Creepy Fun Times

 So.  After blasting through seven states in six days, I'm now up in Northern Michigan, spending the night in a former lunatic asylum gone condo.  It's one of those late-Victorian jobs with the spires and vaulted ceilings and everything.  Awesome!

I wanted to do a Year in Review, but I have so many WIPs, including request-fics for the f-list, that I'd better expend the energy on those instead.  :)

Also, looks like there's a lot of interesting stuff out there to review, yay.

A Night in the Nuthouse

 It looks like a palace.  Four Victorian-Italianate stories of yellow brick crowned with red-roofed spires, set in the beautiful tree-dotted landscape of Grand Traverse Bay.  All around the multi-winged main structure are outbuildings dubbed "cottages" which would, in any other location, be deemed mansions.  Fine mansions, also in the late Victorian style-- some with gingerbread trim, some with grand porches and balconies, some with massive central turrets.

It was designed to be beautiful, peaceful, therapeutic.  Because it's not a palace, or a grand resort, or a health spa.  It is, quite literally, the looney bin-- a former state asylum now in the process of being turned into luxury condos.  There's a wine-tasting place in the basement, a fair-trade coffee joint in one of the outbuildings, and a very fine restaurant in the main building.  But one-half of that main structure is still under renovation, and many of the outbuildings are mothballed and in varying states of decay.  Think broken mirrors and broken windows, dank tunnels leading into the darkness, and walls covered with crumbling mint-green lead paint.

It's the most awesome place I've ever been for New Year's.  Ever.  Way better than Disneyland.  Just looking out the window at the spires is awesome, especially with a mist closing in.  You can't see the modern part of Traverse City thanks to the fog, so it still feels like a world apart-- like it did in the days when people were milking cows and raising pigs out beyond the "cottages" in the belief that wholesome work in beautiful surroundings was the way to cure mental illness.

I have some really jacked-up 'fic ideas thanks to this, too.

Happy New Year's, f-list.  I'd share the wine I bought, but it doesn't carry well over the Intertubes.