The Last Fifty Miles Got To Me

Posted on 30/09/2024 by Grumpa Joe

Driving and taking road trips has been a passion of mine since 1961. However, I’ve only ventured out three times in the past four years. Two of the escapes were taken this month. I dream of driving across this great country of the United States at least once more. The thrill of experiencing the great plains and deserts, followed by the Rockies, sometimes overwhelms me. My body, however, has slipped to a level that surprises me. Having been physically active most of my life, I have fallen into a malaise and inactivity. The result is a body that is twenty pounds overweight, all of it hanging above my belt line like a bowling ball. The weight doesn’t bother me as much as the achy joints they cause. This trip was another test to see If I can last through an extended drive.

Lovely and I undertook the adventure of driving around Lake Michigan, starting from Chicago and circumnavigating in a counterclockwise direction. In days past, it would have taken me two days to drive 998 miles, but this time, I wanted Lovely to experience the beauty of the many lake towns, the great sand dunes that border the west coast of Michigan, and finally, Mackinac Island (pronounced Mackinaw}, and Mackinaw Bridge. The bridge has a history and beauty of its own. It allows people like me to cross the straits a ten mile stretch of water that joins Lake Michigan, Lake Superior, and Lake Huron. The bridge also connects lower Michigan with upper Michigan. Why the state is split into two sections is another history lesson.

Our first stop was Traverse City, the home of cherries. Two peninsulas extend north to form Traverse Bay, creating a terroir that makes growing cherries successful. Thus, the Cherry Capital of the World is born. The drive along the shore of Lake Michigan is scenic and extends almost to the bridge. I had to stop at Charlevoix to take a break and to eat a donut. This is a charming town with many touristy shops catering to the boating crowd, making it a destination. The day was cloudy grey and rather dreary, but we prevailed and continued to enjoy the scenery. The next town in line was Petoskey, famous for the Petoskey stone. These stones are the Great Lakes contribution to fossilized coral formations. My recollection of these towns is from three bike tours I took years ago. I was amazed at the growth that has taken place since those visits.

We arrived at our destination, Mackinac City, at the foot of the bridge. I had always passed this town, but I deliberately stopped to check it out. We checked into our motel, called the American Boutique Inn, and made it our base for the next two days. It was within a ten-minute walk to the ferry dock and the downtown shopping/restaurant area. We discovered two restaurants open and several that catered to breakfast, The White Buffalo Bar & Grille was next door to O’Reilly’s Irish Pub & Restaurant. We later discovered they had the exact same menu and delivered food from the same kitchen. The only difference between them was the beer menu and decor.

Touring Mackinaw Island is undoubtedly different. There are no motorized vehicles allowed on the island. Although I would argue that electric-assist bicycles are motorized, but they are allowed. The main street at the water’s edge is about a mile long and is crowded on both sides with buildings built in the eighteen hundreds. All of them are nic-nack shops and cafes. Other notable attractions are, The Grand Hotel, Fort Mackinac, and Arch Rock. The nicety of the street was that it was quiet except for the clop-clopping of horses hooves as horse drawn carriages acted as taxis, tour, and livery vehicles. We finally took a tour and enjoyed a rest from the shopping. Out cart was drawn by three very large percheron draft horses, and they climbed the hills up to Arch Rock with little effort while dragging a cart load of thirty people.

The tourist season lasts until the end of October. Then, all the shops and hotels close, leaving a permanent population of five hundred people to enjoy the solitude of the island, which often gets iced in when the lakes freeze. Most of the help is contracted from Jamaica and the Dominican Republic. They all go home to enjoy the money they made during the summer. Over 900 horses are ferried back to the mainland to farms and barns in the upper peninsula to rest up for the next season.

We left Mackinaw City to cross the bridge and follow US Rte 2 west, the lake on our left, and forests on our right. After an hour we turned onto Hwy 77 north through heavy forests on both sides with a few tiny hamlets to Munising, Michigan, on the shore of Lake Superior. Our boat ride was at two o’clock and we arrived there at one thirty. The boat ride took us along the lake’s western coast along the Pictured Rocks National Shoreline. To describe it, the coast is a 200 foot high cliff that drops vertically into Lake Superior. I have seen this part of Michigan from the top of the cliff and lakeside. It is an amazing view from both perspectives. The captain of our boat pointed out mosquito bay. He said there is not one single mosquito living there. They are all married and have children.

The geology of the pictured rocks is fascinating. Layers of sandstone form the cliff. On top, there is a layer of topsoil with forest. Groundwater seeps through the layers, picking up various minerals as it moves. The water reaches a level of stone that stops it and moves horizontally toward the lakes, seeps out, and runs down the face of the cliff. The rock face is streaked with colorful orange(Iron), green(copper), black, and white.

We rested in a Holiday Inn Express that night and dined at Munising’s finest supper club, The Dogpatch Restaurant (two and a half stars). In the morning we packed up the Death Star and headed south. The plan was to make it home in one 400 mile segment. Everything went well until we were fifty miles from home. We arrived at precisely the same time as everyone who works in downtown Chicago is leaving to go home for supper. It took us an hour and a half to inch our way home from that point. Lovely was not a happy camper, nor was I. There was nothing I could do to speed things up we just had to slug our way through the traffic.

When I got into the house, the first thing I did was pour myself a healthy jigger of scotch and slugged it down. Except for those last fifty miles, it was a great trip, and I passed my driving test. In total, we drove 998 miles, 400 of which were on the last day, and the final 50 took the longest time

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A Fall Driving Trip

Posted on 24/09/2024 by Grumpa Joe

I am tired, and wanting to eat the ass out of a dead skunk, but I made it to the base of the Mackinaw bridge which is Mackinaw City. I sit with the laptop on my lap hoping to make some sense out of all the ideas that rolled through my mind while driving. Should I speak to all the TRUMP/Vance signs I saw? Yes, why not? These weren’t little yards signs like I stick into my lawn, they were semi-trailer sized signs. This surprises me because Michigan is a blue state. As I drove further north there began to be some equally large Harris-Walz signs. That’s more like the Michigan I know. The whole time my mind kept telling me that the country is going to go crazy like they did with Obama. They will vote for Kamala without knowing what she stands for, and later regret it after she has snuck a bunch of laws and policies into place that will kill the United States that we know.

I’d rather change the subject and talk about how much this part of the country has changed since I was last here.

Number one, I met an immigrant working at our hotel who was a nice black man. The thing I found strange is that over the years I have traveled and stayed in hotels, I have never once seen a male housekeeper. They have always been women.

Number two, the tiny coastal towns that create the uniqueness of the upper lower peninsula have grown substantially. A sign would appear along the roadside announcing the city limits of the town. Yet, I drove another ten minutes before reaching the part that I remember.

Number three, I used a credit card on a parking meter in one of these quaint littles towns which has grown into a city. Except for the fact that the meter screen was not very visible in daylight, it was sexy. We crossed the street and I looked back at my car to see the meter blinking a green light while the meter in the unoccupied spot in front of mine was blinking red. No doubt these lights were meant as an alert to the police who patrolled the streets looking for expired meters to write a ticket.

Number four, US 31 is still a two lane highway. I was literally scared to death to be driving against traffic at the posted speeds. This same road has miles of two lane, two lanes with an occasional extra passing lane, four lanes, and four lanes with limited access. The scariest part is driving on two lanes head on toward a semi hugging the line. It must be my age because it never bothered me before.

Number five, Mackinaw city is not much larger than it was forty years ago. It plays a single function, that is to give temporary shelter to tourists like me who come to visit Mackinaw Island. The total permanent population is around seven hundred, but between July and August the number is in the thousands. The young man who checked me in lives in Florida when he is not checking people in at the desk of the American Boutique Inn in Mackinaw City.

Number six, the Mackinaw Bridge still impresses me after all these years. I was about eight or ten years old when it was built, and it has saved a ton of money for travelers crossing from lower Michigan to Upper Michigan. I once rode over it on my bicycle while on the Shoreline Bike Tour. We actually had a safety meeting before crossing. The expansion joints between sections of the bridge can swallow a bike tire and cause the rider to take a header into the steel grate driving surface. The ride organizers actually placed sheets of plywood over the joints to make them safer. The ride across still gives me the heebie jeebies when I think about being four hundred feet above the water at its peak.

Number seven, it is a few days into Fall, and the trees are just beginning to turn color. We have had cloudy days with occasional showers. The temperature is dropping into the fifties at night, which by itself is not too cold. When you add a brisk wind coming from the lake the wind chill makes it miserable.

Number eight, the season for tourists is two weeks from being over. Businesses will board up and close. Many will return to their winter businesses in Florida. Others will return home where ever that may be.

Number nine, Mackinaw Island does not allow automobiles or trucks. All travel on the island is on foot, bicycle, or a horse drawn carriage. The horses are ferried onto the island in Spring and ferried to their home farms in the Upper Peninsula in the Fall. The largest hotel is the Grand Hotel, an all wooden structure well over a hundred years old. The Grand employs contract workers from Haiti, or the Dominican Republic. Within the next two weeks they will all be headed home until the next season.

Number ten, the last stop on this venture will be Pictured Rocks National Seashore. If it rains, the stop is canceled until a sunny day. In order to see the full beauty of the colors in the rocks requires bright sunlight.

One reason for taking this driving trip is to test my endurance for even longer trips. At this point, I am inclined to bite the bullet and take a plane on longer trips.

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The Best Plans Often Go Awry

Posted on 22/09/2024 by Grumpa Joe

The best plans a man can make often go very wrong. I plan to leave on a short vacation trip tomorrow. This morning, when I returned from mass, I found myself troubleshooting a new problem. I always park my car in the garage, and today, when I pushed the button on my rearview mirror to have the door open by the time the front bumper reaches the door line, nothing happened. There I sat, pressing the button repeatedly all the time thinking of the definition of insanity, i.e. doing the same thing over and over with no success and expecting a different reaction. Except, I was pressing the button on different places thinking there might be a hot spot on the mirror switch. Then, to my surprise on my final push, the door began to rise. It raised about a foot and then slammed to the ground with a bang. That’s not good, I thought. Oh well, give up and tackle the next problem, like how to get into the house. It is my habit to use the garage as the entrance of choice. This morning I realized that is a bad habit because I don’t carry keys to the storm doors. I went to the front door, and found it locked. I went to the side door and luckily the storm door was unlocked, I’ll have to discuss that matter with Lovely, I thought. She fell down on her job to secure all doors before retiring, but today it was my gift. I entered the house and immediately proceeded to the garage to examine the door. I spotted the problem from twenty feet away. One of the two torsion springs that help raise the door is broken. It broke while lifting the door, so it slammed to the ground. Before that, it was overloading and shutting down with each button push.

The next problem is finding someone to replace the spring on a Sunday. Luckily, I remembered that the previous repair company had placed a tag with their number on the door. I called, and after hearing the line switch three times, a voice came on—a genuine, authentic, human voice. I am now waiting for a serviceman to call back with an arrival time. If I am lucky, I may get to leave on the trip tomorrow as planned.

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Traffic

Posted on 21/09/2024 by Grumpa Joe

The word traffic raises my ire. There are many kinds of traffic, like automobiles, the internet, telephone, accidents, etc. Automobile traffic is the one that gets my nostrils flaming. Thirty-two years ago, I moved to Frankfort because the traffic around my home in Alsip was too heavy. I was a bike rider then and commuted to work by bicycle. Ten miles of pedaling was a healthy challenge every morning., and a hazard in the evening hours on the way home.

This morning, Saturday, I enjoyed the pleasure of driving Lovely to the mall so she could shop without me hanging around her every step. I was amazed by the number of cars on the road. When I first moved to Frankfort in 1991, US 45, also known as LaGrange Road was a lonely two-lane country road. The drive to Orland Park Mall was a joy. This morning, the traffic was heavy, with three lanes of traffic streaming steadily northward toward the mall. There was an especially heavy number of NASCAR wannabes inserting themselves in and out between lanes, recklessly cutting drivers off and endangering themselves and the rest of us in the process. Of course the towns in between have all grown Frankfort is up to twenty thousand, Tinley Park is over 100,000, and Orland Park is most certainly over 100,000. Many of these people have arrived by migrating from Chicago, and Indiana. Chicago is a jobs magnet, and the suburbs are their housing.

This drive got me thinking about Springfield, Ohio, a town of about 50,000 recently inundated with another 20,000 new people. Using a simple ratio, I calculated that for Chicago to appreciate the same extent of hardship, the city of 2,600,000 would have to absorb 1,040,000 new people overnight. Then, I rememberd that Chicago is a convention town. They often have several conventions in town at the same time and can house hundreds of thousands of people in the many hotels. But they couldn’t provide permanent homes for that many people without pushing them into the surrounding suburbs. Even then, the place would be overflowing with tents-camps all around the county. No doubt the weekend people-shot-count would increase. Some Chicagoans are reluctant neighbors even to people they know.

The drain on services would be heavy. The city would be hard-pressed to hire more social services clerks to fill out forms for new residents, and help would only arrive once they had the proper infrastructure to handle the crowd. As the years pass, the tent cities will become permanent, and the auto auctions will be short of used junk cars as the new residents will buy them up and begin driving to their jobs as dishwashers and grasscutters. The city council will be flooded with complaints from the original residents claiming that the local hospitals, like Stroger, County, Rush, University of Illinois, and Northwestern are all going bankrupt because of the flood of new patients coming to their ERs with new diseases they have never treated before. Why is it that the immigrants only become visible in hospitals? How could it be if they come with ailments from countries where healthcare is free?

Just yesterday, I was amazed when I had to take Lovely to Rush Hospital for an MRI that her foreign-speaking doctor ordered for her. Lovely can speak enough English to get by, and she needs help understanding the English words from another mouth. However, she has the luck of the Irish and always encounters a nurse or technician who speaks one of the foreign languages she grew up with. When we checked in at the MRI place the nurse detected her accent within a minute and asked if she spoke Polish. Of course Lovely speaks Polish. That ended her reliance on me. The nurse walked her to the MRI waiting room and inserted a line for use in injecting a contrast to make a better picture. A very attractive red headed technician arrived and within a few seconds she began speaking Russian with Lovely, and that totally ended my job as interpreter and demoted me to driver.

What amazes me is that every hospital or clinic we visit has foreign language interpreters on call to help doctors get the answers they need to diagnose. When a bill arrives from an insurance company, there is always one or more pages with instructions informing a foreign language speaking person of their rights. The instructions are usually one or two sentences, but these same instructions are repeated in many different languages filling two sides of a sheet of paper. Many of the languages use alphabet that are unrecognizable to me, like Russian, Greek, Chinese, and Arabic, and who knows where these countries are and what language they speak. What ever happened to the Ellis Island immigrants who were faced with only english speaking clerks checking them in. It doesn’t matter, we let them in and the government tells them they have rights now.

I feel for Springfield, Ohio. They have a huge cross to bear, but as good Christians, they want to do it. My kudos to them.

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Full Moon and Empty Arms

Posted on 17/09/2024 by Grumpa Joe

Lovely, and I just returned from the birthday party of a dear friend. There were eleven of us attending. I’d say only two were Democrats. The party began at 4:30 in the afternoon, and we exited the party at seven this evening. I’m proud to say we didn’t have a single political discussion. If you knew this group like I do, you would know that what we achieved this evening is damn near impossible.

On the way home, I arrived at a tee intersection, and home was to the left. I spotted a full moon rising to our right and decided to enjoy seeing the moon for a couple of miles before returning home again. We did enjoy the view. I slowed the car to 5 mph to watch the sphere longer. It was huge because it was low above the horizon, and the color was yellow. By the time we arrived home, it was white and above the roof line of our homes. There is something about a full September moon that turns me on and I begin to hum Rachmaninov’s melody to the lyrics of full moon and empty arms.

I’m hoping that the super-moon will bring us world peace, or some magical event, or a medical cure. If we still had shamans and witch doctors, we would better appreciate the grandeur of the astronomical events we saw. Instead, we have CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, FOX, and their counterparts to listen to, and they are all a broken record spieling a bunch of stuff they all believe to be true but are far from it.

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