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.