Our boss is the greatest!  Kathy paid for everyone on staff who wanted to to get trained as a Certified Tourism Ambassador (CTA).  Mark and I went through the training today at The Clearing in Ellison Bay.  But first, a woman from The Clearing gave us a tour of the campus.

Mark and I had visited The Clearing Folk School last summer and walked the grounds on our own, but today we got to see inside the buildings we couldn’t go in last year.

This was our group in the Council Circle overlooking Lake Michigan.

A couple classes allowed us to come in and see what they were working on. This was a fused glass class.

This was a watercolor class.

A mural in one of the art rooms

The dinner bell

It was nearly lunch time and the tables were all set for the students. (Our class brought sack lunches.)

Shy violets

Trillium

Yellow Lady’s Slipper

Can you see five bird feeders?

The weaving room

An inviting space to sit

The Clearing is on the American Society of Landscape Architects. The founder, Jens Jensen, was an untaught landscape architect from Sweden. He wanted The Clearing to be a place where people could commune with nature.

A view toward Lake Michigan

A place to sit

There were trilliums everywhere!

This fallen tree looked like a tuning fork in the forest to me!

A yellow violet

A field of blue

When we got back to the room where our training was going to be, we ate our sack lunches as the rest of the class assembled.  We were here to learn all about Door County so we can be of more assistance to our customers.  Odd as it may sound, even as a bathroom cleaner, last summer I was able to suggest places the campers who were in the bathroom might want to try.

We received a thick binder and a Visitors Guide to Door County as pre-reading for the class, and even as we were studying at home, Mark and I were drooling over places we want to check out this summer!  We learned about places we hadn’t yet heard of.  Oh man, we haven’t even scratched the surface of all there is to see and do in Door County!

Every so often during the class, they had trivia questions and if we could answer we got chocolate.  One other woman and I were able to point out things to them that were outdated in their manual and for that, we got a bandana that features a map of Door County!  At the end of the training there was a quiz, and everyone passed.  I was the last to finish and I thought I had missed a few, but I was one of several people who got 100%!  Everyone also got a pin indicating that we are now Certified Tourism Ambassadors.  They said we can put this certification on our resumé as well.  Between the things we learned and all the stuff we earned in the class, I think Kathy got her money’s worth!

Just a brief note:

Thank you to all of you who said you’d be praying for my mom and stepfather and me.  I got word from Mom today that Cal, who has been in the hospital for several days, got a feeding tube put in his stomach today.  This will help him be able to take food without choking.  The hospital has signed Cal up for hospice and my mother is happy for the help now that she has seen how complicated it is going to be to get food into the feeding tube.

Also, my older sister, Sherill, who has a recurrence of her multiple myeloma (bone cancer), has just hired housekeeping help for the first time in her life.  She says this will take a load off her mind.  She remains in good spirits in spite of the pain she’s been experiencing.  She knows that God is going to heal her again, just as He did nine years ago.

I am inspired by the way my mom and sister are handling things that would drop a lesser person to their knees.  Keep those prayers coming!