Ships in locks

Headed west to Gaylord. Took a day trip up north to Sault Ste. Marie across from Canada. There are locks there between Lake Huron and Lake Superior on the St. Mary's river. There are 4 locks and they are huge and similar to our locks in Ballard in look and vintage. They can take 1,000 foot lake freighters that are designed specifically to just fit! Not too many pleasure boats use the locks. We were lucky enough to see 3 major ships pass through.

We took a ferry and spent a day on Mackinac Island. There are no cars allowed so you ride bikes or take horse drawn carriages everywhere. The Grand Hotel is located there and is very much the same as it was in the 1800s. (The movie "Somewhere in Time" was filmed there.) The wonderful coaches that serve the guests are just beautiful with liveried drivers and fine horses. There is no parking lot at the hotel - just a place for bicycles and stables for the horses!
We toured on 3 different team horse drawn carriages. The huge matching horses had great names like Earl, Bubba, and Charlie. We ate lunch at the Yankee Peddler restaurant and had a fabulous pot roast sandwich. The town is beautiful, clean, prosperous and totally charming!

Northern Michigan is really beautiful. It is much like Puget Sound only there are not huge mountains in the distance. It is very clean and neat with commanding views! We like it here a lot.

We are now heading down the east coast of Lake Michigan. We are going to Buchannan where we will leave the motor home and car and fly home on Wed. from nearby Ohare in Chicago.

We have decided to stay home for about 2 months and then come back in the early Fall for a couple more months of travel. We think that Redmond is the best place to be for the hot months of summer. The humidity and bugs are becoming an issue! We have air conditioning, but it gets rather confined in the motor home when the weather is really hot. Carlee and Cody are moving to their new home so we need to help with that and reclaim our house. It will be great to see family and friends who we have missed.

Horray, I was finally able to get the June 3 report to post - been trying for 2 days!

We have been in the Michigan area recently after leaving Indianapolis and our internet service has not been working well here. I have tried to blog several times, but have gotten kicked off and not been able to complete the postings. I am going to try and publish this and hope to get more posted soon. It may be a bit out of order for awhile as I have a lot of time to cover! I hope it works!

We have not had great internet service recently, so I have not had a chance to report! Lots to catch up!



We had a great time at the Indy 500! We were with a group from Camping World and were located in a lot just across from the Speedway with lots of mega motor homes. (No amenities, electricity or water but location was everything.) It was a fun 3 days that included a dinner. We met people from all over. There was lots of celebrating! . The stadium was incredible - you could see grandstands full of people a mile away. The place is not fancy - even the best seats are all hard aluminum benches. They really pack in the 250,000 people. It rained ard in the morning, but stopped in time to dry the track before the start of the race. We sat between the 1st and 2nd turns and there was a lot of action there. It was really interesting to see the safety crews tend to the driver, car, and track after the 5 minor accidents that happened right near us. The noise is awesome -everyone wears ear protection! It rained again after 112 laps and we were able to escape easily to the motor home. Many did go home as there was no cover and it rained hard. Two hours later the race resumed and we walked across the street and saw about 50 more laps before the final rainstorm ended the day. It was to great to be located right there and not to fight the traffic and rainstorms.

Indianapolis is a nice city with some huge monuments and nice parks.

We went north into Michigan for 2 days to recover, do laundry, shop and plan for the next few weeks which will be touring in Michigan and the Great Lakes.

The roads have been very bad lately. It is obvious that hard winters and hot summers have caused numerous chuck holes and heat bumps. Some are very serious and there is no warning. We actually saw a cres on a mojor freeway with no warning signs at all. They had a truck on the shoulder and two guys were throwing shovelfuls of asphalt in the holes between cars going by at full speed.

There are lots of things that we would not see in our area: no helmets for motorcycles or bikes, pickup trucks full of people, unrestrained kids in cars, swimming pools that are not fenced, and workers without safety glasses.

We moved east to the Detroit area. Visited Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan - a huge campus. Detroit is a city in big trouble. There are some positives in the downtown area but it appears that there is not enough prosperity to solve the problems in the surrounding areas. There are nice new condos 2 blocks from the new downtown baseball park that start at $140,000 and don't seem to be selling. The areas surrounding downtown are just bad. There is no attempt at tourism - no tours or anything. Also the local CBS station does not even have news at 11:00. We have not seen a town anywhere that did not have all 3 network news at 11:00!

Drove around the Saginaw Bay area - they call it the "Thumb" and if you look at the map you can understand why. It is largely farmland. The coast has some interesting small towns, but it is really not too well developed for tourists. Each town has several beautiful old buildings, ornate churches and a street of wonderful old houses. We went wading in Lake Huron. It is about 58 degrees and smells and looks like the ocean.

We drove up the Lake Huron coast to Alpena. There are houses and small tourist cottages along the way and modest tourist facilities. All of the houses have signs with cutesy names (Nick's Nook") and lots of yard art and vignettes. We have seen a great deal of yard art in the midwest states - deer, madonnas, cowboy silhouettes, scarecrows and everything else that you can imagine. It must be a kind of "keeping up with the Jones" type of thing here on this coast!