Tin Can Travels

28th – 30th Aug: Days 142 – 144

We continued our journey across NY state and put in a 2 night stop in Watkins Glen. This little known corner of America is best known for a couple of things:

1. The Glen: a smallish but beautiful steep sided gorge with some amazing rock formations and waterfalls, and a very lovely 1.5 mile walk up it.
2. The Glen: a very well known motor racing track, if you know about these things. This was the first place to host a major car race following WW2 giving the petrol heads of this land somewhere to burn some gasoline and tyre rubber. In 1948 this started as a street race around the small town and graduated to a purpose built track 5 yrs later. It hosted Formula 1 Grand Prix 1961-1980 and remains an important NASCAR and INDYCAR venue as the premiere road racing venue in the USA. I, of course knew none of this.

We travelled from Niagara to Watkins Glen though the back roads of Up State New York. This area was a bit less polished than I had expected. More homes that needed repainting, more lawns un-mowed and a bit more junk in the gardens. Still very pretty though and we saw our first Amish horse and buggy on the road. We did a very small detour about 30 miles from our destination in order to visit the Corning Museum of Glass.  This was established by the Corning Glass Works in 1951 in recognition of 100 years of manufacturing glass.  The museum is now housed in a monumental purpose built building and has 45000 pieces of glass, some over 3500 years old. It was fantastic. The gallery areas were in huge minimalist spaces and the museum areas showed that those olden day folks knew some stuff too. There were even some science areas and demonstrations explaining fibre optics and such.  The highlight was watching a live worship where a glassblower knocked up an amazingly ornate bowel in 20 minutes. Quite a talent.

After we had absorbed all the culture that we could accomodate, we headed off to Watkins Glen. The town is in an area called Finger Lakes, and sits at the lower end of Seneca Lake. This is one of a group of long thin glacial lakes and is 38 miles long. We got to our camp at about 5pm, on a lovely sunny evening. We set up and then wandered down to the park area on the lake edge to watch the sunset with a bottle of fizz and a bag of cheesy crisps; last event in the anniversary celebrations. I know, we are all class.

The next day, after a hearty brunch, we donned our walking shoes and set off to walk up the gorge path. The entrance was only about a mile from camp on the edge of town and on the way there we had a coffee sat on a bench on the main street and watched the world go by. There are a lot of trucks that go through this town, so this was not peaceful pastime.  The pavements have plaques sunk into them, each commemorating a different race car driver that had won an event at The Glen. We came across this familiar name.

We found out that a few days after we leave here The Glen is hosting the Indycar Grand Prix. Nick was gutted to be missing it, but I reckon that finding accomodation would have been a little trickier. Anyhow, we have a date to pick up Rick in Burlington, so we must roll onwards!

The racetrack itself is not in town, and unfortunately we didn’t manage to get up to it.  Wonder if we could have given Big Dave a bit of a thrash, Tin Can and all…?

The walk up into the Glen was lovely. There was a well formed stone path built into the side wall of the gorge and lots of great photo opportunities. Unfortunately we also lost these photos in the great memory-card disaster, but here is a stock photo.

That evening we walked back to town and had dinner and a drink sat up at the bar in the local craft brewery, Roosterfish. We got chatting to an interesting chap called Dries and spent a few hours swapping stories and anecdotes.

 

26th – 28th Aug: Days 140-142

I’d not ever had a burning desire to visit Niagara Falls but we were going to be so close that it seemed silly not to swing by. Nick had been before with his Dad in March 1990. He remembers it being so cold that the Falls were half frozen and there were hardly any other tourists.

We booked 2 nights just north of the Falls in a village called Lewiston. Driving here took us from Pennsylvania into New York State. We navigated around the suburbs of Buffalo and had our first ‘low bridge’ experience. Luckily that only involved a hasty stop and me running around in the road to halt traffic so we could execute a 5 point turn, rather than top-slicing the roof off Tin Can. Sometimes the lady in Google Maps gets it wrong…

The first night was our anniversary so we booked a nice restaurant in Lewiston itself. I broke out a dress, Nick donned shirt and slacks and as the best dressed folks in the whole darn campsite we got an Uber to the village. As a happy surprise there happened to be a rather large jazz festival afoot. The main street was closed to traffic, had a stage at each end, was lined with numerous vendors of beer and food and was filled with a happy crowd. The sun was shining and we had a very cool hour of apperitifs listening to the music and soaking up the buzz. Our meal was excellent and we managed to get our return Uber just ahead of the going-home crowds after the last band.

 

The next day I might have felt a little shabby, and might not have had an appetitive for breakfast sandwiches. I know. Unfair.

After a period of time and some appropriate drugs (I healed myself) I was feeling better and we called another Uber to take us down to the Falls. Following recommendations from multiple sources we took our passports and walked over the Friendship Bridge to the Canadian side, with only a mild and completely unfounded anxiety that they might not let us back into the USA on our return.

I have some observations, and some corrected personal misconceptions regarding Niagara Falls:

1. American side shabby, Canadian side smart.
2. In my mind, the river ran the other way and the American and Canadian sides were switched.
3. It is actually 2 falls. American Falls and Horseshoe Falls. I really didn’t know this. Horseshoe falls is the Niagara I had imagined.
4. The view is so much better from the Canadian side.
5. There is a lot of water coming over those darn waterfalls.
6. There are a lot of people who come to look at those big darn waterfalls and only about 5% have any spatial awareness or manners.
7. Whoever is in the business of manufacturing disposable ponchos is making a good living out of the Niagara Falls tourist industry.

Once on the busy but nicely manicured Canadian side we wound our way slowly through the crowds down to Horseshoe Falls. Nick remembered doing a tour though tunnels behind the falls, just him and his Dad, and it being weird as the cascading water was frozen solid. We opted to do the same tour and joined the queue to get the lift down. Nick doesn’t deal with heights well. My Bête Noir is a touch of claustrophobia. Oh. They packed us into those tunnels. Hoards of yellow poncho wearing folks, rustling and shuffling along, each waiting for a turn to stand at the end of a tunnel mouth to watch a wall of white water cascading down in front of them. Not my thing at all. I felt much more relaxed once we got to the open air area at the base of the Falls. It really was epic being so close to it. Very wet, very noisy and a perfect photo opportunity given the backdrop of the cascading water, the Maid of the Mist boat and the rainbow. I cannot share a picture of this with you, however, as the memory card of the camera decided to error.

Here is a stock photo for your reference.

America and American Falls

Horseshoe Falls and Canada

 

With weary bodies after so much walking and excitement we shuffled back across to the USA, were re-admittted without drama, got an Uber home and had a nice cup of tea.

 

25th – 26th Aug: Days 139 – 140

Having spent 8 weeks in Michigan, Pennsylvania only had the honour of our presence for one night. We were just passing through on our way to Niagara Falls, and found a stop just west of Erie, on Lake Erie. We really can’t be bothered to do long driving days as it makes us both grumpy, so we generally only do a maximum of 150 miles, or 3 hours a day.  Never manage to get on the road before 11am, need a stop for lunch and very important for camp to be well and truely set up by beer o’clock.

Our camp for the night was a wooded place, inhabited by long term seasonal campers and there were definitely some twitchy curtains as we made our way to our back-blocks site at the rear of the park. Also amazing that such an out of the way campsite can be so close to a railway line…those horns…

We did very little except watch a few more episodes of Breaking Bad after dinner and I got stung by a wasp. Exciting times.

In the morning as we were leaving Erie we found ourselves in our favourite place, Walmart!  A fabulous start to our 17th wedding anniversary 🙂

Had to get a few supplies for our impending camper-guest, Nick’s brother Rick, who is joining us for a week soon. Going to be cozy with the 3 of us, but he is fully house trained and a bone fide camper so it should be all good!

 

22nd -25th Aug: Days 136 – 139

We left Detroit (and Michigan finally) under a dark cloud of a threatened storm that we never materialised. We were a bit sorry to leave this fine state, but not sorry to leave the terrible roads of Detroit. Ironic that a city built on the back of the motoring industry and which boasts that it had the world’s first section of paved road (1 mile of the aforementioned Woodward Ave in 1909) Should have such awful, awful, awful awful road surfaces. Big Dave’s suspension was challenged by the ridges and potholes and it was a sweet moment when we passed over the state line into Ohio and the tarmac was instantly smooth as.

Our time in Ohio was to be a short but very focused 3 nights and 2 days at the Mecca for all that is fun, fast, high and upside down. Cedar Point Amusement Park. It sits at the end of a spit of land that juts out into Lake Erie at a place called Sandusky and it bills itself as the ‘Roller Coaster Capital Of The World’. And you know, I think it is probably right. It has 17 roller coasters, 5 of which are taller than 200ft, (one is 420ft and another is 310ft), one of the fastest accelerating coasters in the world, the tallest and fastest ‘dive’ coaster in the world and they are building another one which is going to be the biggest and fastest and longest in the whole damn universe. Yes.

Anyhow, a long time ago, Nick, the self confessed ‘Coaster Coward’ decided that we needed to visit this place of hedonism and adrenaline to ‘cure himself’ of his fear of heights. So he had booked us into the on-site RV park for 3 nights and bought us 2-day passes to the amusement park.  Our site was close enough that we could hear the screams…and easily walk to the entrance gate.

We had an amazing 2 days. We walked miles up and down searching the shortest queues. We rode all the big ones bar one (which was unfortunately closed) and some of the smaller ones. We really didn’t have to spend along time waiting for any of the rides, which was cool. We (ok, mainly I) screamed my head off. Repeatedly. We wasted money in the arcades. We ate ice cream. We people watched, a lot. Main observation: there sure is a whole heap of ‘active wear’ being worn by minimally active people. Apparently wearing close fitting stretchy clothing is essential to sit in a chair and travel at speed.

The favourite ride? Top Thrill Dragster.  A 0-120mph in 3.9 s acceleration then straight up, and then straight down. 17s of adrenaline The only one we did twice.

Here is us ‘enjoying’ it!

I spent much of the time having fun through a haze of mild vestibular labrynthitis, (hoorah for stemetil), and Nick now considers himself cured of his fear of heights (a bit).

 

 

19th – 22nd Aug: Days 133 – 136

This trip so far has mainly been about small towns, open roads, parks and lakes. Since we left Seattle the biggest urban area we had visited was probably Boise, Idaho but Nick had a hankering to visit Detroit. He loves a bit of industrial chic and urban decay, and of course it is a pilgrimage destination for the car nut.

As point of interest the Detroit Metro area has only slightly fewer inhabitants than the whole of NZ. You might not be surprised to hear that there are no RV parks in downtown or metro Detroit, so a visit was potentially going to be a little difficult. Happily, however, we had met Todd and Keta in Copper Harbour last month and they were kind enough to invite us to stay, offering us a very exclusive and upscale RV parking spot on their driveway in Shelby Township, a suburb about 20 miles from the centre of Detroit. The closer we got to the city the faster and more aggressive the driving became. Obviously our earlier observations of courteous American drivers was not applicable to all freeway drivers in cities. We white-knuckled-it, google-mapped-it and arrived in one piece mid afternoon on Saturday. The one thing that we had planned for our visit was for the four of us to go and watch a baseball game the next day, the Detroit Tigers were playing the LA Dodgers. Unbeknown to us however, there was a Detroit annual highlight afoot: The Woodward Dream Cruise. This is a week-long classic car event which culminates in an evening of all-comers street cruising in classic and notable cars and trucks. Folks with cool cars, fast cars, rare cars, old cars, new cars, loud cars, modified cars all come out and cruise the city, based around the long 4 lane Woodward road which divides Detroit into East and West. More than a million people come out to watch, either sitting on the road sides in camping chairs with coolers loaded with food and beer, parked up with their own old classics for others to admire up close, or like us, cruising with Family Thelan in their truck in the most tolerable traffic jam ever, surrounded by automotive eye and ear candy. A real treat and about as Detroit an experience as you can get.

We forgot to take any photos, so here is a stock photo, and a link for the fellow car-aholics.

http://www.detroitnews.com/autos/woodward-dream-cruise

The next day we had another truely Detroit-ian experience. BBQ for brunch at ‘Slows’, another Man Vs Food food joint. Slightly heavier than our usual 11am fayre, but the kilos of meat would see us through the baseball game which started at 1pm.

We had accessorised for our baseball experience with Detroit baseball hats, but on arrival at the ballpark I felt I needed a big orange foam Tiger Claw/Paw. It was a brilliantly sunny day and hotter than Hades. We got a handle on the rules of the game and sat through 5 innings with no score whilst we slowly cooked in the baking heat. We decided to take a break from the sun and decamped to an air-conditioned bar for a drink. This half an hour coincided almost exactly with pretty much all the scores in the game. Typical. But the good news was that the Tigers won and the crowd was happy.  We had a great afternoon, but like cricket, baseball can be a little dull.

We headed home via the sights of Detroit. It is a city that has been on it’s knees, but there is a lot of regeneration and it definitely has a buzz about it again.

That evening we were assimilated into a family birthday gathering. Keta’s family all live nearby and have a Sunday evening meal together 3 out of 4 weeks. This week it was at Todd and Keta’s place and we were celebrating Todd and his brother-in law’s birthdays which were the next day. There was a huge amount of food, and I hadn’t really digested my BBQ brunch yet. Luckily we only had a short distance to roll home and I have come to the conclusion that camping in a fully self contained camper on your hosts’ driveway is a perfect way to be a houseguest.

We headed off the next morning, next stop being the Henry Fort Museum in Dearborn about 30 miles away on the other side of the city. It is not just a car museum, but also a homage to American Innovation in general. It needs more than a day to get around all the different areas and due to the continuing lack of RV parks we booked a night in a Comfort Inn just up the road with a free shuttle to the museum. We abandoned TC and Big Dave in a corner of the carpark with our overnight stuff packed into into reusable shopping bags and headed off in the shuttle to the museum.  It really is epic. A huge collection of all that is American style, commercial and domestic invention and, of course, the history of the automobile industry. Henry Ford built an empire in Dearborn and you don’t just see this here, you feel it.  Monday 21st August was also eclipse day and this area had an 85% eclipse. We were armed with the natty specs, and interrupted our museum tour for half an hour to sit on the lawn and experience the slight twilight, happy to be far away from the madness of the ‘totality zone’.

The next day we did a tour visiting ‘The Rouge’, the original Ford plant that is still well and truely in business. The area that the tour visits assembles the bodywork of the F150 truck. This is the automotive workhorse of the American people and at its height was selling one unit PER SECOND in the USA. It was really interesting to watch the assembly line in action, matching up the right cabs, doors and beds. Poetry in motion and surprisingly quiet and clean.

The 3rd part of the complex that we visited was Greenfield Village. A fake historic village with a collection of relocated historic houses and buildings, a steam railway and a craft area. Not particularly interesting to us after all the previous stuff we had seen, so we left town before the forecast storm hit.

 

 

12th – 19th Aug: Days 126 – 133

Yup. Still in Michigan.

Back, back, back in the midsts of time (April), when we were staying with Dean and Lori in Seattle, kitting out the Tin Can and starting to formulate our route, they expressed an interest in coming and finding us somewhere along the way.  They weren’t fussy when or where, but we agreed it should be a summery spot somewhere that they hadn’t been before.  This was a fairly broad remit on the location front as they are ‘coasters’, have done a lot of flying over the States but not so many touch-downs. We settled on a small town called Saugatuck, on the lower west coast of the lower Michigan peninsula.

 

Reasons for this:

• We were vaguely heading this way.
• Oval Beach, Saugatuck’s beach on the shores of Lake Michigan has been voted in the top 25 beaches in the world by Conde Nast, and the 2nd best freshwater beach in the USA by Nat Geo Traveller.
• It is a very cool, lakeside town full of galleries, eateries, safe cycling and water sportsy things to do.
• It was reasonably easy for Dean and Lori to get to from Seattle (Just a 4 hour flight and a 3 hour train ride…I did say reasonably)
• Sarah McWilliams recommended it. (Good call, McWilly)

Although they are good friends, sharing the Tin Can for a week was not a realistic option, so we splurged and rented a holiday home. A week in a real house which didn’t sway in the wind, with proper sewers, cupboards and showers. Bliss.

We arrived on Saturday, but the Seattle contingent didn’t get in til Monday evening. This gave us a couple of days to ourselves to get the lie of the land, do some shopping for provisions and generally veg out. We deposited the Tin Can onto the driveway, pulled out the slides and ‘Voila!‘, the biggest suitcase known to humanity. We hadn’t specifically requested permission to park the camper on the property and during the week we had an email from our landlord saying that he had been informed of its presence by a neighbour and he wanted to check that it wasn’t drawing too much power if it was plugged in. Reassuringly, small towns and twitching curtains are the same all over the world.

The house was about 100m from the lake and cycling the lakeshore road was an amazing opportunity to oogle some fairly impressive homes. The road cut between the houses on one side and the cliff top lawns with sunset watching spots on the lake side. Most of them had steps leading down to private beaches. Very nice.

We had a great week, cycling into and around Saugatuck, stopping in at galleries, shops and craft breweries. We rode the chain ferry across the river, (this is hand cranked by high school seniors as a holiday job), had a day sitting on the famous beach*, swam in the lake (which was beautifully warm and clear) and walked in the nearby Saugatuck Dunes State Park.

We did this on a windy day and the resulting waves limited the width of the beach quite considerably- occasionally to zero ft and wet up to the knees.

We had an evening out at a diner which had its own bowling alley (I only fell over once-boy, those shoes are slippy) and had a great few evenings at home (We now have serious BBQ envy). We even had a team outing to the laundromat. (The good times roll in all sorts of places). We saw lots of deer wandering through the neighbourhood (one was just chilling out in our front garden one day) and more magical fireflies at dusk.

So after much food, a reasonable amount of gin and tonic, plenty of good cheer and hours of marauding around on bikes like a gang of neighbourhood kids, it was time for our holiday-within-a-holiday to come to an end. We loaded TC up, packed, (by packed, I mean carry armfuls of possessions back into Tin Can.), jammed Dean and Lori and their bags into the back seats, and set off to Grand Rapids to drop them at the airport for their trip back West.

Next stop Detroit.

 

 

 

 

8th – 12th Aug: Days 122 -126

We slipped south again to spend 4 days in another lovely coastal town called Grand Haven. This is known as ‘Coastguard City USA’ which is a little bizarre seeing this is a lakeshore town, not a coastal town. We missed the town’s annual week-long fiesta of ‘Coastguard Week’ by about 2 days. This was both good news and a misfortune. These events are jolly, but the crowds make life a bit less relaxed.  In the US the Coastguard is regarded as an arm of the military and federally funded, so they have some tip-top facilities.

Our site here was a ‘Resort’.  (Code for pricey) It was full of very shiny and enormous fancy motor coaches, was beautifully coiffured and well appointed with a great pool, electric gates, a gym, and was only 10 minute cycle to town. There was a State Park, which was essentially just a great sandy beach with a carpark right on the edge of town, a pier, a light house and small boat marina.  The town was quite well-to-do, without some of the posing that went on in Petoskey or Harbour Springs. It even had a Farmers Market twice a week selling actual fruit and vegetables.

Here we procured our 3rd haircuts of the trip. Important to keep looking snazzy on our travels and it gives us a tremendous opportunity to talk mercilessly about ourselves to captive hairdressers.

As usual we did some walking, biking, eating, drinking, with a bit of added loafing by the pool at camp and some loafing on the beach at the State Park. We did not avail ourselves of the gym facility.

The major excitement of our stay here was a quite short, sharp and spectacular storm that hit whilst we were having dinner at a lakeshore restaurant in town. It was a balmy humid evening and having tied up the bikes we started the evening sat out at an outdoor table, admiring the sunset. Then we admired the offshore forked lightening. Then we tolerated a light drizzle. Then not tolerating actual rain we moved inside, and just in the nick of time. Town was hit by 45mph winds, impressive lightening bombardment, thunder, hailstones and then torrential rain. We philosophically contemplated the prospects of getting home in one piece over a digestif, and then it was over. We cycled home without incident and didn’t even get wet a little bit. True story.

Our time on the west coast has been governed by the fact that from 12th August we are having a week in a holiday home in an town called Saugatuck and Dean and Lori are flying in from Seattle to join us. However accustomed we have become to living our small, mobile space and meeting new people all the time, we are really looking forward to a week on dry land with good  friends.

 

 

4th – 8th Aug: Days 118 – 122

Our journey is now taking us slowly down the west coast of Lower Michigan, or the ‘mitten’ as some may call it. Apparently it is shaped a bit like a mitten. Some folk wear T-shirts with ‘Smitten With The Mitten’ written on them. In fact a lot of people wear T-shirts, sweatshirts and baseball caps proclaiming their allegiance to various places/universities/sports teams/arms of the military/the USA. It seems an important part of the national psyche to be identifiable as belonging to a particular tribe. But I digress…

The next roost for the small and exclusive tribe that is ‘The two 40-something British Kiwis who have the coolest camper in the park and intrigue their fellow RV travellers with their exotic accents and why they are not at work like normal pre-retirement age people” (Try putting that on a T-shirt) was Frankfort. Less German than in sounds and a very picturesque coastal town with a lovely main street, beach and the ubiquitous cycle trail.

Our arrival day was slightly dampened by precipitation, but after plugging in (and a set of dry clothes), we holed up and knocked off a few more episodes of Breaking Bad. Oooh, it’s getting good….

The rain went away, the sun came out and we were happy. Over the next 3 days we: cycled a lot, sat on the beach a bit, went to see the Sleeping Bear Dunes nearby, climbed the aforementioned sand dunes and generally mooched about.

The coast here is beautiful. The beaches are lovely and sandy, the small towns have a real beachy vibe and it is a thoroughly pleasant place to spend some summer days. I’m sure winter has its own charms, but less cruising around on a bike in flip-flops, I imagine.

 

 

31st July – 4th Aug: Days 114 – 118

Nick managed the drive over the 5 mile long Mackinac Bridge without too many vertiginous histrionics, and so we left the UP and headed south west to the shores of Lake Michigan on the Lower Penisula. The UP inhabitants call themselves Yoopers, and the the dwellers of the lower half of the state’ Trolls’. Because they live under the bridge. I don’t think the lower folk like this nickname. Our drive today was a not-too-exhausting 45 miles.

Everyone that we have met, who knows this area of Michigan, has waxed lyrical about the charms of Petoskey. It is a busy and affluent little lakeside town with lots of nice shops and eateries. The money here is obvious in the cars, the boats in the marina, the well preserved late 19th C weatherboard homes and the equally well preserved ‘ladies who lunch’. (For my Kiwi readers think leaving rural Northland and arriving in Devonport.) There is a great cycle trail, a State Park with a long sandy beach and Petoskey rock.

Petoskey rock? What’s that? I hear you ask. Let me tell you a story.

About 500 million years ago, when land was sea, the only ‘lunching’ in the area was being done by invertebrates and this area was populated by corals. Sh*t happened, and the corrals died and were turned to stone. Now hunks of  fossilised coral are gleaned from local beaches, polished up and sold to tourists. So their sacrifice was not in vain.  The end.

It really is a pretty and unusual stone and I bought a piece about the size of a chicken egg as a momento. Every great road-trip needs a Pet(oskey) Rock.

Our campsite was only a few hundred metres from the cycle trail, and an easy 3 mile pedal to town, 2 mile pedal to the State Park beach and 1 mile pedal to a craft brewery. A near perfect location.  We had one gloriously hot day and headed to the beach. Lake Michigan is much warmer than Superior and we eventually had our inaugural Great Lake Swim. With the brisk on shore breeze creating quite impressive little waves it felt a lot like the Med. Until you get a faceful of fresh water, that is. Just odd.

We had a day in Petoskey by bike. Walked the streets, had amazing sandwiches from a deli where the bread was so thick and light and fluffy that it was like eating a cloud, perused the boats in the marina, and admired the beautiful lakeside homes. Another day we cycled the 6 miles to the next town, Harbour Springs. This is a smaller, quieter but prettier version of Petoskey. We spent a few hours walking the streets, admiring the boats and homes but were less impressed with the sandwiches.  The Petoskey Brewing Company, of course, also had a visit from us.

Every where is busy now. Summer holidays are in full flow and the population is in full ‘recreating’ mode. We are having to book our sites a few weeks in advance to get in where we want to be, and this has slightly changed the ‘seat-of-the-pants’ flavour of the trip. We are still only meeting American travellers and holiday makers, with even this part of the states with all its amazing lakes not seemingly a destination for fellow foreigners.

 

 

 

 

20th – 24th July: Days 103 – 107

The journey from Marquette to Munising was fairly short, but still managed to include a trip to Walmart. (We may need an intervention…) Munising is also on the south shore of Lake Superior and is a bone fide tourist trap. It’s raison d’être is as the jump-off for accessing ‘Pictured Rocks’, a portion of the lake shore which are rocky cliffs with lots of different coloured layers, eroded into some interesting formations. There are lots of companies doing sightseeing boat trips and kayak hire.  We had 3 full days here, and had booked a kayak trip for the middle day.  Our camp was a ‘family campsite’ with a pool and our site was near enough the pool that we could easily hear the happy sounds of children voices shrieking ‘Marco. Polo’ for hours on end. The children’s cycle tracks conveniently doubled up as the roads around the campsite, and some of those little humans must have rolled past hundreds of times. Shrieking. Fun times.

Our kayak trip needed a early start and we had to be at the office at 8.15 am, about 1 hour earlier than our usual current waking up time. The trip was a bit bigger than we would have liked, with 36 people in total, but the outfit was very efficient and we all had waivers signed, spray skirts and life jackets in hand, safety demo done and aboard and underway by 9.00am. It was sunny and calm, but but after the 1 hour boat trip to the Rocks, it was sunny and quite choppy. Our captain and crew decided it was too messy to do our planned route in the kayaks, so we back-tracked a bit to calmer waters. We were all loaded into our tandem vessels and set off in 3 groups, each with a guide. We had nearly 2 hours of paddling, up close to the face of the Rocks. There were some great features, beautiful colours, and we didn’t fall out once (Literally or figuratively).

The next day we braved some rain to do a couple of hikes up to waterfalls. We managed to get the truck absolutely filthy, and ended the day at the car wash.

We had 4 campfires in 4 evenings in Munising. I think I may be starting to suffer from smoke inhalation.

24th – 26th July: Days 107 – 109

Our next leg was a drive from Munising to Tahquamenon State Park, home of the Tahquamenon Falls.  The water of the river is stained brown by the tannic acid from Hemlock plants and in some places looked just like flowing molten chocolate.. The single Upper Fall is the second most voluminous vertical waterfall east of the Mississippi after only Niagara Falls. Factoid.

It is 4 miles up-river of the cascades of the Lower Falls, which is where our campsite was.  We just had 2 nights here, with a plan to do a big hike on our full day. The Upper and Lower Falls are both major tourist attractions, and most people will drive to each. There is a well trodden 4 mile hiking trail between the falls along the river and there is a shuttle that means you can opt to only do it one way. We decided to do a circuit walk which would take us along a 6 mile loop on a much more primitive trail up to the Upper Falls, then bring us back to the Lower Falls on the popular trail. We had been warned that it might be muddy in patches as there had been 10cm of rain 2 days previously. Undeterred, we packed picnic, bug spray, water and Werthers Originals and set off.  Despite the first 6 miles of trails being quite off the beaten track, they were well signposted. The muddy patches were more like small bogs/ponds and the mosquitos were the size of pigeons, but it was beautiful and peaceful, hot and sunny. We managed to jump/skirt most of the wet patches, and the 40% DEET kept the majority of the bugs away. We popped out of the wilderness into the carpark of the Upper Falls and our solitude was no more. The place was heaving. We dodged the crowds, oooh-ed and aaah-ed at the Falls, and set off down the river track back towards home again. The Lower Falls were less dramatic, but very pretty. It was a great day: 10.5 miles walked, tired legs, but feet intact and a warm fuzzy feeling of achievement. (Best appreciated after a shower with the first cold beer).  We sat out around the fire again, packed up as much as we could before bed as we knew rain was on the way again, and slept like logs.

26th – 28th July: Days 109 – 111

Yup. Rained overnight, and was still raining in the morning during pack-up, which is a rapid and well practiced affair by now.  We only had another short hop to our next stop: Sault Sainte Marie. The main attraction at Sault (pronounced ‘Soo’, for some reason to do with the English mis-pronouncing the original French name) are its epic locks.

These can accomodate the 1000ft freighters, and manage the 21ft drop of the St Marys River between the waters of Lakes Superior and Huron. Ingeniously the spillways power hydroelectric plants on both sides of the river, which provide all the power for the locks, with plenty to spare for the town too. The locks are right in town, and the massive freighters come through, dwarfing the waterfront and providing quite a captivating slow motion spectacle.  Our campsite was right on the water, about a mile down river so had great views of the approaching and departing ships, and looked right across the river at Canada. The rain stopped at lunchtime and the day turned into glorious sunny one. We headed to town for dinner on our first evening here. There was a regular summertime performance by a local steel drum band in the park, which was excellent, and after watching for 15 minutes we found a restaurant with a roof top terrace. Our waitress amused us, and herself, by practicing her English accent, and we had a perfect view of the locks and a passing freighter during our meal. The next day we mooched around, watched a few more ships coming through, spent some time in the Locks Visitor Centre and had savoury crepes for lunch. Just a little bit French.

Another factoid: Sault is the 3rd oldest city in the USA, having been established by French missionaries in 1668. The knowledge cup runneth over…

28th – 31st July: Days 111 – 114

We left Sault and headed to our final Upper Peninsula destination, St Ignace. Again, not a long trip, perhaps 1.5 hours driving. We have been on the UP for 5 weeks now, and are moving so slowly that we have almost ground to a halt.

St Ignace sits at the northern end of the Mackinac Bridge, which spans the Mackinac straits, the 5 mile stretch of water that separates the UP from the Lower Michigan Peninsula, and Lake Huron from Lake Michigan. The bridge is very long, and is, wait for it, the ‘longest suspension bridge between anchorages’ in the world. But before we get to the bridge, the other main attraction of St Ignace is that it is the gateway to Mackinac Island.  In another strange quirk of pronunciation, Mackinac is pronounced Mackinaw. Something to do with the French/English thang again.

We had 3 nights here in a campsite called ‘Tiki’. Felt a bit like home.  A trip to the island is a must, and we did this the next day, which was a perfect hot sunny cloudless day with a light breeze and low humidity. There are several boat companies that regularly make the 25 minute trip across to the island. It was an important outpost for the US army for many years and has a well preserved fort, but its more recent history is as a popular summer holiday destination for the monied in the late 19th C. As cars became popular and the island was in danger of losing its tranquillity, the powers-that-be made a big decision in 1898 and banned motorised vehicles from the island. This edict remains in place and transport on the 8 mile circumference island is only by foot, pedal or hoof, with 300 horses providing carriage rides.

The jewel in the island’s crown is the Grand Hotel. Built in 1887, it is enormous and boasts a 660ft long french porch, which, you guessed it, is the longest in the world. The chief industries on the island are selling fudge to tourists, and renting bicycles to tourists. The place is bonkers! Bazillions of people on bikes doing the circuit of the flat lakeshore road. Some of these people even had some spacial awareness and a grasp of the basic road rules.

We had a fantastic day: brunch at an old fashioned diner, did a couple laps and a few crosses on the internal island tracks, visited the old fort, bought home-made lemonade from 2 cute little girls on the roadside, had an hour lying in the sun, and got quite adept at horse poop slalom. (Even the horse pooper-scooper wagon is horse drawn.) The island is a very special place, with a real sense of history and some amazing old homes. It is interesting that even without the scourge of the combustion engine, humans all want to be going somewhere, in large numbers

After catching the boat back to St Ignace we had dinner in town then watched the weekly summertime fireworks display. Quite impressive. Our cycle home was exciting as we had no lights for the bikes. Luckily we could stick to pavements, so it wasn’t as dangerous as it felt.

The next day we eventually mustered ourselves at about midday and after brunch headed back into town on the bikes. We mooched around, bought some bike lights, sussed out a dinner spot and visited the teeny tiny lighthouse at the end of the very short breakwater. Later, after cycling back into town with our camp chairs on our backs, we had (a mediocre) dinner and then as darkness fell, we watched the weekly open air movie in the park. (The animated movie ‘Sing’). Our ride home was less scary given the improved illumination factor.

The next day we drove over the Mighty Mackinaw Bridge, and were sad to leave the wilds of the UP. It, and it’s people are quite like NZ, and the Kiwis. I think that is why we have enjoyed it so much. Michigan is a state of 2 halves, and now we head back into relative civilisation of the Lower Peninsula, or the ‘Mitten’, as it is affectionately known. Perhaps the Wifi will be better…