Little Big Ski Area
Nice Beach. Not exactly a beach day though ...
... But apparently this guy didn't get the memo.
There are less-than-Great lakes too. This one is Deer Lake.
With that philosophy in mind, I hit the road. It rained on and off, never really all that hard, for the first couple of hours, then stopped. It seemed that I was outrunning the front. And in fact, at a stop to refill the propane tank around lunchtime, the propane-pumper-person told me that while it sure felt like a storm was coming in (it was gusty winds, and a little cold), it hadn't rained there in a couple of weeks. "There", in this case, was just into Michigan from Wisconsin.
Not long after I crossed into Michigan, I started seeing a lot of signs for ski areas. This was a bit of a surprise -- it's not even remotely mountainous. The signs (for three different ski areas) were clearly all competing with each other for the "biggest" -- biggest vertical at one place, biggest ski area at another ... the third just claimed to be the best, not the biggest.
Anyway, I decided to take a brief detour to check out the biggest ski area. It's called Big Powderhorn Mountain. Driving to it is a lot like driving to Nashoba Valley, for those of you from Sudbury. For those of you not from Sudbury, Nashoba Valley was our closest ski area when we were growing up. It has a whopping 250 feet of vertical, and you can get down its steepest, "expert" run in about 15 seconds if you point straight downhill.
So, the Big Powderhorn approach is a lot like the Nashoba Valley approach. You turn north off the main road onto this little side road, which seems kind of level (shouldn't we be going up?) Then it takes a downhill dive, curves to the west, and there you are at the base of this ski area. It actually seems quite a bit bigger than Nashoba, both in vertical and horizontal. It seemed to even have multiple peaks. It definitely had multiple base areas. Yet it still falls into the "truly dinky ski area" category. It was beautiful with the green grass, bright red chairlifts, and multi-colored foliage.
Not too far east of the ski areas, there was a little town with the National Ski Hall of Fame museum. Really? Here? It sure looked official on the outside. But it was closed today, so I couldn't check it out.
I continued my due-east drive. I've been driving due east since Montana. I was truly surprised to see the "entering Eastern Time Zone" sign. I didn't realize I was that far east, but then, the eastern time zone is truly enormous to stretch all the way from the Atlantic to here. Which reminds me -- tomorrow, I'll probably hit the 5,000 mile mark for this trip.
The route I was on was skirting the southern border of Lake Superior. I thought about the Great Lakes. For a while there, I was unable to come up with the name of the fifth one. I'd now seen Lake Superior, and I'd already seen Lake Michigan, Lake Ontario, and Lake Erie -- but what was the name of the fifth (hint: it rhymes with "Huron" :-)
Since I'd spent the night on the shores of Lake Superior, I was thinking that maybe I should cross down south and travel along the north shore of Lake Michigan, but there were things along the north shore of the upper peninsula that made me think it would be more scenic. I don't know if I was right or not, but it was gorgeous.
Lots of weird things go through your mind when you are driving alone through nowhere. Today, I wasted lots of brain power pondering why some lakes, like the Great Lakes, and Lake Tahoe, for example, are Lake XXXX, but others are XXXX Lake. For example, Mono Lake. If you said, "I'm going up to Lake Mono for Labor Day weekend," everyone would look at you like you'd just stepped off of the proverbial turnip truck. Or, if you said, "Hey, Josh has been driving along Superior Lake," whoever you were speaking to would get this quizzical look and change the subject before admitting that they had no clue where the heck Superior Lake is. At least, that's what I'd do :-)
There's a 40-mile stretch of the shoreline called Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore and I drove a good stretch of that. The shoreline and the lake are truly gorgeous, even with the lack of sun. The foliage here is gorgeous. I don't feel the need to see it in New England anymore, which is famous for beautiful fall views.
Staying ahead of the front was a very windy, gusty experience, so it was a little stressful. I still think there's something loose in the front end that's making times like that a little too "white-knuckle". Mental note, find a chance to look into that, but it seems like it won't happen until the end of the trip.
I stopped for the night in Newberry, MI, which is just a little ways away from Tahquamenon Falls, which area a couple of big waterfalls. Maybe it'll be more impressive than Niagara Falls, which failed to wow me back when I first saw them. Of course, that will only likely happen if it isn't raining too hard in the morning. It wasn't raining at all when I stopped, but now, at 9pm, it's raining quite hard.
My campsite is the biggest one I've ever seen. When I got here, I went into the campground office and asked for a long pull-thru, as I always do, but this late in the season they are in "drive around, find a site, then come back here and tell me which one you chose." Since there were fully 10 people who had done that but hadn't yet returned to register, he didn't know what was full and what was empty. He pointed me at their longest pull-thrus and I headed out to find one.
Well, there were plenty of available ones in the area that he'd recommended, but they were *very* narrow and the trees hung very low. But it looked like lots of the other pull-thrus were plenty long, so I started taking a drive around the park. I ended up in this one campsite that must be 80' long and 35' wide. At first I'd centered myself, but discovered that although my power wire just barely reached to the hookup, my water hose was a good 10' short. So, I moved over to the side. It's now wide enough to lower my awning (which I won't bother with) and still park the BMW out next to that!
Unfortunately, it's so heavily wooded here that there's no way to set up the satellite dish. It's so far north that the satellite is at only 35 degrees of elevation, which looks practically horizontal on the dish. Well, I brought three books with me (Tom Clancy's latest, a Dean Koontz and a Robin Cook) and I really should get started on them. Besides, my first month of DirecTV is up and I'm no longer getting every channel known to man.
Tomorrow should be a day for lots of water. There are the falls, plus I expect I'll see three Great Lakes: Superior, Michigan, and Huron. I'll be crossing the Mackinac Bridge to get down to the lower peninsula, and depending on what time I end up doing that, I'm going to try to get to the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, on Lake Michigan, which apparently have natural Sahara-sized sand dunes. I might even go into Canada, just to do it. Sounds like fun. I hope the weather clears.