48stateroadtrip.com

Trust me, that’s what it says.

Indiana is a fantastic state, however, under the auspices of this trip, I only acknowledge it because it happens to be one of the Lower 48. I’m thinking there’s some pretty decent probability I’ll be coming back this way for interviews or campus tours in the next few months anyway. At least I hope so — Purdue looks like it might be a very good fit.

As for the photo — well, night and speed aren’t very helpful. Indiana was the first state crossed into on an interstate freeway and also the first crossed into at night (a little while later Illinois became the second). Fortunately, I’ve done very little night driving on this trip (maybe three days total). Unfortunately, the days are getting shorter.

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The headline overpromises, although, yes, I did visit Mackinac Island and my niece and her husband, whose last name is Nate. Maybe it doesn’t overpromise so much as it leads the post to under-deliver.

The island is basically like being ont he TV show The Prisoner, but with better special effects. The concept is that you start out in Mackinaw City, just across the bridge from the Upper Peninsula, then take a 20-minute ferry ride across (a small part of) Lake Huron to Mackinac Island, a small island community where internal combustion engines are not allowed. As such, transportation is done via horse-drawn buggy, bicycle, and foot.

Should’ve skipped straight to the fourth paragraph.

Mackinac Island waterfront.

Main Street, which features the highest per-square-foot concentration of fudge retailers in the Lower 48. I would know.

Horses, buggy, people. Road also. Grass, trees.

Prisoner with bubble.

Pathway up to Fort Mackinac, which dates back to the Revolutionary War. It wasn’t our fort back then.

I’m not sure why the six-year-old gets to be the officer, but I’m guessing nepotism.

Pretty similar picture to that other one, but I figured if I put the one with the rifles in between you wouldn’t notice so much. I think it’s an Episcopal church.

And on the way back, I took this photo of the Round Island Lighthouse.

• Cloudy day.
• The fort was cool.
• I pretty well liked hanging out in a non-motorized town, especially walking around a little further to the island’s interior. It was easy to imagine horse-drawn carriage rides to someone’s house in the woods.
• OTOH, the streets all smelled like horse manure.
• And if I wanted to get rich, I’d open up a shop on Main Street there and sell something *other than* fudge.

After escaping the island I drove down to Grand Rapids and saw Andrea and Preston, went to dinner with them, and then left. No pictures. Their new house is pretty nice.

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PS, Mackinaw City (where I stayed in a hotel before catching the ferry over in the morning) was a nice place also — friendly locals and it’s a very well-kept town. Someone there’s doing *something* right. Probably mafia.

10.5-mile loop hike starting at the Mosquito Chapel Trailhead, about 20 miles east of Munising (where the Upper Peninsula’s purported powerhouse high school football team is located).

At which point I worried I’d chosen a bad trail. I mean, remoteness is its own reward and all, but these are parking lot-quality waterfalls at best. Unless you’re in Orange County, in which case you’d hike 40 miles straight uphill for them and be grateful for the opportunity.

Chapel Rock and the start of my shadow-sun issues. Probably if the tree had been in full sun — except that the colors on the rock are the real-life interesting part.

Meh.

Rocks, pictured.

Cliff-rocks, pictured.

The so-called “Grand Portal”.

Rocks at Mosquito Beach.

The edge of the world. Fine: *an* edge. And if you fall off, you’re in a lake, not some fiery abyss. The fiery abyss would’ve made a good photo, though.

I and My Breakfast

A red-headed step-duck starts a voyage of a thousand miles with a single foot-flap.

• About as easy a 10+-miler as you’ll find.
• My route took me past Chapel Falls down to the beach at Chapel Rock, then along the lakeshore past the Mosquito campground, then back to the trailhead via Mosquito Falls.
• I regret that I didn’t add three miles to include Spray Falls in the hike. I’ll have to go back for that one. Per the pictures, it would have been the one waterfall worth visiting.
• The photos don’t look as great as reality — it’s a north-facing lakeshore and I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with shadowy cliffs above fully-lit water. (If anyone could lmk, that’d be cool.)
• For being the warmest Saturday of the year so far, it wasn’t crowded.
• Would probably be a fun place to do an overnighter — either two very easy days along the trail I took, or a shuttle hike along the Lakeshore Trail.
• The water’s colder than it looks — but I *did* swim in it (not pictured).

I’d go back here again, no questions asked. All hail Lake Superior!

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Drove across the U.P. to Christmas, Mich., where I got a campsite for the night, then headed out to Munising (a town!) and then Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore to see what was there, half-way intending on finding it to be lame and then leaving first thing in the morning.

I found out Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore existed by going through a list of all National Parks Service properties on Wikipedia and seeing that this one looked kind of pretty in the pictures, plus somewhere in my mind I thought I remembered someone telling me that the “claw part” of Michigan had something worthwhile about it. Turns out that real life is prettier than the pictures, most especially *my* pictures (in this case). IMHO.

See that there? And if you squint hard enough, you can almost see a waterfall!

So Munising Falls wasn’t the good part. It was close to town, though, and thus got visited. The next site down the line was Miner’s Castle, which was recommended by RS’s Reader’s Digest book.

The Miner’s Castle; the miner himself may be in one of the ‘yaks. But probably not.

Sans paddlers.

Was mostly struck by how pretty the water was. Looked like something you’d expect to find in the South Pacific, but it was on Lake Superior. Pretty cool. I figured I hadn’t seen enough of it and then found what looked like a good 10-miler I could try the next day.

Meanwhile, my writeups get continually lamer. This one’s almost *sincere* [shudders]. Only another 68 days of blogging to go (give or take)! Maybe my second (writing) wind is waiting for me in, oh, let’s say the Adirondacks. Seems likely enough.

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PS, The campground was an NFS site, so you know it had to be good. It was a pretty big NFS campground (40 or so sites) and privately managed, which meant it was a little on the expensive site for NFS ($16). But: potable water, plenty of trees, and I could do laundry without my neighbors having to watch. NFS campgrounds über alles.

Oh boy, the states are coming fast and furious(ly) now! ‘Course, I’m in Chicago at my brother’s place all this week, so there will be a slow-down in state-churn for a bit. Ah well, ah well.

Despite appearances, there wasn’t all that much highway construction going on in Michigan. I think someone must have forgotten they were a swing state.

I had some pretty great times in Michigan and there were, by definition, some great lakes, so — yeah. Good job on not over-selling on the welcome sign. Some cool things about Michigan:

• Everyone goes 10 mph over, even in 25 mph zones — this was especially amazing after the very cautious driving habits of North Dakotans, Minnesotans, and Wisconsinians.
• No, seriously: 10 over!
• No “click it or ticket signs” or other nanny-state roadside hallmarks.
• People were disarmingly friendly. Like, residents in small towns who know you’re a tourist walking through their neighborhood still say hello and seem to mean it.
• Granted, I’ve never been to Detroit, but: it’s a pretty place.

More later.

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I meant to stay the night in Duluth, but the Super 8 wanted $70 for a smoking room and the Motel 6 wouldn’t answer their phone. So I drove across the river to Superior, where cheap roadside motels were plentiful. But, despite all of them broadcasting “Vacancy” in red neon, none of them had rooms. Supposedly. I guess I could’ve shaved. Oh well.

So I drove on to the first campground in Wisconsin. It stays warmer at night in states where they have > 0% humidity it turns out. And where you’re below 7,000 feet elevation. It was dark when I got there. Slept pretty well. And when I woke up, the campground had waterfalls.

It probably had them when I went to sleep, too, but I have no evidence of this.

The pool is brown from the tannins!

Nice privacy in the campground — especially when only three of 30 campsites are taken. A little expensive for an out-of-stater ($22), though it wasn’t much cheaper for in-state ($16?). Ah well. Cheaper than $70 and less smoky, plus it got me closer to my next scheduled stop in Michigan than I would’ve been otherwise. Hooray Amnicon!

And then I left.

Went to a Country Kitchen restaurant, though, which had spectacular pancakes.

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I would’ve thought Wisconsin would be more welcoming, but it turns out that if you enter the state on US 2, they don’t particularly care whether you’ve gotten there or not.

At least the City of Superior bothered to try. (Trust me, that sign says something about Superior and how it’s yet another “Tree City USA”.)

I was also impressed that Wisconsin had (no joke) closed down all the Wisconsin Welcome Centers that were on the freeways. Unsubtle.

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Once on the anniversary of its construction and once to commemorate the date of the sinking of the Ella Fitzgerald. Fine, Edmund Fitzgerald, what do I care?. “Starlit Hour” is my favorite song of hers. The boat never did much for me.

The lighthouse is a good one, located in Minnesota, north of Duluth, along the shores of Lake Superior.

And by “good lighthouse”, I mean it’s reasonably polite and a generous tipper.

The foghorn gets used more than twice a year.

Clichéed shot of spiral lighthouse staircase. Ah well.

And it even seems to be situated usefully.

Yep, lighthouse. Apparently it was featured on a stamp as one of the “Great Lighthouses of the Great Lakes” some time in the 90s. And Lake Superior is really, really big.

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Finally! A reason to have a strong opinion regarding beaver dams. Y’know, getting out of the canoe, having mud and brown water slosh into your boots, then yanking your fully loaded canoe across a bunch of sticks isn’t the worst thing in the world, but it’s sort of not the best either.

And would it kill the beavers to come out and give a guy a hand?

You gotta hand it to those beavers: they just wanted it more.

It’s really more shoving than it is yanking.

Ah, anyway. I was more anxious about Boundary Waters than I was about any other part of the trip, so I suppose now that it’s over I can start being anxious about grad school apps. Finally I can have a strong opinion about those, too (maybe).

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Day 1: Rudolph?

There’s probably some better way to crop this one.

A fierce lake turtle!

Day 2: A fierce lake walleye!

Day 3: Heading Home

Overall, a pretty cool trip. I think going solo made it a little more of an adventure than it otherwise would’ve been — the place has to be a haven for Boy Scout troops, guys’ weeks out, etc. Also:

• The solitude here is amazing. You go and find a campsite and you basically don’t need to remember that humanity exists after that point — which is a little unsettling when you’re out there by yourself.
• The bird sounds here were all foreign too me.
• Even the squirrels seemed off-model (I think they’re red squirrels rather than whatever the other kind are).
• The lakes all do look kind of the same.
• When paddling home in the fog Thursday morning, I actually got to use my compass (thanks!).
• Paddling against the wind is one of the most frustrating things I’ve ever done multiple times. Fortunately it only happened for about the last hour of paddling on Day 1.
• Had never caught a fish while paddling my own boat before. Probably a good thing it wasn’t a 30-lb. northern pike — that might’ve gotten awkward.
• When I was coming out of the lake, the folks just putting in were asking me if it was crowded. Relative to Boundary Waters? No idea if that constitutes crowded. There are, like, seven campsites on Lake Agnes and they were all taken, but it didn’t *feel* crowded.
• For having no padding under me (and no stuffing on the bottom of my sleeping bag), I slept remarkably well out there.
• Finally got to dig into my MREs. The chili and macaroni one was excellent. Even the penne with vegetarian sausage was good.
• Pretty much all the water out there is brown, I’m guessing from all the tannins in the trees filtering through the soil? Anyway — when you put that through your own water filter, it’s still brown when you drink it.

Close enough.

bkd