Day 16 – Wednesday, May 28, 2014

St Ignace, Michigan to Parry Sound, Ontario – 366 miles

It was a long driving day, but we wanted to get as close to Peterborough as we could so tomorrow’s drive won’t be so long.  We dumped the tanks and filled up with fresh water before leaving the state park, then stopped at a grocery store to stock up on a few non-perishables at the cheaper US prices.  We also topped off the propane tank when we filled up with gas in St Ignace, then stopped in Sault Ste Marie to get the oil changed in the Tiger before crossing into Canada.  The lines were short, only three vehicles ahead of us at the toll booth for the international bridge over the Soo Locks on the waterway between Lakes Superior and Huron, and a single car ahead of us at Canadian customs on their side of the bridge. 

It was 11:00am when we pulled out of customs and started down Highway 17, the same Trans-Canada Highway that we’d driven on back in Saskatchewan a few days ago.  We followed the TCH all the way to Sudbury, about 190 miles, before turning south on Highway 69, the main north-south route down to Toronto (although we won’t be going all the way to Toronto).  The scenery along the TCH was very similar to what we had been seeing as we crossed the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, although more sparsely settled and hillier than the UP.  As we neared Sudbury, and even more so after we turned south from Sudbury, we were on the Canadian Shield, a vast block of the earth’s crust that was essentially scraped bare by the glacial sheet during the last ice age.  The shield covers a large portion of this part of Ontario, and can even be seen in portions of the western provinces and the adjacent border states, but is especially evident here.  While it probably appears relatively flat from the air, it is actually a rolling landscape of exposed rock outcrops punctuated by innumerable lakes, ponds, and bogs, and crossed by streams and rivers of all sizes.  On the GPS screen on our dashboard, it looks like the skin of a fair Irish lass, except the freckles are irregular blue dots and splotches of varying sizes on a white background, broken only by the single yellow ribbon of the highway upon which we were traveling.   Where the rock is exposed, it is scoured into smoothly rounded shapes as might be expected from the thousands of years of extremely slow glacial movement that shaped this land.  Where the rock is not exposed, the surface is generally forested, although the topsoil layer is very thin – in places only a few inches deep.  

Off to the west, from a few isolated high points, we could catch glimpses of Georgian Bay, a large off-shoot of Lake Huron which lies behind a string of islands several miles out from the eastern shore of the larger lake.  On a map of the Great Lakes region, Georgian Bay appears almost as large as the smaller of the Great Lakes, Erie and Ontario; however, technically speaking, I guess that because it is merely a large body of water separated by a few islands from the larger body of Lake Huron, it doesn’t qualify as a lake.

Our original plan was to stop at a KOA campground just outside Parry Sound, but after driving by the KOA and seeing that it was located down in a wooded hollow that was infested with black flies, we decided to return to the town and do some urban boondocking at the local Walmart parking lot.  I was hoping to post this as well as the posts from the last two days, but we’re far out in the fringes of the parking lot and the wifi signal from the store is too weak to do an upload.  There’s a McDonald’s just up the street, so maybe we’ll stop there for breakfast in the morning and, if they have wifi, post these entries then.

Day 15 – Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Mackinac Island, Michigan

We called the ferry company last night and made arrangements for a shuttle to pick us up at the state park so we wouldn’t have to drive down into town and leave the motorhome in the parking lot all day.  The shuttle picked us up at 9:00, and it was a short ten minute drive to the ferry dock.  On the way over the driver explained to us the difference between the two ways we see the name of the island spelled:  “Mackinac” and “Mackinaw.”  This area was originally explored by the French trappers and traders in the 1600’s, and their adaptation of the Indian name for the strait between the lakes was “Mackinac.” In French the “c” at the end was silent.  When the British came along a few years later, their adaptation of the Indian name was “Mackinaw.”  Today, there are only three entities which continue to officially use the French spelling:  Mackinac Island itself, the Strait of Mackinac (the wide channel between Lakes Michigan and Huron), and the Mackinac Bridge over the Strait.  In all cases, the “c” at the end is silent, so the pronunciation is the English version, “Mackinaw.”

It’s a 25-minute ferry ride over to the Island, and as soon as we left the dock we were enveloped in thick fog, which remained until we entered the harbor at the island.  Even then, a very light fog lingered for most of the morning, finally clearing into a beautiful sunny day just before lunch time.  Disembarking from the ferry is like stepping back a hundred years.  There are no cars allowed on the island – at least no private cars.  There are a few service trucks, but for everyone else, transportation is by bicycle or horse-drawn buggy.  Even the freight delivery on the island is by large wagons drawn by sturdy draft horses.  Surprisingly, however, the streets are very clean.  I noticed a brown UPS truck sitting on the dock near the ferry terminal, and surmise that it comes across in the morning and parks there after unloading all the packages for the hotels and shops for delivery by wagon or bicycle.  I guess that during the day people and businesses drop off or send by bicycle delivery their outgoing packages to the truck, which then takes a late ferry back across to the mainland side, making it something like a mobile UPS shipping terminal.

Every building on the island – hotels, B&Bs, shops, and private homes – is an authentic, 100-plus year old gem of Victorian architecture, or else a very good modern replica.  There is an 18^th-century fort on the hill above the little town at the harbor, but the most famous building is the Grand Hotel, an expansive, 300-room, white Victorian hotel on the bluff looking out across the strait to the mainland.  This hotel was the setting for a movie made back in 1979 or so, starring Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour called “Somewhere in Time.”  The plot was that Christopher Reeve, in modern time, visited the hotel where he saw a painting of a beautiful woman (Jane Seymour), and became obsessed with her.  He somehow managed to travel back in time to the turn of the 20^th century – taking some authentic Victorian clothing with him so he’d fit in.  He then contrived a chance meeting with this woman, and of course they fell in love, yada yada.  Unfortunately, he saw something shiny on the floor of his hotel room, and when he bent town to pick it up, it turned out to be a modern penny that he had forgotten was in his pocket.  He had inadvertently dropped it while changing clothes.  That broke the spell, and he suddenly found himself once again in 1979.  Boo-hoo, end of story.  There’s a little more to it, but that’s basically what it’s all about.

The island is, however, an interesting place to visit, especially if you have a few days to spend exploring the entire island.  Most of it is pristine woodland, although there are roads and trails throughout the island – all to be explored on foot or bicycle, of course.  It’s not very large; in fact the perimeter road that circles the island is only 8-1/2 miles long.  There is a small airstrip located near the center of the island which can handle private aircraft, and I saw somewhere that there is commercial air ferry service for the rich and famous who can afford such things. 

We saw many beautiful homes while walking around, and when I asked the shuttle driver on our way back to the state park if they were summer homes, he said most were the permanent homes of some of the 500 or so people who live on the island year-round.  He mentioned that most of the year-round residents lived in a residential area up the hill, away from the touristy main street around the ferry dock.  We didn’t get up that far in our walks around town, so I can’t say if that area is authentic Victorian or not, but apparently they don’t have cars either.

Main Street, Mackinac Island - Early Morning Before the Crowds

Fort Mackinac - Mackinac Island

The Grand Hotel, Mackinac Island

So now we’re back at the campground, and tomorrow it’s off to Ontario and beyond for the next three weeks or so.  We’ll get this posted when we find a campground or RV park with wifi, or else find a wifi hotspot somewhere along the way.

Day 14 – Monday, May 26, 2014

Iron Mountain Michigan to St Ignace, Michigan – 202 miles

We left early this morning, about 7:15, figuring to beat the Memorial Day crowds heading home.  As it turned out, that was a good decision because the traffic was very light.  If everyone out celebrating the holiday weekend was like the folks back in the RV park where we stayed last night, it’ll probably take them until mid-afternoon to get packed up and on the road.  It looked like everyone in the park had brought everything but the kitchen sink with them – barbeque grilles,  what looked like dozens of folding chairs, ice chests large and small, bundles of firewood, bicycles, kids’ ride-around electric cars, frisbies, badminton nets, soccer balls, tiki torches — it was unbelievable.  But seeing all the families out enjoying the first warm weather of the season was heartening.  We both remarked how much it reminded us of the times back in San Antonio when a bunch of the young architects’ families got together for camp-outs like that.

Passing through the Michigan countryside on US 2 was like a trip back into the 1950’s.  Everything looked just like it used to look when we drove down old Hwy 90A to Galveston when I was a kid – the modest houses with asbestos shingle siding, the unpainted barns and sheds, the small towns virtually unchanged in 60 years except for the occasional computer store and, of course, the price of gasoline on the service station signs.  Even the state patrol cars we passed had single, old-fashioned gumball lights on the roof, albeit with brightly flashing LED strobes in them instead of the old rotating double red beacons.  (No, we didn’t get stopped for speeding, but we saw a few unlucky ones that did.)  One thing I remember from those days that I didn’t see were the fruit and watermelon stands along the roadside from my youth, although that may have been simply because it’s too early in the year.

We soon reached the northern shore of Lake Michigan, and in several places the highway skirted right along the water’s edge, at places only thirty or forty feet from the rippling waters of our second Great Lake for this trip.  There was no ice on this one, though.  We stopped for coffee and a pecan caramel roll in a small town whose name I can’t remember, and watched in fascination and horror as the news of the giant landslide in Colorado crawled across the bottom of a giant TV screen on the wall of the cafe.  Jeanette and I drove down that very same back road between Collbran and Rifle a few years ago on one of our autumn aspen viewing trips.  At least this one didn’t wipe out major portions of towns and take hundreds of lives like the ones in Washington State and Afghanistan a few weeks ago.

Later, we pulled into a roadside viewpoint just a few miles west of St. Ignace and fixed a sandwich for lunch.  In the distance we could see the Mackinac Bridge, the long suspension bridge that connects the two halves of Michigan together across the Straits of Mackinac.  A short while later we pulled into the Straits State Park, our home for the next two nights.  The park is located just a stone’s throw from the northern approach to the bridge, and we can see this impressive structure through a gap in the trees from our campsite, which itself is just a couple of hundred feet back from the water’s edge.  Assuming the bridge is located at the narrowest point of the Strait, and since that would be the geographic boundary between Lake Michigan and Lake Huron, I suppose you could say that technically we are on the shores of Lake Huron since we’re on the east side of the bridge.  That makes Great Lake number three.  At any rate, we’ll be out on the waters of Lake Huron tomorrow as we take the ferry across to Mackinac Island and step back in time into the Victorian era.  Although to be honest, they do have modern conveniences like electricity and TV on the island even if they don’t have automobiles.

We spent a leisurely afternoon here in the park, taking a nice hike through the park grounds and woods, then sitting in the sunshine (even though it was a bit cool) and catching up on our reading.  We spoke to our friend John, from our trek on the Camino de Santiago last fall, after dinner tonight.  We’ll be visiting him and his wife Catherine on their farm just outside Peterborough, Ontario later this week, and we were confirming our final ETA with them.  Now it’s blog time, listening to some soft iPod jazz and hearing the mournful wail of fog horns out in the Strait in the distance as I tap away at the keyboard. 

Day 13 – Sunday, May 25, 2014

Madeline Island, Wisconsin to Iron Mountain, Michigan – 224 miles

We vacated our campsite at Big Bay State Park at about 7:30.  The weather was clear and the temperature in the low 60’s – it looked like we were finally back in temperate weather.  There was no dump station at the state park, so we had to go down to what  is I guess the one and only RV dump station on the island, oddly located at the airport.  So it was 8:15 by the time we got to the ferry landing, in plenty of time to make the 8:30 ferry to the mainland.  But we goofed – the ferry left at 8:00, so we had to wait for the next one at 9:15.  We passed the time watching one of the smaller ferries play icebreaker in the harbor since the wind had shifted overnight and all the ice that had been floating out in the bay had blown against the shore on this side of the island.

Because we had skipped breakfast before leaving the campsite in order to get away early, our first stop in Bayfield – the town where the mainland ferry dock is located – was at the Egg Stop, a breakfast café that someone had recommended.  We had a huge breakfast – huevos rancheros for me and the “special” egg and sausage muffin with a really big serving of hash browns for Jeanette.  Needless to say, we skipped lunch today after that overindulgence.

After breakfast, we walked around town and did a little shopping, then got on the road about noon.  After leaving the shores of Lake Superior, we traveled through the north woods of Wisconsin – Paul Bunyon country.  The deep, dense woods of yore are long gone, logged over years ago.  What’s left now is all smaller second or third growth pine mixed with birch and a few other hardwood species I couldn’t identify (note to self: gotta get a good tree book).  We steadily climbed in elevation from just under 700 feet at Lake Superior to a maximum of almost sixteen hundred feet, driving through gently rolling hills.  We entered the land of lakes – big lakes, small lakes, mere ponds, and wide rivers, all packed with boats on this Memorial Day weekend.  Most of the small towns we passed through had their streets lined with American flags in honor of the holiday.  This is really the first weekend of decent weather in this part of the world, and people were out in droves.  It was good to see all the families out together, and good to see people in shorts and T-shirts instead of bundled up in sweaters and jackets.  On a side note, when we were on Madeline Island, it was cool enough along the waterfront to need a jacket even at mid-day, but if you walked inland only a block, it was short-sleeve weather, at least yesterday.

We reached Iron Mountain, Michigan about 4:30 this afternoon, and checked into a crowded, but pleasant commercial RV park.  Again, it is full of families, with kids running all around while groups of parents sit in circled lawn chairs around campfires.  A true modern day American scene.

 

"Icebreaking" ferry at Madeline Island.

Approaching Bayfield, the mainland ferry terminus.