October 14 - St. Ignace, Michigan

We didn’t sleep too well during the night—it seemed that we were both slightly nervous about being the only persons in the entire camping area. Introverts we may be, but hermits definitely not! My imagination got going particularly strongly after I watched someone park a car in a campsite down the way for a while but then suddenly pull out without ever putting up a tent. My imagination works wonders in a scenario like this, but usually the possibilities I come up with are rather negative. I recall thinking something about a burglar casing our trailer for a break-in later that night (unlikely), or a drug dealer counting his cash after making a major drug deal (even more unlikely).

I would really prefer to think it was just two kids out necking before they had to get home for the evening, but I have no idea if the current generation does anything remotely like “necking”. My sons told me that “hanging out” had replaced “dating” sometime in the 1980s and I just don’t know what all else may have changed in the meantime. That’s the problem with being out of the market for over 30 years—my skills and knowledge just get very out of date, and of course Monika wants to keep it that way!

Where was I? Oh yes, in any case we both slept rather poorly that evening—I was listening all night for sounds of a break-in—and were a bit groggy and grouchy in the morning. Perhaps not too surprisingly, after a quick breakfast it took us only ½ hour to break camp, connect the trailer, dump the waste tanks, and be on our way. So I might have been incorrect about the relative time advantages of breaking camp for a tent versus a trailer. One thing is certain, breaking camp with a wet tent has always been exceedingly unpleasant due to packing away wet fabric into a small bag with bare hands. Breaking camp with the trailer in the rain was, by comparison, relatively quick and easy since it is just manipulating hoses, wires, and metal pieces. To be sure, when the temperature gets below freezing I will want to wear gloves to handle those metal pieces, but at least they don’t swell up and become stiff in a cold rain like canvas or nylon do.

It rained steadily but lightly from a gray sky as we drove eastward across the Upper Peninsula to St. Ignace on the Straights of Mackinac, where we intended to visit Mackinac Island on the morrow. We first stopped at the information for the Hiawatha National Forest that had advertised free wolf posters, and indeed they turned out to be very nice posters, well worth the price! So we both picked one up and continued on our journey to St. Ignace.

It might seem that these long cross-country drives would be boring, but that is generally not the case. Particularly if we take the side roads rather than the interstates, we often find many quaint and curious things while driving thru the country. In the Upper Peninsula, for example, I was heartened to find so many businesses being run by “Bob”. We found Bob was selling Used Cars, running a Diner, and doing other miscellaneous things like heating and air-conditioning repair. I was happy to see Bob busy in so many different ways altho I resisted the impulse to stop in and say hello to my fellow Bob.

Many times we have encountered “roadside mysteries”—some really odd object or implement sitting in someone’s yard and you can’t help but wonder “what is that used for?” Again I am tempted to stop and ask, but almost never do. The radio also provides entertainment, usually intentionally but sometimes quite by accident. I was vaguely listening to a radio commercial that started off with a deep, sonorous voice intoning something to the effect that people judge you by the quality of your English, which I certainly agree with. But the voice continued about how important it was to improve your English “in business and social.” I kept expecting them to add “social situations” or “social events” or any noun that would make the sentence grammatically correct, but they never did. I was highly amused that an advertisement for English improvement courses used incorrect grammar in the ad itself. If all else failed, we could always amuse ourselves by looking at the scenery that the Upper Peninsula is particularly blessed with (yes, it’s OK to end a sentence with a preposition).

The fall colors were, surprisingly, still quite brilliant perhaps because of the contrast to the dark sky and the drive was pleasant due to the scenery, straight roads, and a complete lack of traffic. There truly are not many people up here, and many a mile went by where we saw only forest and no sign of humans. At first we had views of Lake Superior to the north of us, and as we approached St. Ignace we had views of Lake Michigan to the south of us. Lake Superior definitely had more waves and a more rugged shoreline than the Lake Michigan shore we saw, but they were both pretty in their own way.

We found a home for the next couple of nights at a KOA just outside of St. Ignace and gratefully parked the trailer in a pull-thru space, which is much better for beginners like I was. After unhitching, we both felt like a short nap before we drove into downtown St. Ignace just to walk around and get some exercise. St. Ignace is quite old, founded in 1671 as I recall, but is still a small town of about 3,000 that apparently lives by serving the tourist ferries to Mackinac Island. The main street is the street along the harbor where there are at least 3 different companies sending ferries over to the island, each with their own parking lot and wharf area.

The main street also has an interesting set of businesses—we shopped at an IGA—and the Museum of Ojibwa Culture. It was just getting ready to close as we walked by, so we postponed a visit to the museum and walked back along a boardwalk that fronts directly on the harbor. The city had posted information plaques every so often, and reading these I was surprised to learn that Pere Marquette had actually died on the return journey when he led a team of voyageurs exploring the Mississippi River. I was also impressed that he had spent his first 2 years in the new world learning the Native American languages so that he could converse with (and convert, naturally) the tribes along the way. His total working life in New France totaled only about 6 or 7 years, which was sad, but he did accomplish more in that brief span than many folks do in their entire lives so that is some consolation, I guess.

But we also finally found a small folding wooden cribbage board for $3.95 at a gift shop, which we thought was a reasonable price, and bought it. After dinner back in the trailer, we broke it in with a couple of games. Monika slaughtered me in the first game and I eked out a win by 1 point in the second—stay tuned for Continuing Cribbage Coverage (CCC) as we travel life definitely in the slow lane. If we were traveling any slower we would be overtaken by continental drift! Seriously, I haven’t had the time to play cards at all since our children were born several decades ago and I had to totally re-learn the rules, but it was nice having the time and place to play games like that again. Monika thought I was getting too excited during that second game so she called it quits for the evening and we just crocheted and wrote in the journal for a while to relax.