Our crossing of the Mackinac Bridge went exactly according to plan.  We got on the road early (for us at least) and were to the bridge just before 11AM.  We crossed with virtually no wind, and it was completely uneventful.  We came off the bridge into Michigan’s Upper Peninsula without much idea of what we wanted to do besides see the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, but we’d talked to a few people who said the Tahquamenon State Park was worth a stop.  I remembered that we’d been told to follow state road 123, so as soon as we saw a sign for that road we looked at maps and figured out how to get there.

Tahquamenon State Park is definitely worth a stop, although between annoying state recreation area policies and the fact that the reports of how bad mosquitoes are in the UP is in no way an exaggeration, it probably won’t end up being one of our favorite parks.  This state park is spread out over a large area of lake and riverfront in the northeast corner of the UP.  It has a number of camping areas, as well as a number of visitor centers where you can stop to see key features of the park.  The most annoying policy is that to drive into a state park or recreation area, you have to get either a day pass for the vehicle for $11, or an annual pass for $39.  Michigan state covers a lot of parks, recreation areas, and forests, and all of them require the recreation pass.  Because we figured we’d be spending a couple days at Tahquamenon, and stopping at other state forests and recreation areas, we got the annual pass.  We got our money’s worth out of it before we left the state, but it still seems like the state might be overreaching a bit since many of the places where the pass is required are unmanned forest areas that really aren’t costing the state much.  Also, it’s unlikely that anyone would be around to check that you have the pass when you enter those areas, but we like to follow the rules and, basically, like to support state recreation efforts, although in other states we feel like we’ve had better value with the state passes.  

Anyway, we bought the recreation pass and booked at night at the virtually deserted campground.  Maybe we should have figured out at that point that there was a good reason why the campground was deserted on a beautiful summer weekend.  Instead, we just thought how nice the quiet was, and took the dogs out for a walk to see the Lower Falls, one of the main draws for the park.  We weren’t 50 feet from the camper when we found ourselves swarmed by mosquitos.  We went back to the camper and put on long sleeves and long pants, and decided to stick to the roads.  They were better on the roads, but still bad, and when we got to the Lower Falls visitor center we bought an overpriced vial of citronella, which maybe helped a little for 10 minutes or so.  Ultimately, we just walked fast and didn’t stop, and made it back to the camper where we spent the rest of the evening looking out through the mosquito covered screens.  Happy we hadn’t booked more than one night, we took off in the morning for a stop at the Upper Falls in the park.  That parking lot was wide open and the mosquitoes didn’t seem to be as bad in the morning, so we walked along the river and saw the falls before getting back in the truck to head for Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore.

It’s possible our stress was cranked up a little higher because Tom had to get some work done on line, and the cell reception in Tahquamenon State Park wasn’t good enough to hotspot his computer to his phone.  We headed towards Pictured Rocks with me watching the bars on the phone to see if we could get two or three bars, but it seemed that most of the UP had pretty dismal cell connection.  We finally turned a corner in a small town where we had barely two bars, so we pulled into a restaurant/bar parking lot and Tom tried to hook up.  It still wouldn’t work, and I had a sudden brainstorm that the bar might have wifi.  Tom went in to ask, and they did, so we took ourselves and our devices in so Tom could get his work done and I wouldn’t have to cook lunch.  Win win!  We also met the home schooled children of one of the employees, and were happy that our list of capitals visited was helpful to their schoolwork.  Their mom said they’re planning to RV around parts of the US and asked us where we would go first if we had kids, which was a question we had to think about for a while.  We ended up giving her a few ideas, but since we needed to think more on it, we told her to contact us when they’re ready to go to talk more about it, and we’ll be waiting to hear from her.  

Happy with finished work, full bellies, and the satisfaction of helping a couple of kids enjoy their schoolwork, we went on our way towards Pictured Rock National Lakeshore.  

We drove from the Marzinski Trailhead to the southernmost part of Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore.  Like Indiana Dunes, Sleeping Bear spans miles of lakeshore with lots to see and do as you pass through the park.  We started at the south end, with a hike from the river access area through the forest to the dunes and the lakeshore.  After seeing all the sand at Indiana Dunes, we thought the pretty sand and big dunes were a feature of the south side of Lake Michigan, but found that big dunes also occur on the east side of the lake.  Like Indiana Dunes, on the mile from the parking lot to the lakeshore we passed boggy ponds, went though multiple types of forest, and then came out to the dunes and the lakeshore.  Dogs weren’t allowed on the beach because the beach is a piping plover nesting site, but Tom and I took turns holding the dogs while the other walked to the water.

After that hike, we continued north to see the biggest dunes in the park.  They’re big!  People were climbing them and rolling down the hill, and some were continuing towards the lake which was about a mile and a half away.  Neither of us really like the sand, so we passed and took a few photos from the parking lot before continuing towards the north section of the park.

The north part of the park is more about history and less about dunes.  We stopped in the village of Glen Haven, which is constantly in the process of being restored.  Much of the area where the park now is was settled by a man named D.H. Day, and Glen Haven is a village he founded.  While a few people live there, it’s mostly a living history museum of reconstructed buildings, and some still in the ongoing process of reconstruction.  You can see the remains of the pier where the big boats would dock, and the canning factory has been converted into a boat museum.  The Sleeping Bear Inn is currently being renovated to become lodging for park visitors.  The old general store is now a park store, and the blacksmith shop is a working blacksmith shop that creates whatever metal is needed for projects in the entire park.  We walked through the village and talked to the volunteers manning the buildings.  We couldn’t help but compare this village to Pullman, since both George Pullman and D.H. Day had similar visions of creating a community where people could work and live.  However, their implementations varied tremendously, and from what we read and heard, it seems like the Glen Haven residents were actually happy to live and work there.  D.H. Day actually built himself a grand house for his family on his farm a few miles south of the village, but neither he nor his wife wanted to move from their apartment above the general store since they liked the companionship provided by the people in town.  

After letting the dogs play in the lake, we drove through the rest of the park which was a farming community.  We thought about spending another day in the park, but at some point in the afternoon we had looked at the weather map and realized winds were supposed to pick up the next afternoon, and we wanted to get over the Mackinac Bridge in good weather.  The truck’s suspension has been much better since the work done on it in Missouri, but driving a sail over a 5-mile suspension bridge in high winds didn’t sound like a lot of fun.  We drove to Traverse City, which is about and hour and a half from the bridge, and parked at a Walmart for the night.  We set the alarm so we’d be up early enough to get over the bridge well before the winds started in the afternoon.

We left Indiana Dunes and made it as far as Battle Creek, MI, on our way to Lansing, Michigan’s capital.  We found a friendly Walmart, and looked to see if there was anything else to see while we were in the Lansing area.  We found that there was - our good friend Beth, who traveled to horse shows with us, met up with me when I’d go to Florida in the winter, and who was a most excellent house and farm sitter when we went away when we lived in NY.  She’s now married and has a son named Declan - he’ll spell it for you if you want - and lives about 15 minutes outside of Lansing.  I texted her in a bit of a panic because we wanted to drop in with no warning since we hadn’t realized how close we were, but she immediately got back to me and assured me that she’d love to see us.  The only downside was that her wife Nicole had just left for a dog show in Pennsylvania so we didn’t get to meet her, but we had lunch with Beth and Declan at Horrocks, which is a really cool nursery/restaurant/super market/all purpose country store.  We figured out that we hadn’t seen each other in at least 10 years, but we picked right up where we left off, as good friends do. We hung around long enough for Declan to show Tom all of his favorite toys, but then had to say goodbye and take the short drive into Lansing.

Like many of the Midwest capitals, Lansing is plunked in the middle of farmland, and while Beth warned us that we might hit a little traffic because it was getting later in the afternoon, it turned out that it really was just a *little* traffic.  We easily found a place to park on a street just a couple of blocks from the capitol, and walked the dogs to the building.  Initially, we didn’t think much of the surroundings, but we realized we had approached from the backside, and the front is a raised plaza over the streets which we had unknowingly parked under.  We ended up taking a longer walk than we had anticipated because the raised plaza extends three or four blocks from the capitol.  

We left Lansing, heading towards our next National Park, Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore.  We had looked online for a place to camp near the park, but couldn’t find anything, free or not.  So, we stopped about an hour southeast of the park at the Marzinski Trailhead on some national forest land.  It was a free campground like those we found in California, with spacious campsites with picnic tables and fire rings.  We had a little scare when we first pulled in and it said camping was by reservation only, but when I got on the reservations.gov website I found that most of the sites were open, and were in fact free.  Only one other site of the 19 campsites was taken when we got there, and one other group pulled in after us, but at the end of the day only three of the sites were occupied.  And, the one site which had been marked on the website as reserved remained empty.  I’m not quite sure what the point is of asking people to make reservations for free campsites since there’s no penalty if you book a site and don’t show up and keep someone else from using the space, but I guess the government will have to figure that out.  The website also didn’t let us mark the site we occupied as taken, so I expect some problems will arise when the area starts to get busy.  But, it worked out fine for us and we had a nice hike and a quiet evening before heading for Sleeping Bear Dunes in the morning.

Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore was full of surprises for us.  The most obvious surprise was the dunes, which are huge and, at least near the lake, composed of white sand that looks like it should be in the Caribbean.  Lake Michigan is also very blue, so if you looked from the dunes out towards the lake, you would never guess you were in Indiana.  We were also surprised by the biodiversity.  We talked to a ranger who said you can walk through five ecosystems in a mile, and while I can’t name the five ecosystems off the top of my head, we walked a loop trail of just a couple of miles and went along the lakeshore, through a hardwood forest, past a bog with a beaver dam and lodge, through some grasslands, and then through a pine forest.  We saw turkeys and deer, and one of the trails we wanted to walk on was closed because a coyote den with pups was very close to the trail and they were waiting for the pups to grow before reopening the trail.

One of the other things we didn’t expect was the historical aspect of the park.  The area was settled by Swedish and German farmers, who created and maintained very productive farms.  Being right on the lake, the community also had a role in trading in the area, moving goods using the lake and the rivers.  A number of these homes are being preserved in the park.

The biggest surprise for us was how the National Park Service has managed to squeeze a park site with such diversity into an area that is primarily  industrial.  The park is composed of sites dotted along the lakeshore, interspersed with ports and steel mills.  The westernmost sites are less than 45 minutes by car from the Pullman park in Chicago.  If you drive on the surface roads rather than taking the expressways, Chicago runs right to the Illinois/Indiana border, and, when you cross into Indiana, becomes Little Chicago and then Gary, which are industrial towns.  In the park, you can’t avoid hearing planes, trains, and cars, yet you can walk along a beach that seems to go forever or through forests filled with birdsong and animals in the underbrush.  The park has also allowed a few small beach towns to remain quaint hideaways for families who have had cottages there for decades.  One of these towns even has five of the “future homes” from the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago.  After the World’s Fair, they were transported by boat from Chicago to the Indiana lakeshore, where they have remained in private possession although they are on display with informational signage as you drive through the village.  

Because the visitor center is shared by the National Park and a state park which is embedded in the middle of the National Park, they allow RVs to boondock in their parking lot.  That’s what we had done when we drove there from Chicago, and we considered a second night since there was more to see, but after walking miles of trails and seeing so much during our full day in the park, we opted to press on towards Lansing, MI. 

We had a quick but very fun visit to Chicago.  We had made arrangements to stay at Tom’s Aunt Patricia’s retirement community for one night, in the parking lot as we had done last September.  However, we were arriving on Memorial Day, and Patricia had planned a dinner with Tom’s cousin Eileen and her husband Dick, but they were all quick to make sure we knew we were included in the invitation.  We arrived at Patricia’s a little later than planned, so she was waiting in her parking lot so we could park the truck and load us and the dogs into her car to drive to Eileen and Dick’s.  Eileen and Dick had planned an absolutely delicious surf and turf dinner, which we all enjoyed immensely, since not only was the food way better than anything you’d get in a restaurant, but we were able to relax and catch up on the past six months.  We hadn’t seen these three in almost five years when we visited in September, so it was a big treat to get in another short but sweet visit after only six months.

The next morning, we headed south out of Chicago towards Indiana Dunes National Park, with a planned stop on the way at the Pullman National Monument.  I knew nothing about the Pullman site except it was a community on the outskirts of Chicago which had been planned by Pullman of Pullman train car fame.  I expected to see some old architecture and industrial artifacts, but instead found a fascinating memorial to the US labor movement.

I think I expected the National Memorial to be a memorial to Pullman.  Instead, I found that Pullman was basically a paternal jerk who expected his employees to work themselves to death and thank him for the opportunity to do so, and the National Memorial was created to honor the labor movement.  Pullman built his business and factory at the center of a planned town, where he built row houses, schools, a church, and businesses to support the community.  The kicker was that his employees had no option but to rent the houses, go to those schools, go to that church, and patronize his businesses.  He didn’t pay them enough to pay the rent or to be able to afford to patronize those businesses, and he provided no options for faiths other than the single church unless other faiths wanted to rent the building for ridiculously high prices.  The employees eventually went on strike, but even that situation was fraught because only the White workers could strike, and while they didn’t want the Black workers to strike, they also didn’t want them to take their jobs.  Needless to say, there were years of tension, and the museum and the informational signs around the community do a great job of bringing the situation to life.

The row houses are all restored, and are now mostly privately owned.  Pullman advertised them as being a great deal because they had indoor plumbing when that was definitely not something that was considered standard, but he still expected his employees to pay high rent for the privilege.  We found it interesting that most of the row houses in the neighborhood south of the factory have been restored and look very nice, but the neighborhood north of the factory is pretty rough, with some abandoned with boarded windows, and most in pretty deplorable shape.

This is the church which most religions couldn’t afford to rent.  Apparently it was unused for many years since nobody was willing to pay the rent.

The very fancy Hotel Florence has fallen into disrepair, but this was also a tool for Pullman’s status games.  The employees were only allowed into a few of the common rooms, and the bulk of the hotel was reserved for Pullman’s business guests.  It probably wasn’t a big deal, since the employees couldn’t afford to cross the threshold anyway.

The factory burned and has not been rebuilt, but its bulk stands as a testimonial to the size of the operation.

​We did the entire walking tour of the site, although we turned back when we got to the rougher section of row houses.  We then got back in the truck and headed out of Chicago and Illinois, for a brief stop in Indiana at Indiana Dunes National Park.