Yooper Trailer Trip 2002
So this was the summer of our big change of life. We sold our company and our old rental house and I got ready to launch OYB into the big leagues. And Henry is starting kinneygarden. To celebrate these changes and chances, we were going to go on a national trailer tour, with a load of OYB stickers and goodies to spread around.
Then we put in our garden. When I finally got revved to take off, Martha said “But what about the garden? We can’t leave!” Sigh. But everything else was dragging WAY out as well. Tip: big life changes don’t get ironed out pronto, they DRAG out.
But we finally did get our break and grabbed an actual week’n’a’half of free time. So we jammed the old trailer fulla goodies and hitched it to the big ole Town Car with the Yakima rack loaded with boats and bikes and tossed the kids and dog in and blew this pizza stand for the north woods.
I bet there aren’t too many stylin’ Town Cars with crusty toys on top pulling vintage trailers.
But ya know, really when you go on a trip, you should think it over about what you need to bring. But darnit we always end up with the sudden chance to go and end up dashing it off. Well, we did pretty good.
We now have new rules for travel packing: Don’t end up with anything extra in the living space of any part of the rig. Don’t use the bathroom as a closet. This way you can use your trailer and bathroom. Get it? Believe it! Also, only bring what you need and make sure you bring what you need. Yeah, yeah, it’s all obvious *now*.
As we traveled, we made notes about what to fix, what to bring next time. The key will be to USE these notes before the next time we go out!
For one thing: when you go on an extended tour of an area, bring along all relevant books and tapes, both the cultural ones (histories, regional novels, etc.) and the identification guides. Use the library to supplement and bring along as many as possible—if you can keep them safe. You can’t have enough such books. (Your trailer has a book shelf, right?)
For another thing: look into what’s happening in the general area and timeframe you’re thinking of traveling. It only makes sense. We keep missing neat events by a few days. Like the Lumberjack Festival in Newberry or the Wooden Boat Show in Les Chenaux. …Of course, our getaways come and go quick without much latitude for launch or landing, but looking at events schedules is a good idea.
But first, how we got the kayaks for this trip is a story in itself.
I realized that when we go camping we head to beachy areas, which have waves and big water. My canoe is always dicey in such conditions. But sea kayaks go with waves like ducks to water. So I thought to ask around the old gang to see if anyone knew of a boat for sale. Our local boating guru Karl said Heck ya, he’s selling his whole garage full of boats at good prices, lightnening his load, come on over and take a look.
He has boats of every kind and several sea kayaks. They all seemed cool. Each different, but great at what it does best. He had a rec boat, a play boat, a speed boat. He offered to let me test them at the next club outing. Sure!
So I did, and he taught me the nifty basics of the eskimo roll as well, plus other more essential skills like proper bracing so that you don’t wreck your shoulder. One has to roll maybe once a year, but one braces all the time. I learned some amazing things I didn’t know. If you want to do kayaking, you should learn them all, too. Karl has been teaching for years and one reason he’s slowing down his involvement now is that he’s a bit jaded with the popularity of kayaking: he had to do 18 rescues one weekend at a kayak show. People are getting in over their head all too often these days. Then there’s the syndrome that if you’re the guy with all the boats, you get to bring all the boats all the time! So he’s going to try to let someone else take the reins for awhile. Also, he wants to move. Lighten the load! He’s finding as he sells stuff that he still keeps breathing, so he’s getting bolder: clear that garage!
Anyway, I was tortured by what boat to get. The blue plastic CD Storm is casual, easy, indestructible, well designed. The yellow glass Valley Pintail is elite, gorgeous, sexy and fun…and smallish, tight and a little pricier. The stripper Seda Glider replica is a character boat, a real work horse, superfast, the first boat that Karl made, and cheap. Each boat pulls me, darn it. Karl said “Take em all! Just bring em along up north and try em out.” So I loaded two on the rack. He said “Why not 3?” I said “You bad man, Karl. You’re trying to get me to buy them all!” He laughed, “I sure am, and I’ll give you an even better price if you do!” Baaad man.
Anyway, off we went. (We set it up so that Roland, our wandering guru pro housesitter extraordinaire, would stay at the house and take care of the cat, yard and garden for a few of the days.)
WED: Dinner at Patty’s Town House, Grayling: swanky 50’s-style place with short-skirt waitri and glamor-era matron. Sleep in rest area near Gaylord, rocked by the semi’s blasting past.
THURS: Get to Pam’s parent’s cottage near Grand Marais on coast of Lake Superior, where she and old Ann Arbor pals are building a deelux outhouse. Drive 3 miles on tricky two-tracks in the sand to get there. Finally get stuck on a big uphill corner. Thankfully a guy in a big new truck pulls up shortly thereafter. He says We saw you go by and thought What the heck, a Town Car in the boonies? I was peeved since I can usually get away with driving cars where trucks don’t go, but then I saw how excited he was. He said “OK, let’s pull you outta there! I got a strap!” So I looped the strap under my front end and he just eased both car and trailer right outta that sand pit like it was nothing. He was happy as a clam. We had a beer and he said Darn if we only had that on videotape my coworkers would’ve layed an egg. I was only too happy to oblige him with using his truck on its first big rescue, and a nice large-sized one it was. We get to the cabin and party with the gang. I break out the jug of micro-brew I bought at the brewery in GM on the way in, plus the big smoked trout. Definitely bring a come-along and big strap next time.
FRI: Pick enough wild blueberries for a pie, which Martha promptly gets cookin in the trailer, as a secret surprise treat for our hosts. Henry has never picked blueberries in the wild. He starts slow and whiney. Then it’s “Hey Mommy, this here is the juiciest berry in the world!” then it’s juicy this and juicy that for the next hour. He contributes a bunch towards the pie. Hey, can I say that Martha is the best cook? I mean, Martha Stewart doesn’t SAY she’s great, but somehow we think we know that she is. But do we really? You do in the end need someone to SAY your food is great. So I’m saying Martha’s kicks butt. She can cook great food anywhere anyhow. So it’s nice to give her a full trailer kitchen in lovely turquoise enamel when camping. We have great meals, every meal. Even if we’re running out of most everything, we have great meals. Am I a lucky guy, or what? 
I notice the sad state of the rotting cabin steps and how they’re falling in, and also how they’re made of half-round logs and there’s some right-length leftover logs laying behind the cabin. So I mention this and Pam says Well, you can build new ones if you like. Well, since I scoped it out I guess it’s what I want to do, so I say Sure! —I bite off more than I can chew. All the logs are rotten. Nick says You could just make a regular stair…. He shows me how. I start diggin and pullin and cuttin and hammerin. I’m onea the boys, minus the wages. At the end of the day, the stairs are done. It’s a present to the hostess. And of course I’m proud of my carpenter-like labor (and I didn’t even do my usual ‘cut three times measure four times’ routine). They’re the best stairs in the area. We hit the beach. Get bit by millions of flies. But they can’t get you when you’re under water, so we swim a lot. Lovely, lovely, lovely clear cool just right blue water. Great body surfing. Gorgeous rocks galore. Daisy goes nuts fetching sticks. She just loves water and the surf. But she can’t hardly swim. Gets tumbled. Back home, her shorthair cousin Davey swims like a ski boat, but Daisy kinda sinks, don’t know what’s up with that. I inflate a new toy: a Sevylor Tahiti Pro Kayak. They cost as cheap as $130 and are the cheapest “real” inflatable boats. I like having foldable things. You can’t always use a rack or carry a big boat or paddle (or bike or full-length bow). It inflates in a jiffy with the foot pump, then we jam away in the surf with it. It gets voted world’s best beach toy. It actually works great, surfs anything, spins on a dime, and still paddles right along. They use them on real river trips. In the evening Mike hikes around with a high-tech tape recorder (mini disk) taping goofy chats. Everybody is psyched about the sea kayaks on the roof rack. We don’t get them in the water yet, but talk starts up on how purty they are and how we should buy them all, including the stripper I left behind, and make a Boat Club. Get a great price on the lot of them, then have it so everyone can use them all when they like, mix’n’match. So when you need a fun boat, you can have one, or if you need a hardcore speed boat, you can have it, or if you have a whole gang going out you have em and don’t have to rent. Those boats cost $1200-2600 new, but in one lot maybe we can get them for $1400. I’ve been reading chapters from “Tales of the Texas Gang” to everyone in bed in the cabin at night. I mean the grown-ups. Very cute.
SAT: Nick and Curt leave early for sorry, unusual home duties. They miss out bigtime. Generally these bachelors are free as birds. The fancy outhouse is almost finished. Just needs siding. They were hoping to get it all done in four days, but really it’s like a mini-house. (And it does lots more than just outhouse duty.) Of course it’s an architectural delight, since Pam the Architect designed it! Mike and I launch the kayaks and go way upcoast and pick a heavy load of beauty rocks. Then we paddle back downcoast and decide to head to town for lunch and beer. We neglect to drop off the rocks. Silly boys. But we’re digging the water too much to stop. It’s a headwind and over an hour later we make it into Grand Marais. We each offer the pretty barmaid a lovely rock in trade for a beer but she doesn’t go for either temptation (the fool! mine was an agate!). A big storm kicks up on our paddle back. We beach in fine weather but within 10 minutes it’s howling and wavey. Gulp! Ya know, this area’s weather has changed every 10 minutes since we’ve been here. It’s actually a bit annoying. Kind of nerve-rattling. Rain, then sun, then howling wind, then fog…. It actually leaves one unsettled. Mike and I agree that the yellow boat is totally sexy. The blue boat is a practical barge. But both of them make me see why a fast boat is a very nice thing. Speed doesn’t equal macho racing. The wood-stripper is a great all-around classic boat. It’s long, lean and stable just fine. It just really carries its speed. With the other boats, you kind of work along. With the stripper, you ROLL along. I was thinking I just paddle for fun, who needs speed. But when you want to have lunch in a town a few miles away, it suddenly becomes a very nice thing to have a boat that just keeps rolling along, that seems to help you cover more ground than the effort you put into it. So we really do need all 3 boats. Mike is in for sure, he says. Maybe the others are just talk. I’ll see if I can find an actual committed third (and even fourth) for the Club. In the evening we listen to Mike’s recordings. Very spooky. With the headphones, the quality is so good that it seems more real than real. It’s like the people are in the cabin with us. Mike catches lots of great Henry stories. Whoever puts the headphones on starts looking around confused. Did you say something? Who’s talking here? Then they start laughing. Henry is in bed, but he’s telling stories on the tape. Each of us ends up listening to different ones, despite Mike’s efforts to rewind, but they’re all crack-ups.
SUN: Clean up cabin spic’n’span and say goodbyes. Then we drive to Whitefish Point. Henry is ready for the Shipwreck Museum! We camp at a little lake next to a Lonely Guy. He’s reading, has tent, mtbike on SUV, very tidy, about 50 yrs old. Barely responds to my wave. Our kids aren’t loud, BUT they are kids. Poor guy. We work on the quietness of camping concept with the younguns. Neighboring hellions come riding their bikes around, fighting, screaming. Henry and Lucy try to join in. They are largely ignored. I think these are Ritalin kids. Henry runs alongside the bikers at biking speed for a half hour. He’s laughing. One boy tries to punch him, Henry just laughs. Lucy laughs, too. Look at that naughty boy! They’re new to violence, but agile enough. Everyone actually plays fine. The one kid may have bruises due to kicks but what can ya do. The other kids are just on something, maybe TV. I tag along a ways back. They all go streaking to the other family’s campsite. The older folks there don’t say Hi or welcome our kids at all. Ritalin parents and grandparents. Lovely. Later on a big diesel truck with 5th wheel camper goes blasting thru the narrow campground lane and finally settles in. I draw some sketches of brainstorms I get about boat-bikes, faired motorcycles, monocoque upright bikes with exo-frames that function as fairing, and a fully-integrated city bike.
MON: Henry’s energy builds and he’s singing the Edmund Fitzgerald song nonstop as we head to the Shipwreck Museum at the Point. We all have a great time at the Point. Henry is beside himself with the movie, the models, everything related to shipwrecks. We go to the beach and see a freighter pass by close. Lucy starts up her theme-to-be: “It’s the Edmund Fitzgerald Sink!” All along so far we’ve been getting good stares from people due to our deluxe rig as well as the special dog which leaps out snuffling. I’ve been rubbernecking other rigs with kayaks on top. We see a nice Feathercraft fold-boat on a rack. I buy a music tape by a local guy named Carl Behrend because there’s a cover of The Song on it. It’s full of songs about pirates, sailing, and shipwrecks. It’s mostly quite cheesy in your standard local bar-singer balladeer kind of way, but the kids loved it from the get-go. Then it started growing on us, too. Soon everyone was singing all the songs. Then comes the scary part: they won’t leave our heads. It’s a week later now and we’re home and we’re all still singing bits of most of the songs on that tape. There’s a great cover of the Stan Rogers tune “The Wreck of the Mary Ellen Carter.” I hadn’t heard it. What a great song! —About the workers raising a boat that the owners had written off via insurance after it sank. It makes pointed remarks about rotten drunken bosses and pressing on despite the odds with your friends. Great song. Kids are having a screaming fit about once or twice a day. Not too bad. But they seem to keep us both about half busy, so not much else gets done. I feel a bit hampered by this, but not too bad. It’s great being around the little dickens so much. They whine and squabble but it’s also a lot of joy and hilarity. 
We’re building ships, we’re nailing up robots out of Pam’s building scraps. Lucy sings like a bird. And she runs fast, too. But she has a wandering instinct which takes her out of the campsite or down any trail. Doesn’t know about obeying things like “Come back!” yet either. 2-yr-olds, what can ya do. Still, it can be a bit distracted feeling to camp with kids. You need to bloom where you’re planted IN your campsite, basically. If you start soaking in too much of the spicy pine scent suddenly you look down and a kid is back down the trail out of sight. We tried to give each grownup some daily solo time. I took the kids out in the cushy blue boat with big cockpit for trips around the lake. As is his habit, Henry yells No he doesn’t like boats, doesn’t want to do it, at first. Then I ask Lucy and she says “Tay!” Then Henry wants to go, but he’s lost his chance and has to wait until Lucy goes first. Then he’s bragging about how it’s better to go last. Sigh. A sizeable lesson is about how heavy sea kayaks are: very heavy. Really, one person can’t even carry them around. I guess the yellow boat is the world’s heaviest model, for extreme abuse. It’s 70 lbs I think. But I’m a sports wimp. I find dealing with any boats but see-thru kevlar ones to be annoying. Putting a kevlar boat on a roof or carrying it is a breeze. With any other boat, you have to be a tough guy and use smart physics and leverage. We have a laundry list of honey-do’s for the trailer. The main thing, of course, is to JUST GO with whatever you have. Our trailer works great. But some systems need dialing in. I brought too much stuff. I realize that the big spare tire that rides in the aisle is a match for the Town Car spare. Don’t need two. Sheesh. And we haven’t used the cinder block that kicks around the kitchen AT ALL. See? The Nick’n’Pam Crew left us all their leftover food and we have TONS of great stuff, coz Nick got given TONS of great leftovers after another party by his pal the local imported foods shop guy.
TUES: We leave our site and explore the area. As we’re getting ready to go, the same diesel RV dude leaves, too, and goes blasting thru the campground. Our kids are in the road. He doesn’t slow. M grabs them. I wasn’t there, but would’ve stepped right in front of him and stopped that damn fool. Earlier in the morning, with a fairly full but silent sunrise campground, a jerk starts cranking his outboard. The lake is maybe 20 acres, a 5 minute paddle or row anywhere. Loud roaring engine noises. Once it’s going it’s quieter. But the engine was totally unnecessary and rude. That guy absolutely needs someone to start a chainsaw outside his window just a little earlier. Is there any other cure? We visit Tacquamenon Falls. It’s a deluxe place now. Lots of new construction there. Quite crowded, but nice people. Lots of ooohin and ahhhhin over the kids, especially Lucy. Questions about Daisy. Lucy’s main songs are: Red Red Robin, Mary Had a Little Lamb, We’re Going on a Bear Hunt and Miss Lucy Had a Baby. 
We visit the Centennial Cranberry Bog by the Point. The only one in Michigan! It’s a 125-yr-old family farm. We buy fresh fruit, jams and such. It’s just great! So fresh. They have a little tour all set up and dialed in. The lady did it all, I know. She made the video they have running in a shed. She said she did it on her computer. It’s totally a great watch, pro quality. She does all the gift stuff. She asked “So what kind of character does your dog have?” She seemed like a very smart, capable northwoods lady. We visit Oswald’s Bear Ranch, where the owner, who is an ex-heavyweight, looks and talks like a bear. On the way down to Newberry, we stop at the Brick Oven Bakery and buy a bunch of bread that turns out to be GREAT, as good as Zingerman’s easily. No good book or magazine or paper selections even about regional topics. Every shop has the same lame book rack. Sells the same lame foreign rocks. The Paradise rock shop is nice and sold the only good Lk Sup rock book, but not many local rocks. Nice, serious local agates sales, though. But agates aren’t the half of the local rock game. (But what do I know.) The Agate Museum in GM is supposedly THE place for the local rocks, but it was closed! We peeked in the window. It looked WAY cute and full of goodies. Anyway, it seems like the UP in general could use some better media and gift items…. There’s a cool sportshop in Newberry that carries bikes, bows, skis, bikes, hockey and MX gear. The party teen chick who was running the place said her dad sells whatever he likes. I gave them some OYB mags. As we drove back thru town again I saw her and her smoking gal pal sitting on the sidewalk reading the mags. Henry had clay-withdrawal so we checked the local dimestore and they had clay! Great joy for him. Immediately, his armrest is lined with colorful freighters, subs and sea monsters.We drive 20 miles of dirt roads and find only full campgrounds. There are only 4 paved roads in 150 miles of area up here: from Munising to Whitefish. They run NS. All EW and the rest of the NS roads are dirt. It really seems like a frontier area. Except when we were driving in what seemed like a remote part of it, on dirt roads, there was heavy traffic in tourist minivans! They’d be rocketing along in their own dust. Coming from casinos? We’d pull over. Pam’s parents paid $7K for their 10 acres with lots of beach in 1985. It would now probably cost $100K or more. We finally found a campsite. The next day we walked to another campground on the other side of the lake. It was lovely, perfect (Blind Sucker 2). But I heard a generator running. I can’t believe that people dare to run a generator around other people. It’s insane. No excuse for it. They can’t run one around me, though. I’ll use my diplomacy on their ass.
WED: We move to the single opening in the campground on Lake Superior. Raining. Great rock picking. Henry learns the love and goes ape for the rocks. Our neighbor is running a generator. Gotta watch that TV. But it’s amazingly quiet. I have to figure out where it’s coming from. He has it on the other side of his truck. Since it’s raining hard and we’re in our trailer, we can’t hear it, so I spare him. I was going to tell him how impressively quiet it is, but really it would be best if he just put it in the trailer with him, then maybe it really wouldn’t bother anyone, we could let him know. Even in the boonies, we’re finding that campsites are really tiny. In the campground at the end of the one paved road in the area, they’re about half full and there are well over a hundred campers in there cheek by jowl in a haze of smoke. Looks like hell. I recall that when Engler got in he made the Parks self supporting by cutting campsites in half statewide and doubling the fees. Really, I’m trying to get Martha to get into just camping on raw state land. Our trailer is great for it. We don’t hardly use any facilities. It would be perfect. But she balks. OK, I can see we might get stuck more often. She’s leery of the midnight dirtbike rallies, too. But we could work on getting the scoop about good places to go. It is nice to have a few neighbors for the kids to play with. But I figure we’d go hang out at some beach or fishin hole by a dam that had some kids around anyway. No need to pay the Man $20 a night for nuthin but grief. Too bad they couldn’t run camping like they did a few years back: big, cheap sites for those who don’t need anything. But then there’s still that darn civility which we Americans don’t have yet. No, we have civility, just not my kind. I’m the odd man out. There’s a very clear etiquette that everyone else seems to go along with just fine: make noise, be drunk, be vulgar, endanger others, watch TV, and spend money like the wind, on gambling preferably. Sigh. Actually, not everyone goes by this special etiquette, maybe only one in five, but no one else seems to mind it. I’m always the one who has to hike across the crowded campground to tell a guy that midnight chainsawing just ain’t cool. Actually, the last several times that I camped off-road, I also received the American Blessing of yelling, screaming, moaning drunks all night long plus various forms of vehicle racing, fireworks and shooting. Even so, I dream about living up here. Or at least staying up MUCH LONGER. I dream old Mackinaw Island dreams about my old pals there, about green water. Ravens are much bigger than crows. I’m noticing that I don’t mind bad literature and bad music. What’s to complain about? As long as it has something to offer, I find that it can be far better than elite media which contributes nothing of import in the end. Daisy needs more socializing and training, strains on leash walks. We end up in St. Ignace, heading south.
THURS: Parking our long rig in tiny sites is tough. I’m really good at it, but…. The teenage clerks put us into two tent-only sites. Our 3rd spot finally works fine. They don’t know much at the ranger station. It takes an hour to find a site. The first one is tiny plus has a downhill plus side slope. I get the trailer in OK but then put one wheel on a tall block. When jacking the hitch off the ball, the trailer suddenly slides forward in a scary way. No harm, but I forgot to chock the wheels. It’s past dinner time and I’m rattled. So we really need a proper site. Finally get it. One set of neighbors is concerned (we start and end up near where we started). They seem like neat people, older, sleeping in their truck with canoe on top. I say Hi the next day and it turns out they’re Yoopers. They talk slow and pay attention and hang out around us for quite awhile. You can feel the different world view operating. I thought to go visit the Fort Michilamackinac yesterday. How obvious! They might even have a tall ship there. I told this to Henry. He got all revved up. From then on, the vibes of “going to the fort and seeing the ship!” kept everything moving fast forward. I read the local St. Ignace and Mack Island papers and found mentions of all my old pals. That was fun. Mark Chambers and son doing voyageur canoeing. Steve Murray getting a horse. “Friend Steve” fixing up their corral—that’s gotta be Steve Sweet. Mr. Arbib doing better after illness: Al’s dad. Things about the Dowd family. It was neat seeing the books by Dr. David Armour at the Fort gift shop. I asked the clerk if he was still around. “Why sure,” she said, “Doctor Armour was just in.” I thought he’d retired, but I guess he’s still going strong. I looked at one of his books and saw that his kid who I went to school with illustrated part of it. Man, now that was a gift shop. Mr. Armour built all this up from scratch as longtime park superintendent. I knew he’d been around awhile, but in some historic books I saw groovy 60’s pics of him breaking ground on this’n’that. We used to stay with them when we visited the Island. They were very nice people to know and hospitable. I think we probably pushed their limits sometimes, though. Bardy was more friends with their boy, Art. But I knew their grampa from my year at Grove City College. He was a great old guy to meet, who built a stone cabin out of rock in a nearby stream gorge. Dr. Armour went to GC as well as his dad. I think they were warm to me due to that connection, but my partying ways and overstaying of welcome wasn’t always the smartest diplomacy. A very respectible family. I stopped by their smaller summer place on the Island and said Hi a few years back. I haven’t forgotten any of them. The book section at the fort gift shop was FAR BETTER than any library I bet, on the subject of northwoods history going far and wide. It also sold many very quirky books about the area. –All thanks to Dr. Armour, I’m sure. I bought a bunch of books. Plus a minuteman hat for Henry and Indian feather bonnet for the Maiden. They both went nuts for them and are still wearing them around. 
One quirky book is by a local guy who dressed up as a frenchman with his family as natives and took pics of them living the olddays life, with text explaining every detail. A cool wacky guy. His bio in the back says he’s an “independent scholar.” Go man go! Another wacky book is a sketchbook of Indians of the 1700’s in all details. The cover is a gory color sketch of a scalping at the famous Indian massacre of the British by way of the lacrosse trick at the Fort. Good bloody, burning, stabbing cover art! : ) The sketches inside are amateurish yet perfect. They have great spirit and seem to be done in color even though they’re B&W. Man, those indians looked cool! Each sketch shows the clothes and markings and headwear and weaponry of the particular tribe. Man, what cool dudes! It was so cool how they typically BLENDED their stuff with the white man’s. They’d carry rifle, pistol, bow, knife. They’d wear a suitcoat plus loincloth. Definitely the coolest tats and hairdos and hats ever. Some very nervy dudes, they were. I like how it said that war-making with the whites was largely a social event. I recently read elsewhere that it was common for indians to make 50 miles in a day on foot. Dudes! Role models, for sure! Another quirky book is Dr. Armour’s only biography, of a fort commander who had panache. He was also the guy who invented guerilla warfare and the ‘rangers’ concept. Cool! Robert Rogers didn’t do things the usual way, didn’t keep great bookkeeping, had amazing victories and great relations with locals and got promoted by the top brass very quick, so naturally his immediate superiors hated him and ruined him in short order. The cover of Armour’s book shows a soldier mauling Rogers’ wife as he’s in chains…apparently happened. That Dr. Armour must have a bit of spark in him, too, eh? We checked out the fort. Cool stuff. Hard core archeaology, lots of reinactment stuff. Henry talked about the cannons for days, but when it came time for the noon salute, he hid in one of the museums, cried and covered his ears. Lucy and I went and watched the cannon go ‘boom.’ It wasn’t very loud. Poor Henry was chagrined and admitted that it wasn’t loud at all. He really has a thing about not liking the things that he likes, with a switcharound to finally liking it after awhile. Whew! Lucy calls the Mackinaw Bridge the “Edmund Fitzgerald Sink.”
FRI: I got thirsty for sea kayak reading. I saw a good looking bookshop in St. Ignace. It had a big magazine section. –And quite a few magazines about whitewater kayaking. Not much on canoeing and nothing on sea kayaking. What stupidity. There is no WW in this region. There’s great canoeing and world class sea kayaking. As usual, they get it all backwards. I buy a bunch of regional mags, though. Shoulda got em ahead of time to learn about events. In “Michigan Out of Doors” I notice a remark that maps of state parks are no longer available. Hmmm…. Man, I want to do a map project! What a service it would be! My plan has always been to do county maps that cover all good biking roads, plus include trails in park and rec areas, as well as good commuter routes in towns. In the evening we are as far south as Clare and stop at Jay’s for goodies. I buy a new Filson bush hat: mine felt Stetson crusher has been way too small for years. I’m a terrible shopper. Almost buy a kiddy sport vest for H. He’d love lots of pockets. But he can use mine and we’ll pin the armholes smaller. Had dinner in the parking lot. We make it home by midnight.
SAT: Reading the mail backlog. New issue of “Messing About In Boats” has another fine Robb White column that mentions stowing tons of stuff in boats when he trailers them. This makes me remember that I have all the hatches of the kayaks on the roof stuffed with junk. Boots, powercords. Cute. Here’s another travel lesson: only pack what you need. It seems obvious, but when you have decent storage space you can be tempted to overpack. So just remember that overpacking takes much longer to do and then takes much longer to UNDO. Pack efficiently. Use a wheelbarrow. It was great being with nippers so much: soft little Lucy, skinny revved-up Henry. We had some good bug-times: once Martha got stung by a hornet getting in the car, then she looked at her coat and it had a big caterpillar on it, then she looked at me and I had a big chigger thing hiding behind my ear. She was a bit overwhelmed. We also found a monarch caterpillar and put it in a jar. The next day it turned into a cocoon. At Pam’s cabin I stepped on a little spider in the sand and he stung me but good. The last thing that happened was by St. Johns close to home. Martha was driving for the first time since I was just kaput. We slowed at an exit and a MOUSE ran onto our hood. We stopped, I got out and tried to brush him off, but he disappeared. Later at a gas station, I opened the hood and saw him in the vent. Then later on we slowed a bit for a curve and suddenly he was on the hood again, then streak up the windshield and was gone. So the trailer was great. The kids have their books, crayons, Legos and clay and then it gets put away. It’s great to have a dialed in operation. Ya know, I think the perfect camping method is to rise before dawn every day. Take a nap later on if you have to. Heck, it’s a good way for every day. Life takes effort. Anyway, THAT WAS OUR TRIP!
