(By Joy)

When Jeff wouldn't get out of bed at the stinky Morley Motel the morning we were headed for Big Rapids, I knew he needed to get off the road for a while and away from Michigan's busy roads, so from our hotel in Big Rapids, I rode a few miles to pick up the 10' truck we'd be riding in the next week. Big Rapids had a nice riverfront bike path, and riding unloaded for the first time this trip was a treat. Since we were renting from Budget rather than U-Haul, we had unlimited miles and decided to make use of them and go see some stuff.

Since Jeff had never been to Lake Michigan except to see it during a visit to Chicago, we headed straight for Ludington, walked out to the lighthouse, paid $2 to climb some very steep ladders/stairs to the top, and had a good lunch at Jamesport Brewery, where Jeff tried to get into my beer sampling but determined that almost all beer tastes the same to him, which is to say, bitter and bad.

After getting a quote for what seemed like a very high price for a not-so-great hotel in town, we decided to head north out of town instead and see what we would see. At some point it became apparent that we might have trouble getting a place since it was the weekend and most places were full, but we weren't really in the mood to camp, so we backtracked to a tiny town with one little roadside motel, one little restaurant, and one gorgeous beach where Jeff got out into the lake and where we watched the sunset. This unexpected little gem of a town turned out to be one of the highlights of our vacation from our tour.

The next day, we were in somewhat familiar (to me) territory since my mom would often bring us on vacations to the area to visit family, so we stopped at the famous Cherry Hut, drove our little moving van out to see the cemetery where my great-grandmother is buried, and headed for Sleeping Bear Dunes. A lowlight of the vacation happened, then, when the National Parks Services people were more interested in writing tickets to people instead of putting up a sign telling them where and how to pay for use of a remote part of the park. I was not a happy camper since it was clear they saw us pull in (they waved at us from their truck) and wrote the ticket while we were wandering around the parking lot trying to figure out how to pay. They canceled the ticket when we came back to the truck 5 minutes later and they told us where the well-hidden pay kiosk was, but the interaction put a bad taste in my mouth for the location, so we moved on up the road, had a nice little picnic next to a large Chinese family, and made it only halfway up the dune climb when the sand proved too hot for my little feet. We decided to see about staying in Traverse City for the night, but as we drove that way, I was checking my phone for hotel rates and saw they were ridiculously high. We ended up not even stopping in Traverse City, a place I'd visited many times as a child, because the National Cherry Festival was going on and there was a bunch of traffic everywhere, and instead opted to head closer to Mackinaw.

The next day, though, we decided to skip Mackinac Island since it's become so touristy and that wasn't what we were in the mood for when we were trying to escape people instead. We thought we'd rather spend our time and money seeing more natural beauty farther north than become part of the tourist hoard tracking down half-pound blocks of fudge, so we went straight up to Whitefish Point instead, had a picnic on the beach, and toured the shipwreck museum and other buildings there and watched a film about the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald. It was a very nice stop, and being cooled by Lake Superior breezes instead of facing hot winds was nice for a change as well.

We made a quick stop at Tettegouche Falls, decided not to camp there since it looked crowded and potentially noisy, and made our way to Munising, where Jeff had to do some work on the computer while I went and explored the town. We took a boat tour of the Painted Rocks National Lakeshore the next morning, which was definitely worth it. We decided, though, that people trapped in boats or planes get weird about snacks. When they announced they had chips for a dollar at the front of the boat, it was like a little stampede of people headed that way to get the oh so exotic Lays and Fritos. One group of older people acted like they'd never seen a bag of potato chips before and bought one of each flavor before the hour was out, passing them around to each other and commenting on their favorites.

After the tour, we had lunch at a great bookstore/coffee shop and then decided to make some miles and finished our drive across Michigan into Wisconsin, where we stayed in a tiny town before heading to Duluth and up the North Shore the next day. We found a great little hotel right on Lake Superior and enjoyed the last day of our vacation from our vacation on the rocky beach there. We were reluctant to leave the next morning, but the truck had to be returned in Iowa, and we had to get back on our bikes soon.

We spent a couple of days with my mom, petting our kitty (she's been staying with my mom during our trip), repacking our stuff, lightening our load, and figuring out a route for the next few hundred miles. I was pretty certain I had a better low-traffic route planned out through Iowa and Missouri that would keep Jeff happy, but I wasn't so sure about the weather. The forecast was still hot, hot, hot, but it was time to ride again.