Experiencing Michigan, cont'd

One of the many benefits to having friends, besides emotional stability, good health, and not having to go to the movies by yourself, is that they are very likely to have cameras, and in fact will sometimes let you handle there camera and take a few pictures even if, after losing two of your own cameras in a matter of months it takes time to build up to a level of full trust. This can help compensate for no longer owning a camera yourself because of said losses and ensures that, given a little time, you can still post pictures on your blog. (By "you" in the last several sentences, of course, I mean "me".)

I'm going to try to cram two blog posts into one because if I don't I might never actually get around to both of them. I am going to trust that my readers have the patience and willingness to keep reading, although if you just want to look at the pictures I will certainly not be offended.

I. The Hike

I promised to write about the hike once I got pictures, and now I have them. This was my 4th-of-July-minus-the-fireworks excitement. On the morning of the 4th, Sara and I went down to Waterloo Recreation Area, which is apparently the largest park in the lower peninsula, with over 40 miles of trails. We didn't quite hike all 40 miles of the trails, but we spent a good several hours hacking our way through the dense Michigan undergrowth and warding off divebombing mosquitos. That is not entirely an exaggeration, either. About five minutes into our first hike (or rather, or first attempt at a hike) we were expending so much of our energy swatting at bugs that we were hardly paying any attention to our surroundings, and we finally drove back into Chelsea in search of the strongest bug spray we could find. This helped a lot. And as for hacking our way through the dense Michigan undergrowth, we had our share of that t0o. The picture to the right looks like Sara hiding in the bushes, but it is actually Sara walking along the Lakeview Trail. Most of the trails did not look like this, just the Lakeview Trail which was, all in all, a great disappointment given that there was not a decent view of the lake to be had anywhere along the trail.

Not to highlight the negative, but there were a couple other disappointments as well. First there was the lack of hills. Sara and I both spent most of our lives in the mountain west, California and Colorado and Utah, and to us hiking means hiking to somewhere, generally uphill. Hikes without summits, let alone real destinations (other than the place where we started) felt a little less like hikes and more like scenic walking. When we finally did encounter a hill, which took all of 2 minutes to ascend, we were so excited that we had to double back and take pictures (okay, the doubling back was actually because we took a wrong turn and found ourselves walking in circles, but it had the benefit of giving us a second chance to take advantage of the photo op we'd missed).

And finally there was the carnivorous plant. We'd seen this on the trail map, and saved it for last because we thought it would be a brilliant end to a not-altogether-bad day. The carnivorous plants, it turned out, were pretty but not quite worth the hype, especially because we could not find a single one ingesting so much as a gnat, and by that point we were so bug-bitten that we would have been thrilled to find a gnat falling prey to the bug-eating fauna.

Despite the disappointments, however, it was a lovely way to spend the 4th, and meant that I was able to happily skip the fireworks later on without any regrets.


II. Mackinac Island, Take Three

This past Saturday morning I left the apartment bright and early with my friends Stephanie, Rachel, and Jason for a day trip to Mackinac Island. Although this is the first time I have made the trip without an overnight stay somewhere along the route to the island, it is my third time visiting Mackinac. In fact, I have now been to Mackinac Island all three of my summers in Michigan, so it’s beginning to feel like tradition. Still, each year has been with a very different group of people, and so even though I essentially made the same rounds on the island each time, they’ve all been unique experiences.

I’ve already written about Mackinac Island, back when I made my first trip, but for those who don’t know, Mackinac Island is a little island up by the bridge between the lower and upper peninsulas of Michigan. It’s been a summer getaway for the wealthy for a very long time, with the famous Grand Hotel sitting prominently above the shoreline (rooms for $750 a night—suit coats for the men and skirts for the ladies are required attire after 6 pm.) Nowadays a day trip to Mackinac Island is also affordable to us common folk, though we are still not allowed to walk the promenade in front of the Grand Hotel. The island is also home to M-185, the only state highway in the country that does not allow cars given that a ban on motored transportation on the island instituted when automobiles first became popular has never been lifted.

On our trip, we did a lot of the same things I have done on other trips. We rented bikes and rode the 8 miles of highway looping the island, went as far as we were allowed on the Grand Hotel grounds, walked along the forested paths over to Arch Rock, ate ice cream, and bought fudge.





This is about what I have done every time I visited the island. There are probably many other things to do on the island, but on my second trip last year I was the tour guide and so I did what I knew, and this year I was the one who had been to the island most recently and so, again, I suggested that we do what I knew. Still, the trip was not an entire repeat of my last experiences. There was, for example, the Ugly Mackinac Island Sweater Contest, a tie between the pink collared sweatshirt with flowers, the lime green cardigan-and-t-shirt combo with cats, and the button-down sweater with pinecones.






There was also the Incident on the Fort Mackinac Lawn, also known as the Great Seagull Showdown, also known as Jason Versus the Birds, when we were surrounded on all sides by a flock of hungry gulls intent on scavenging the remains of our famous Mackinac Island ice cream.

I think a good time was had by all. I do enjoy Mackinac Island. It's kind of like watching movies - it's very hard for me to make it through a movie I've seen before a second time all by myself, no matter how much I like the movie. But if I'm watching the movie with someone, particularly someone who has never seen it, I can watch it over and over again without ever getting bored. That's why I will probably visit Mackinac again, maybe the next time my parents come out to visit, although I also hope to get to other parts of Michigan that I haven't seen yet.