On the Road Again
Well, my friends, are you ready for another sparkling gem of a blog; one that might be a little informative as well as entertaining? Perhaps it may even chase away the summertime blues?
(Look around Jude, is anyone still there? Are they buying any of this?)
Yes, dear friends, it’s time for another travel blog! To be specific, a road trip blog! So if you’re in the mood for one of those boogers, fasten your seat belt. It’s going to be bumpy ride. For the rest of you, adios mi amigos. See you when the blog express fires up again with something more to your taste.
So, here’s how it went…
On Monday the aforementioned road trip commenced, or, in layman’s terms, we headed out. Our intention that day was to drive to Mackinaw City, Michigan from our northeastern Ohio town with a stop for lunch in Frankenmuth, Michigan. The day was nice, the company (my wife) companionable and the drive was pleasurable. We arrived in Frankenmuth around 1 p.m. and found the restaurant we were heading for almost immediately. It’s called Zehnder’s and has been a fixture in that city for many, many years as the sepia-toned photographs and newspaper clippings on the walls attributed. It is also very well liked as the large group of cars in the parking lot amply demonstrated. We were seated only after about a 15-minute wait. The servers were all dressed in Victorian outfits to apparently match the décor of the dining rooms. We ordered our lunches and soon were served. They were chicken dishes, quite tasty and we enjoyed the meal immensely. After finishing I let my eyes sweep across the dining room we were in. They stopped at a gentleman sitting two tables away. I saw him in profile and thought to myself, my goodness – that looks remarkably like an old friend of mine, a guy I went to school with from elementary through high school. He was even in the same branch of the military at the same time as I was. I told myself I’d have to tell him about his “double” that I saw there in Michigan. About that time the man and his wife stood up. I immediately recognized the wife. Yes, it was my friend Larry! He stopped at our table after we hollered at him and we chatted for a minute or so, remarking on the coincidence of our meeting. They were on their way home from their recent vacation up in the same northern territory as we were heading. After they left, my wife and I chatted about the odd circumstance. Two people who knew each other for many years meeting at a restaurant I’d never heard of the week before, on the same day, in the same dining room, at the same time. Pretty strange, eh?
We headed north again after a visit to the largest Christmas store in the world – Bronner’s – 27 acres of Christmas-themed merchandise. Of course we bought something! You had to ask?
The roadside business’s pretty well disappeared north of the Saginaw area as we drove northward and we soon noticed that birch trees, virtually no where to be seen in the wild around home, were everywhere roadside along with elk crossing signs. None of those down home!
We were getting into the North Country.
We arrived in Mackinaw City later in the day. Our hotel was an older one but quite clean and entirely serviceable – a mom and pop kind of place albeit a bit small. The air temperature was refreshingly cool compared to the muggy warmth of home when we left, many miles to the south. The hotel was directly across the street from a small park, which fronted on Lake Huron and gave a great view of the Mackinac Bridge, which connected the mainland of Michigan to its Upper Peninsula. The straits there also divided Lake Huron from Lake Michigan. It was a very imposing sight, a little over 8 miles long counting the approaches with 552 foot high towers.
A whopper in anyone’s book.
Supper was whitefish sandwiches at a small restaurant nearby (a local delicacy, apparently, and quite tasty). I returned to that small lakeside park after dark to take some really cool night pictures of the bridge.
On Tuesday we took an island trip. During the night we’d left the windows open at the hotel and enjoyed the cool night air. No need for the a/c at all! In the morning, after a nice breakfast downtown we boarded the Shepler’s ferry for a trip across Lake Huron to Mackinac Island. We caught the 10:30 ferry as that trip would go under the Big Mac Bridge on its way to the island. We were again impressed by the bridge when seeing it up close and were glad we took that particular boat.
Mackinac Island, in case you didn’t know, is perhaps unique in the fact that it bans any vehicle with a combustion engine – cars, trucks, motorcycles, etc. All traveling on the island is either by foot, by bicycle or by horse and there were a LOT of horses and bikes on that island. If you lived on the island and needed supplies, they came by boat and were transferred to carts pulled by draft horses and carried to where you wanted them. Bicycles were available for rent by the thousands and we saw tons of them. We grabbed a geocache while waiting for our purchased carriage ride. At 11:30 we got on a 20-passenger cart pulled by two matched Belgian draft horses and commenced our 2-hour tour of Mackinac Island. (The guide joked that the tours used to be for 3 hours, but no one wanted to take “a three hour tour” referring to the Gilligan’s Island TV show) Our tour guide was a young lady from New York who really knew her facts about the island and imparted a bunch of that knowledge as we rode around looking at stuff. The lilacs were in full bloom that week and we were stunned by the vast numbers of, naturally, lilac-colored bushes lining the streets. We clomped by the famous Grand Hotel on the island, the one featured in a couple movies – “This Time for Keeps” (1947 Jimmy Durante and Esther Williams) and “Somewhere in Time” (1980 Christopher Reeves and Jane Seymour). It’s a huge white building having a 660 foot porch and is the largest seasonal hotel in the world with 385 guest rooms, none the same as any other. Built in 1887 and refurbished a number of times, it’s very imposing. We got off the carriage tour at Fort Mackinac and wandered around the numerous buildings there. It was manned by the English and the Americans back and forth over its long history and contains many examples of how life was lived there in the “old” days. We exited the fort through a long downhill path back to the downtown area and ate lunch. We were then off to buy some souvenirs and fudge before returning to the mainland when we saw a lady lying on the sidewalk face down. Apparently she’d tripped and hit her face. There was quite a bit of blood involved and a nurse was already there giving first aid before the ambulance arrived – a motorized ambulance – one of the few motorized vehicles allowed on the island. Since I had broken my nose a few weeks earlier in a vaguely similar manner, I commiserated with the lady and silently wished her well.
We returned to our mainland hotel around 5 o’clock and were quite tired from all the walking done during the day. We grabbed a few more geocaches in the city and retired to the outside-air freshened motel room for another good night’s sleep.
On Wednesday we hit the road again. Up at 7 and crossed the Big Mac Bridge soon afterward. Apparently some folks are so scared of the bridge they let someone else drive them across. We were not scared. We’ve been on other bridges that were LOTS more scary! The Sunshine Bridge down near Tampa immediately comes to mind. After crossing we were on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan which is quite a different animal than the mainland. We headed west on the major road going that direction – a 2-laner called Route 2. Not far from the bridge there were numerous old cabin-style motels like out of old black-and-white movies, most of them abandoned to the elements and out of business. Soon even those disappeared and we then traveled mostly through thinly populated areas. Stopping at a rest area we discovered why the joke about what is Michigan’s State Bird’s answer is the mosquito. It isn’t a joke! Lots of the critters around. Bazillions, seemed like. We killed mosquitoes in the car for the next 50 miles! Very pretty country, though, with the big lake on your left and what appeared to be mostly wilderness to the right. Saw a number of deer and more elk crossing signs. I could just imagine how this place was in the winter. Brrr!
We stopped for lunch in Green Bay, Wisconsin at a place recommended to us by a friend of my wife’s. The place was called Krull’s Restaurant and was located directly across the street from Lambeau Field where the Green Bay Packers play football. We had their signature “butterburger” sandwich (pretty good) and were off again in under an hour. We suffered through a major detour south of Green Bay, apparently due to an Interstate building project, and ended up going a long way around the affected area. Saw a great big windmill farm in a hilly area and counted many dozens of the big turbine windmills slowly turning. Then, at last, we arrived at Wisconsin Dells for our second major stop of the trip.
I’d again booked us into a mom-and-pop place, the Indian Trail Motel, and we were even more pleased with this one. It was furnished in what appeared ‘70’s fixtures, yellow in color. I think my wife and I had yellow fixtures when we were first married! The room was immaculately clean and much bigger than our Mac City place. The bed, sheets and pillows were among the best we’ve ever had in a motel. A nice choice, I thought, proud of myself! You did good, Willie! We grabbed a geocache almost immediately to make sure we had Wisconsin logged as a new state then drove through the business district. It’s a regular resort-type area, stores, attractions, amusement parks, water parks, t-shirt shops, many restaurants and other attractions for people on vacations, especially if they had kids. We ate at a nice Mexican place, The Mexicali Rose, right on the Wisconsin River and took pictures out the window at the scenery. My wife and I had very sore muscles from all our walking yesterday.
On Thursday we toured Wisconsin Dells. Breakfast was at a friendly IHOP and then we bought tickets for two tours – a boat tour of the Upper Dells above the dam (the prettier side) and a duck tour. On the 10:30 riverboat tour we saw lots of sandstone formations along the banks of the river and got oodles of information about the area from the boat captain and the lady tour guide. A lot of stuff happened on that river over the years! Our first stop was at Witch’s Gulch where we disembarked and walked on a boardwalk back this dimly-lit canyon with fantastically-carved sandstone close to both sides. This was, according to Indian legend, a haunted place and the white settlers were warned to stay away. It was actually pretty cool! Then it was back to the boat, up the river a bit more to our second stop - another land attraction. We walked uphill to a viewing area where we could see two towering rock formations. Back in the early days of photography a local man figured out a way to make photographs of moving subjects, an activity that didn’t work with the old photography equipment. His photos were taken as fakes by the public, so he went to this place and had his son jump from one formation to the other while he took photos. 17 jumps later he got the proof that his technique worked! Need I say it was a LONG way down from that gap the kid had jumped across. Now days they have a German Shepherd dog do the same stunt and we got to see it. I was lucky enough to actually catch the dog in mid-jump with a photo! Then it was back to the boat and the refreshing ride back to the pier. After indulging in a rare ice cream sundae (it was getting warm), my wife and I headed off to the duck tour. In case you don’t know, a duck is an Army amphibious vehicle that travels on land or water. A large part of the World War II fleet of ducks have been bought by tour companies here and there to ferry customers on land/water excursions. That was the case here.
We rode our 24-passenger duck, along with a driver and a tour guide through a lot of heavily wooded areas along specific roads just for the duck tours. The guide entertained us with a running commentary on the area and many corny jokes and silly stories while the driver concentrated getting us through some of the tighter areas of the road. We took the duck into the Wisconsin River for a while then back onto the land. After another 15 minutes we stopped just before entering Lake Delton. The guide asked us passengers whether we wanted the entry into the water to be “slow and dry” or “fast and wet”. I don’t think you will get the answer to this one wrong. The driver hit the gas and we hit hard with the water mushrooming around us. The rear few seats got pretty wet! Then it was back to the starting place.
We walked around downtown for a while after that looking into a few shops and bought a few this-and-that’s, then went back to the hotel where I took a dip in the outdoor pool. Nice! We went out then for some more geocaches then had supper at an Applebees.
Another busy day.
On Friday we took a day trip. Since one reason for the trip was geocaching and since the states of Minnesota and Iowa were less than two hours to the west, we decided to drive over there and add two more states to our kitty! The interstate west was smooth and fast and soon we were in Minnesota. Luckily the first place I pulled off was right where our first geocache was hidden and we soon had it “in the bag”. We drove south about 30 miles into Iowa on the Great River Road and before long had the second one. It was a good day for the “states bagged” quota! After driving back to the Dells I spent a lovely hour in the motel’s indoor pool and whirlpool spa. Very relaxing!
Supper was at a Ponderosa that evening. Lots of kids around but… what do you expect? It was summer and this was a resort town. I remember getting a BIG root beer with supper and how GREAT it tasted! What a dumb thing to remember, eh? Took another drive through the downtown area checking out the bustling people and the evening street performers, then back to the hotel to hit the hay. And early day planned for tomorrow.
On Saturday we drove home. I don’t have too much exciting to tell you about that trip. It was long and tiring. The high point, perhaps, is that we drove through downtown Chicago and that was a bit hair-raising even on a Saturday. At last we were pulling into our own driveway and hitting the “relax” key. Home, son, dog and our own bed for the night.
So another satisfying road trip comes to an end.
Sure wish you had been with us!
Maybe next time?
