To Mackinac and Back

And once again, I’ve had a severe lack of bloggish activity lately. As usual, real life has been a bit busy of late. I’ll try to catch up, starting with this post.
I’ve sure been putting the miles on my car the last month. Five weekends ago I drove to Valpo to visit Alex, four weekends ago I drove to Ithaca to visit Carl & Seth, and then two weekends ago I drove to northern lower Michigan to visit Alex again. Now I’ve got well over 231,000 miles on my Mazda, and it’s still ticking (well, mostly — more on that in a bit). I wanted to go visit Alex some weekend this summer at the University of Michigan Biological Station (UMBS), where he’s doing research until mid-August, and that was the weekend that looked like it’d work out best overall. His project at UMBS hadn’t really started in earnest, he didn’t have specific tasks to complete over the weekend, and neither did I with my project. I also had never been to that part of Michigan before, so I was looking forward to visiting a new part of the country.
It’s a really long drive from State College to UMBS, about 650 miles, or about 11 hours (counting stops). Basically, drive about 6 hours west to Toledo, then about 5 hours north to UMBS. With it being such a long drive, we arranged for me to stay up there for two full days and three nights. It’s still not a lot of time, but two days is better than one! So once Alex got confirmation from his supervisor that he could have the weekend off, I headed out from State College around 10am on Friday morning the 5th, and got to UMBS at 9pm. I had a bit of a backache from helping move a couple of couches on Thursday (Kent was moving to Oklahoma and graciously donated his couch to upgrade the craptastic one in our office in Walker, the one that was so bad and old that the foam was turning to powder!), and also had a wee bit of a sore throat, so the drive felt like it was taking longer, at least the first half to Toledo. With UMBS being a bit more than 4 hours north of Ann Arbor, I quickly became glad that Alex will be going to grad school in Ann Arbor, and not way up at UMBS. 🙂
One humorous thing is that I threw away part of my car on the way up there. I was at a rest stop near Gaylord, Michigan, and when I came out I noticed not one but two things hanging down from my car. I knew what the first one was (a piece of rubber lining or insulation along the bottom of my rear passenger door), but the second one was new. Turned out it was a rusted piece of metal, perhaps from my heat shield. It came right off when I grabbed it, so I threw it in the trash can at the rest stop. Clearly, Michigan is part of the rust belt. 🙂 So my car was a bit louder from then on, but still worked fine (and then there was a second piece of rusted metal just like it hanging down that I removed Monday night).
After I got there Alex gave me a quick tour of UMBS (gotta love long summer daylight north of 45¬∞N!), and met some of the other students who were living there. It’s a small campus, in the middle of the woods, and several miles from the nearest town (Pellston, a town of maybe 300 people), and about 20 miles from any reasonable-sized city (Petoskey, Mackinaw City, Cheboygan). It’s a campus primarily for students in ecology and environment-related majors at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor to take a class or two, in a setting that’s not far removed from camping. Most of the students stay in little one-room, two-person, un-insulated huts that have a wood stove and no bathroom. Oh, and no locks. Pretty rustic. Alex had nicer accommodations, in a cabin at the top of the hill above the rest of the campus. When I was there he was the only one staying in the cabin, but eventually this summer there’ll be anywhere from 9-12 people in there (there are 3 beds in each of 4 small rooms). That’s another reason I went there when I did, because there was still room for me in the cabin and wasn’t anyone else around (even though I still had to pay UMBS each night to stay there…). The campus also has a central dining room, but each meal is only served for one hour, so everyone gets on a pretty regimented schedule. It’s also a bit on the expensive side for guests, so we didn’t eat there at all on Saturday.
On Saturday Alex needed to get a bunch of supplies for the research lab, so we went to the local hardware store in Pellston for a bit. While we were there I was able to find a screw for my camera’s “gorillapod,” as I’d lost the screw a few months ago somehow. 17 cents isn’t a bad price to pay to have a working tripod again, that’s for sure! Then it was time for lunch, and we went to Mackinaw City, after poking our heads in a roadside saloon in Levering and realizing that we were definitely, umm, outsiders. Aside from nobody noticing that we were even there, all the NASCAR flags adorning the inside of the establishment indicated it was a bit too “hey buddy.” So we moved on. After lunch we drove across the Mackinac Bridge (my first time seeing the world’s longest suspension bridge) and walked around Straits State Park for a bit — my first time being in the Upper Peninsula. That day, incidentally, also happened to mark one year since we first met, so it was fun for us to reflect on our friendship for the past year. A lot of good memories. 🙂

After being in Straits State Park for awhile, we drove over to Cheboygan, so that I could get my first daytime view of Lake Huron (I “saw” it in the middle of the night in April 2005 at Sarnia/Port Huron while en route from Boston to Minnesota via Niagara Falls). At the beach there in Cheboygan they had a stubby little lighthouse, and a pier that had plenty of rocks that made for good rock-hopping.

After we’d gotten plenty chilled by the lake breeze (temps were only in the low 60s), Alex & I went back to the PROPHET tower & lab where he works, the Program for Research on Oxidants: Photochemistry Emissions and Transport. He’s there for the CABINEX field campaign, the Community Atmosphere-Biosphere Interactions Experiments. (Alex also made and maintains the CABINEX website.) We both got all harnessed up, and climbed up the 102-foot tower! He has to climb up it fairly regularly to repair or replace various instruments that are at the top of it. While I’m not afraid of heights, I do have a healthy respect for them, so I was kind of nervous about climbing the tower, even with all the safety equipment. But it really was pretty fun to get up there way above the treetops and look out over the forest below. You can even see Mackinac Bridge way in the distance (15-20 miles) from the tower! For a bit of fun we also had a legitimate spitting contest at the top of the tower too, haha. I had been a little nervous about bringing my camera up there, for fear of accidentally dropping it from some great height, but Alex doesn’t yet own a camera (his last one broke a couple years ago while storm chasing), and he wanted some pictures from up there to send to people, so he told me, “You’re bringing your camera up there.” I’m glad I did! There really wasn’t much risk involved in climbing the tower thanks to all the safety equipment, but it was still one of the more “adventurous” things I’ve done. Maybe I need to get out more. 🙂

Then on Sunday the 7th we played some piano for a bit, as the lecture hall/auditorium had two (slightly out of tune) cabinet pianos. My cough was really starting to bother me at that point though, so we had to cut that short. 🙁 Fortunately by then the sun had surprisingly come out, and with it all of a sudden being a nice day, we decided to walk a mile or down the shore of Lake Douglas, to check out a different part of the lake (and a seagull colony). There were plenty of fun downed or leaning trees to climb too. We both slipped and almost lost our balance at different times, but somehow neither of us fell into the lake. 🙂

After dinner we both started over again on our Bible reading plan too, as we’d both fallen off the pace pretty badly. We decided it was easier to start over rather than both of us try to catch up. Third time’s the charm??
It was time to hit the road at 9am on Monday the 8th. I was a bit tired, however, because I only got 2-3 hours of sleep Sunday night. I woke up in the middle of the night and then just could not get back to sleep (partly because I was starting to come down with a cold?). Those nights are pretty frustrating when they happen. I made it back to PA safely, but not without a small adventure a couple hours into the drive… That rest stop came at a fortunate time, let’s just say that. (But I’m okay, Mom! Don’t worry!)
At any rate, it was a really good visit, and good to hang out with Alex again. I’m glad I made the trip. It was a really long drive, but I thought it was well worth my while. It was cool to see where he’s living and working this summer and to climb the tower and everything, and to take in some pretty scenery in northern Michigan. (And as an extra bonus, I’ll get to color in several more counties on my map, haha.) It was definitely a long enough drive that I won’t be making another trip up there this summer, however, unless it’s on my way through to Wisconsin after I’m done with comps in August. I think I’ll definitely appreciate the substantially shorter drive to Ann Arbor when I visit this fall and beyond!