems his great-grandmother planted that tree back in the 1800s and he wanted to use it in the house she lived in.

I posted a bunch of photos on Sentinel Spotted, a site through The Holland Sentinel. You can access the pics through www.hollandsentinel.com, then click on "You Spotted." The site is called "Ganges in October."

Good news: You no longer have to register to use The Sentinel site! Hooray. Logic has finally won out.

Thought: Did the Grim Reaper ride a Fuji?