From Michigan to God's Country or the first half of this summer's odyssey.........

Alright, let’s do this. I had a ton of fun writing these four years ago and I hope you had fun reading them, if not and you would prefer not to get these just send me a note to take you off the list or ignore them, either way no harm no foul.  If still interested, then enjoy!:  Also for those interested in a very long love letter to Michigan as well as a deeper explanation as to why I am now moving to Tennessee, it is here at this link:

http://thiel4.blogspot.com/2015/07/leaving-michigan-or-holy-crap-what-am.html

     

Now to the good stuff, I’ll be covering the trip here(in various installments) and those who know my prose style know I can go overlong, so feel free to settle in and I will do my best to skip over the boring parts.  That said, I can already feel everyone going, “Stupid Writer!, Be More Funny!” ala Homer Simpson and I am nothing if not an obedient servant.

Day One: Monday 22 June Ann Arbor to Traverse City

Between travelling to Nashville for a job interview, finishing up the house cleaning, various late night parties with the neighbors, getting the final packing done, closing on the house in the morning, and a four hour drive to Traverse City in the past three days Megan and I aren’t in a mood for much when we finally get to the hotel.  However, the kids need the pool and so I take them to go burn off some energy while I stare at the same page of a football preview magazine hoping it will eventually make sense on the third or fourth reading.  I get back to the hotel room and Megan and I decide that ordering in would be good, we decide to order a pizza from a local company that apparently has a deal with the hotel and get a congealed mass of grease masquerading as a pizza.  That said, it’s food and at this point that’s really all Megan and I care about.  What it definitely does is sour us on pizza for the rest of the trip, probably a good thing all things considered.

Day Two: Tuesday 23 June Traverse City to Munising, MI

            We’re engaging in a bit of a see everything we possibly can in Michigan tour on the way out and so it’s time to go and see Sleeping Bear Dunes.  We only have a few hours to explore them as we have to get up to Munising in time to take the Pictured Rocks Lakeshore sunset boat tour.  It mostly ends up being a lot of quick stops and quick hikes to go oooohhh and aahhhh over the various views of the dunes and Lake Michigan, but it is really pretty and well worth a morning: We spend our time admiring high sand dunes leading down into pretty blue water, it’s a sunny day so everything is in bright colors and you can see islands covered with thick forests out in the distance.  You can’t see across the lake and so it may as well be an ocean, I wish we had more time but thems the breaks.   We head out to the dune climb area and run into an area with tons of families all climbing up the dunes and basically giving their kids an adventure in climbing the dunes while simultaneously exercising them.  What’s also nice is Northern Michigan’s cooler temperatures and near constant cloud cover keep the temperature of the sand decent instead of scorching hot.  Logan and Elizabeth zoom up the dune, trying to get to a spot with a good view and also engage in a game called “Combat racing”, the rules of which should be familiar to everyone in that there are no rules, whatever dirty trick you can play to get in front of the person you’re racing are in.  Given they’re on sand it’s not like they’re going to hurt each other, so Megan and I are happy to let them continue to burn off energy.  Megan and I start heading up the dune as well and the views are great, my issue is this if I am walking on somewhat level ground or even on a decline, I move pretty well.  Once the grade gets above about 2% I turn into a 90 year old asthma patient who smokes two packs a day.  There’s just something about uphill I just never have done very well, yes I’m out of shape but this inability to do uphill is absolutely out of synch with my general level of in-shapeness, I don’t know what it is but I think it contributes to my general level of antipathy for backpacking(love hiking though).  We hang out at the climbing dune for a good half hour and I chase the kids down the dune and show the how to take giant leaps while still landing safely to get down quickly, I make sure to do this out of Megan’s sight. 

            We get back in the car and head back to Traverse City, gather everything up and then head out in the caravan again.  Through this phase of the trip Megan drives the van and I drive the truck, if we need to go to a location together for any reason we take the van.  The kids mostly ride in the van as that’s where the DVD player is located.  We hold out riding with Dad as a possible fun thing to change things up, but that doesn’t work and so it turns into having to ride in the truck with me is a punishment for when our two little cherubs turn into a pair of four foot demon terrors who are at each others throats.  What that means is that I am mostly alone in the truck listening to a mix of podcasts and Satellite radio.  When I feel the need to turn my brain off even more, I shift into putting the music on the IPhone into shuffle and singing along, the best part is when I do this I sound EXACTLY like the singer, it’s eerie.

            The caravan heads up across the Mackinac bridge and we get to the Upper Peninsula.  Once there we head out on Highway 2 along the southern coast of the UP.  It’s a beautiful, sunny day by this point and so we’re getting green forests leading to the coast of Lake Michigan and small little waves on the lake with the sun glinting off of it.  It’s really pretty, but a little weird at the same time, there are a ton of old abandoned cabins along the road, they’re basically a motel office right next to a group of four or five separated cabins in front of a weed choked parking lot.  The separated cabins look like extreme versions of the tiny houses I keep seeing on TV and I assume are roughly analogous to the cabins the guy who wrote in the great real estate overview of Sweden “The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo” described(The book may have also had a mystery and some extreme wish fulfillment on the author’s part involved as well if my dim recall is any good by this point…………).  Frankly if you ever want to shoot a horror movie about being isolated at a creepy cabin in the woods at a motel with the owner who looks like he’s in-bred for 80 generations and is ready to call his cannibal cousins to go and eat the teenagers, this is where you want to start.  The thing is the little cabins are all really cute and it makes you think if you could JUST grab a few of them and spruce them up then you could probably make a ton of money, which is EXACTLY what everyone else who has driven along that road has thought.

            We pull into Munising and get situated before our sunset tour of the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, which is something I have always wanted to see.  However, what I have really always wanted to do was kayak the lakeshore and explore it that way, the boat ride feels a bit like cheating, but with a seven year old and a four year old the options are a bit limiting and I’m probably not in the right kayaking shape to handle a ride like this anyway.  The lakeshore itself is cool, it’s basically a long section of cliff, almost as if the Grand Canyon filled all the way up with water and you could only see the top portion.  It’s neat to see, but the overall boat ride is three and a half hours long and after a while looking at a what’s basically a giant rock begins to turn into something of a metaphysical experience as you try to find the meaning of yourself in the rock as you’ve been staring at it for so long that you just feel as if something HAS to be there(I assume this is similar to going to Uluru in Australia), well either that or standing by the boat exhaust and breathing it in was finally getting to me, I leave it to you to decide.  After about two hours my children turn from adorable tikes staring at the lakeshore with awe and wonder into wriggly demon-weasels and so the rest of the ride consists of Megan and I trying to keep them entertained so they don’t completely ruin the boat ride for everyone else.  I leave that to the kid who puked off the back of the boat and whose family then relied on someone else to tell the boat crew to clean it up, which they do in about thirty seconds, almost as if they’ve done it before.  I do wonder if the boat crew is disappointed they only got one person sick on this ride.  We go back to the hotel that has a sign in the front lobby advertising the bed-bug hunting dog service they use(not comforting) and settle in for the night.

Day Three: Wednesday 24 June Munising, MI to Alexandria, MN

            We wake up fairly early and try to get going as soon as we can as it’s a bit of a slog down back highways to get from the UP to Megan’s cousins place in Minnesota.  The drive itself is fairly uneventful, livened up by a quick stop in Wisconsin so the kids can go swimming for a bit in Lake Superior.  When we first get there, I think the water will be too cold for the kids to swim in as the one time I had been to Lake Superior I dunked my feet in and had a hard time deciding if I had my feet in water or some sort of weird liquid ice.  My kids however are either tougher than me(likely) or so insane from boredom in the car that they insist they are able to swim and hit the water as hard as they can.  We let them swim for a bit and play in the park to burn off some energy before putting them back in the van and hitting the road again. 

            On the way to Alexandria, I notice a black shape on the side of the highway and wonder if it is a bear.  The truck in front of Megan and I apparently wonders the same thing and begins to slow down.  As it does, the black shape indeed reveals itself to be a bear and the damn thing lopes across the highway.  It’s the first bear I have seen since college and since this time I am in my truck watching it run across the highway instead of being isolated on a mountain trail staring at a bear cub and wondering in pants shitting terror where mama bear is, I am free to appreciate seeing the bear and am happy for the experience.  I call Megan, hoping that Logan saw it, but alas my animal loving son missed his chance to see his first bear outside of a zoo.  Thankfully this is something we are able to correct a couple of days later. 

            We arrive in Minnesota and enjoy our night at Megan’s cousins house on the lake, there’s a big barbecue with Megan’s relatives and we get a chance to catch up, although most seem dumbfounded that we would pack up and move without knowing exactly where we’re going, at this time I am fairly confident it’s Seattle and so it’s more of just allowing that there are other possibilities.  The kids decide that they need MORE swimming and so I take them down to the dock and then start laughing as I see them freak out about the spiders that have made their lives on the little dock. 

 Day Four: Thursday 25 June Alexandria, MN to Rapid City, SD

            The day starts out with a quick breakfast as well as taking the kids down to the lake yet-a-goddamn-gain, to be clear I love that they want to be active but the high pitched whine that starts when they see water and can’t get into it is a little irritating.  There is a big event to start the day off as I take a call officially offering me a job in Nashville.  Megan and I talk about it a little in the morning and then decide to continue the conversation over the phone once we hit the highway in our respective vehicles, a concept I recognize as being inherently weird.  The thrust of the conversation is that the Nashville opportunity seems like a better career step, but it’s hard to let go of the idea of moving to Seattle now that the opportunity to do so is solidly in our grasp.  As the day continues, both of us shift to deciding on moving to Nashville, but it definitely took some time and a lot of thought to get our heads around such a big change.

            We’re heading to Rapid City, SD so we can go and see Mt. Rushmore the next day.  We originally have a campsite scheduled, but the weather looks bad and given that travelling with small children tends to “extend” the schedule, we realize we won’t get into the Rapid City area until around 9 p.m.  I’m less than enthusiastic at the thought of setting up camp in the dark and so we decide to use Hotwire to get a hotel in the town right outside of Mt. Rushmore, it’s even available for a decent rate in the middle of the summer which makes me wonder what’s wrong with it.  This is something we’ll discuss later.

            We get to spend most of our time on the interstate and once we get into South Dakota we are even aided by the fact that even the people of South Dakota realize that no-one wants to be there longer than they have to be and thus helpfully have made the speed limit 80.  By about noon the kids are at each others throats and so Logan “gets” to ride with me.  He’s not big on music the way Elizabeth is and so when he gets bored of the IPad I entertain him by teaching him the license plate game and how to recognize the license plates of the various states that we run across.  I also try to get him to spot the signs for Wall Drug and get him to tell me what he expects to see once we get there.  We kick around the idea of driving through the Badlands, but we’re already scheduled to get up to the Rushmore village late and as cool as the Badlands are, I don’t think they’re so unique that we need to take a huge detour for them, so we make do by looking at what we can of them off to the South of I-90.  We do stop at a scenic overlook in order to get a moment to look at the scenery and soak it in instead of glancing off the highway, but the mosquitos have other plans and descend upon us.  It’s not that big of a deal to me, but Megan apparently has a blood chemistry that makes her irresistible to mosquitos and therefore I may be benefitting from the fact that they all seem to head straight for her.  We decide to get back in the car rather quickly at this point, disappointing the mosquito Maitre D’ that is setting up reservations at the Chez Megan, I can almost hear the disappointed sighs as Megan gets back behind a wall of metal and glass.

            Given the signs we’ve seen and the anticipation that Logan has built up about what he can see there stopping at Wall Drug is now mandatory.  The place is absolutely brilliant, it’s a haphazard collection of several different associated shops all under one roof.  You pass through an actual drug store to get to the T-shirt shop, which then opens up to the café where truly terrible food at obscene prices is served to people who have no better options within immediate reach which connects to the rock store, and the leather store and the knife store and I am sure there’s a few more I’m missing.  It’s hard to describe the place as anything other than a Middle Eastern bazaar or an Asian Night market in the middle of the South Dakota plains.  Megan orders a piece of pie al a mode to share with Elizabeth and gets maybe a bite or two into it before giving up.  Elizabeth doesn’t last much longer and for a four year old to give up on eating a sweet……...  For those wondering why Logan didn’t try to get in on eating a sweet, I haven’t yet mentioned that Wall Drug is stuffed to the brim with well, stuffed animals of the taxidermy variety.  He is way too interested in looking at the various birds, bobcats, elk, deer, bears, etc. throughout the stores to let a little thing like food interrupt this stroll through animal paradise.  I spend about half an hour shepherding him through the place and listening to a litany of animal facts while getting into arguments every once in a while as to what a specific type of animal is.    What he thinks are the absolute greatest are the jackalopes and BEGS me for one, laughing I pick one up to check the price, fully intending on buying him one(I think they’re funny, too) and then immediately set it back down once I see the price tag.  Maybe once he gets his room set up in Tennessee I will order him one as a Christmas gift, but wow! I mean I get it, you are buying the results of what I assume is a fairly complex taxidermal procedure and I don’t want that type of skill to be so commoditized it’s cheap, but having an argument with a stir crazy seven year old about why he cannot have an item he has clearly become attached to is exhausting.  I assume Wall Drug makes most of its money from the parents who have lost this argument.  

            Having experienced this particular slice of Americana, we press on and eventually make our way towards the Mt. Rushmore village.  We pull into the President’s view resort and are basically treated to a Holidome hotel from the 1980’s.  It is like a trip back in time to the family vacations I went on as a kid and I turn on the TV half-hoping/half-dreading the entirely legitimate possibility that Knight Rider is going to be playing, alas it’s the local news and the newscasters have modern haircuts and are wearing non-pastel suits.  The room is small and basic, but it has beds(hard with threadbare sheets) and the shower works(or at least water flows out of it when you turn the faucet in the correct way), so we pronounce it acceptable and get the kids into the pool so they can burn off some energy.  Another indication of how ancient this place is that the Pepsi machines have the old red, white, and blue logos on them that I have not seen anywhere in circulation since at least the late 90’s(and even then they were dated).  We manage to get the kids out of the pool after about an hour and luckily Logan either doesn’t notice or elects not to ask about the guy wearing the “Go Fuck Yourself” T-shirt.

Day Five: Friday 26 June Rapid City, SD to Yellowstone National Park

            We get up early with the intent to go to breakfast quickly, get up to Mt. Rushmore quickly, make sure we get a good two hours there and then hit the road to Yellowstone.  The Rushmore village is sleepy and for a near weekend day in the height of tourist season, it makes me worry for the place and then I wonder why I am worried for a collection of over-priced restaurants with bad food, kitschy souvenir stands, and basic hotels in need of a capital infusion except that it may indicate a fading interest in a national treasure.  A quick drive up to the actual park area shows I needn’t have worried.  At nine in the morning there are already a ton of cars in the parking lot, with plates from a ton of states and even a few Canadian provinces.  We park the van and then head up the path to the monument and travel through the display of the state flags of all fifty states.  We pause at the flag for Tennessee and tell the kids that they are looking at the flag of their new state.  They take the news in stride as we’ve already gotten past the trauma of leaving Michigan and at this point the concept of the new state is somewhat esoteric.

            We head to look at Mt. Rushmore and spend time telling the kids why each of the Presidents on the monument is important, they make the appropriate noises, but I am sure are overwhelmed by the fact that they are looking at a mountain with giant heads carved out of it.  A group of guys who are looking at the mountain next to us spot a family of Mountain Goats and point them out to us.  Megan and I spot them fairly quickly, but we know how to look for movement and the Mountain Goats blend very well into the rocks.  Logan has a harder time picking them out and gets frustrated, which to me means I need to start taking him hunting once I actually figure out how to do so in Tennessee and teach him how to look for animals that don’t want to be seen.  We also walk along the trail that takes you a little closer to the Mount and gives you a chance to look at the heads one at a time.  The internal timer that marks the line between spending enough time to feel as if we’ve paid the proper respects and approaching boredom-induced kiddo meltdowns starts to flash and so we all head back down to the van and down the mountain to pick up the truck and continue the caravan.

            The rest of the day to Yellowstone is mostly uneventful.  After lunch we again have to pull the “Ride with Dada as a punishment” lever.  Frankly, I am amazed Megan lasts as long as she does with both kids and no help from me in the other truck.  She’s a saint for letting them stay in the van together as long as she does(they vastly prefer the van as the van has the DVD’s) given how much they are: A) at each others throats and fighting over silly things like the same pillow when there are a ton of other pillows available, B) Refusing to even consider the possibility of going to the bathroom when we are at a stop and then deciding after about ten minutes on the road that they have to go. And C) having negative patience when they’re hungry, while staying picky about what they want to eat.  I get Logan again for the drive into Yellowstone and to our campsite.  I can tell Logan is excited as he talks for the entire last three hours of the drive.  The first part is a rather imaginative description of how he is going to go spear hunting in the park and cook us up a big dinner on our second night, I play along thinking this is just an imagination game and am a bit taken aback when I realize he was completely serious about it, to the point where he even describes how he is going to make the spear.  He is rather disappointed when I tell him that hunting in the park is illegal.  He then switches to a long list of animals he wants to see in the park and the associated facts that go along with all of these different animals.  I have to play a bit of a game with him as he doesn’t give me any room to comment and so most of my conversation veers into “Uh-huh, Uh-huh” while nodding my head territory, he’s smart enough to pick up on this and so lays the guilt trip of, “I guess you aren’t listening so I should stop talking.” on me.  The response to this is to repeat the last few things he’s said, make a question out of it and get him talking again.  I want him to feel like he’s being interesting, but it gets tough to do this after the first hour and so I’m lucky I have the ability to pull a response out of my butt after a period of only half-listening(never say consulting has taught me nothing).  The drive through the park goes well, but it’s getting late so we don’t really have time to stop and do any sight-seeing.  About halfway to the campground we run into an area in which road work is on-going and a ton of cars and RV’s are parked along the side of the road in a haphazard manner, there are also a ton of pedestrians running across the road in both directions and not looking for traffic, it is very reminiscent of a crowded downtown road area in a SE Asian city in which the forces of chaos rule, mostly by virtue of being better organized than whatever groups are trying to impose order on the scene.  My blood pressure is through the roof in dealing with this chaos, but it is quickly alleviated as I park by ramming a Prius out of the way(it’s the small joys in life) and Megan finds out that what everyone is so excited about.  It turns out that there is a Young male Grizzly bear hanging out by the side of the pond eating a fish.  We get out and Logan gets his chance to see a bear in the wild, he is super excited and we stand, go oooh and ahhhh, take some pictures and then load back up and head to the campground.  We get to our campsite, assess our own small space surrounded by approximately 800 of our closest friends and start to get everything set up.  The kids “help” me with the tent while Megan handles getting the site organized and preps the meal which we cook on the camp stove.  As night starts to fall we roast some marshmellows and get everyone to bed. 

Day Six: Saturday 27 June, All day at Yellowstone.

            The first night we’ve spent in a tent as a family is mostly successful, Logan wakes up at one point freaked out that a bear is going to come and get him, so we have to assure him that we are fine and that everyone is following the rules to keep a clean campsite so the bears won’t come in.  At three in the morning we also discover that Logan’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle sleeping bag which is MAYBE rated to handle a heated house for a sleepover is perhaps not up to the job of keeping him warm when the temp drops to about thirty degrees.  I have a spare, real sleeping bag and so get that out and get him into it, and thankfully we all get back to sleep. 

            Megan and I get up early and split the chores in getting breakfast ready and then get the kids up as we have a big day ahead of us.  Once everyone is fed and we have the camp cleaned up and buttoned up, so we can experience Yellowstone without fear of the Rangers confiscating our campsite.  We head around and debate about where the best spots to stop at are.  We want to ensure we see some of the geysers and hot springs, but at the same time we don’t want to see ALL of them as they are all basically the same darn thing.  The day is a lot of fun, the kids get a great experience and my animal loving children get to see all the elk, buffalo, and birds they could want.  We even basically find Bambi’s dad, the largest Male Elk I have ever seen with a HUGE rack grazing on the side of the road.  We park the car on the side of the road and get out and just watch him graze until he wanders off into the forest.  You can where he’s been rutting as the trees have huge gashes on them.  I’d go into more detail on Yellowstone, but there’s so much to write about and Logan saying it was the best day of his life sums the day up beautifully.  If you haven’t been there yet you need to go.

            That night back at the campsite we take the kids swimming in the river which is nicely warm due to the Hot Springs warming it up.  There’s a slightly scary moment as I teach Logan how to ride the current down the river and we get to an area that’s a little too deep for him and he looks about ready to go under.  I am right there and keep him above water, but it’s not my favorite moment.  Nor is it Megan’s, who has to both watch this happen and explain to our four year old Evel Knievel clone why she can’t go down the river too.  We decide to spend a little more time in the river being a little more low-key and then head back up.  The rest of the night is fairly uneventful, a coyote starts howling at around two in the morning which gets all of the dogs in the campground barking, Elizabeth sleeps right through this, but it does wake Logan up for a little bit.
 

Day Seven: Sunday, 28 June Yellowstone to Elko, NV

            The morning starts out early as I get up, pack up what parts of the campground I can and then get breakfast cooked up for Megan and the kids.  As soon as breakfast is over Megan and I get to work cleaning up the campsite while the kids make friends with the kids at the campsite next to ours and start tearing ass around the campground on their scooters.  Packing up takes a little bit as getting organized the right way when packing up the tent and air mattresses takes a little bit of care and Megan luckily has the brilliant idea of using the portable vacuum(that we use to clean up after our two adorable little heathens) to clean the dirt out of the tent.

            We get about an hour down the road before I get a call from requesting I pull over immediately in order to facilitate the transportation of one of our angelic children, who are certainly not already going crazy after only an hour in the car.  This time I get Elizabeth, and it’s actually pretty fun as she really likes listening to the same music I do and I get a lot of requests of “Again, Again!”  The main challenge with her is two-fold, first is ensuring when the song starts that my No-troublesome language filter isn’t triggered and second is figuring out what songs she will let me skip through if I’m not in the mood to listen to them.  This is an issue as she gets kind of short with me if I skip through a song she likes, about a half hour in, I crack the code.  If there is a guitar heavy intro then I’m going to end up listening to the song.  I am very happy at this development and look forward to many years of continuing to shape her musical taste.  I also spend part of the drive teaching her the chorus “Rocky Top”(The Charlie Daniels version, of course, which is AWESOME), but alternate with “The Victors” so she always remembers which song is more important.

            The day passes fairly uneventfully, after lunch is over Elizabeth gets back in the van with Megan so she can watch some movies and I am again left alone with my thoughts.  As we’re getting close to Elko, I take the lead and the rest of the ride is fairly uneventful, except for a funny incident in which we pass Jackpot, ask the kids if they need to use the bathroom, get an emphatic No! in response and then five minutes later both of them have to go to the bathroom REALLY badly.  Given we are between Jackpot and Wells there is fuck-all for bathrooms for the next hour and we use this as an object lesson in going to the bathroom when you’re given the opportunity. 

            We get to my parent’s house right around five in the evening and hit their fortieth anniversary party in full swing.  The kids are excited as all get out to be there and immediately start running around with their cousin Dean, and Megan and I get re-acquainted with everyone who is at the party.  It’s a fun night and my dad fires up the pizza oven he built that is out in his yard.  I'm happy I get the chance to celebrate this moment with my mom and dad and be there for them.  It's also nice to see a large collection of people who are there to spend that night with my parents and it's a great testament to the life they built in Elko and the friends they made.  I can only hope I have a similar experience when my fortieth rolls around(assuming I live that long).
It’s great to be at the end of the first phase and I am glad to roll in and call it a week.  The next update will revolve around the major incidents of the next four weeks: A hike up Lamoille canyon, Fourth of July in the booming metropolis of Eureka, NV, househunting in Nashville and the week at the lake.