“Like an off-brand, bootleg version of the Jules Verne classic.”
Hi there, I didn’t see you come in. Please, have a seat, but don’t plan on staying long, there’s much to be done. I have much to say yet again about things which are neither imperative for your life nor full of meaning. And yet, look at the time! Would you believe it, how time flies? It’s Monday night and I already need to be getting ready for my job tomorrow! And I don’t know have any material to put together for a blog. Oh, what’s a digital rat-man to do? Hmm, well, here’s an idea that I’ve been toying around with for, oh, the last several months or so. Why don’t you write the blog post, this time, hmm? Tell you what, I’ll give you, like, forty photos or something absurd like that, and slap them together in what amounts to glorified PowerPoint slideshow, and you piece it together into a story and write something that’s universally applicable. Good? Great! I’ll have more time to finish Elden Ring.
What? That sounds like a terrible idea? Please, it can’t be that bad. Tell you what, I’ll even throw in some explanatory material for each picture and give a little description of what, exactly, I’ve been doing for the last week or so. You think I was around last week to write that blog post where I complained about Odder Objects for two thousand words? Psssh, as if. I wrote that a week in advance and scheduled it to post in my absence because last week I was, in fact, on another road trip! We were even in Steve-O’s camper van again! In what has become a tradition, apparently, instead of taking a relaxing vacation somewhere, my family has instead chosen to lock ourselves in a metal can on wheels for four hours a day to try and see as much as physically possible for the end of the world. This time, though, it was a bit more laidback.
How? Well, I suppose I can tell you a little bit about it…
Since my dad, Nick, and I didn’t have quite as much time this summer to take a trip compared to our two-week cross-country odyssey last year, we decided to take a few days and go somewhere local instead. My vote had initially been the red-headed stepchild of National Parks, Cuyahoga Valley, in *shudders* Ohio, but we decided instead to do a whole tour around the edge of Lake Michigan and go up into the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Not, like, the official tour or anything, just a kind of “figure it out as we go along” sort of thing. We left Chicago Monday morning and drove straight through *retches* Indiana and on into Michigan, figuring we’ve already seen enough of Chicago’s lake shore. We were gonna stop at the Indiana Dunes or the Warren Dunes, but it was raining and we didn’t feel like it, so we went to the Air Zoo in Kalamazoo instead. Sorry, Genevieve. We did not stop to visit your park.
Funnily enough, we’ve actually been to the Air Zoo before. It is one of four (plus?) fucking aerospace museums I have been to in my life. I don’t even like planes that much, to be honest (I’m more of a rockets kind of guy), but I have somehow been to pretty much every major aerospace museum east of the Mississippi. But, suffice to say for being in Kalamazoo, it’s a pretty high-quality museum. They even have an SR-71 blackbird, which is bonkers cool, and a piece of moon rock in a weird Space Odyssey-esque glass pyramid.
We even stopped in Grand Rapids to visit our spare sibling, Heather! My family used to travel with her family all the time, and she’s been working up that way for a while now, so it was fun to have a chance to see her again.
We spent the night in a cool campground on the shores of Lake Michigan, and had a chance to walk up and down along the beach for a while, which had weird, pacific northwest vibes in the rain. But then next day we did go to a national park type thing for real, because we went to Sleeping Bear Dunes (and it had stopped raining!). We hiked along the dunes and crossed miles of sand and grass to get to the lake shore, only to find it covered in fish. I normally prefer my fish in the water, so that wasn’t too great, but the dunes are very nice! You can run down them as much as you want, but only if you’re prepared to walk back up them.
Why is that sign so surreal and unusually aggressive? Why is that stick-man projectile vomiting all over the sand dunes? The world may never know, but it probably has something to do with the fact that the dunes are like four hundred feet high and very, very steep. But they also have fossils in the rocks, and we spent quite a while breaking open rocks on the backs of people’s heads to find the fossils inside, so that may have been part of it, too.
There were some less-steep and less aggressive dunes that we climbed elsewhere, and those were the ones that eventually led us to the fish beach. And then that night we drove all the way across Michigan to stay on Lake Huron instead, because my delicate sensibilities had been too offended by the number of tourists explosively regurgitating all over the sand.
The worst great lake is probably Lake Erie, because it has the unfortunate distinction of being saddled with the presences of both Cleveland, Ohio and Erie, Pennsylvania, and it set on fire a whole bunch. Just three of the many reasons to avoid Lake Erie, which is exactly what we did! Because after spending the night on Lake Huron, we returned to our trip northward and caught the ferry to Mackinac Island the next day.
I have to say, for being known as a kitschy tourist town full of fudge and lilacs, I was disappointed by the actual lack of kitsch on Mackinac island. Atlantic City this is not. There’s no Ripley’s Believe it or Not museum, as far as I can tell. Conversely, I was pleasantly surprised to find that 80% of the island is just wilderness, and the remaining 20% is walking/biking trails, horses, quaint seaside resorts, interesting historic sites, and a forced labor camp passing off as a Boy Scout summer retreat. I was a tad disappointed by the fudge, though. I’ve had better, to be honest.
There was also a larger cemetery that had a disturbingly high number of what I consider to be “memestones,” or graves/headstones with names that are easily memed. Is using the names of the dead for laughs disrespectful to their slumber? Probably. Am I gonna do it anyway? With some reservations, yes. Do I think it’s funny? Hell yeah. “Am I really gonna defile this grave for money? … Of course I am!” They’re dead, they don’t care.
After being neer-do-wells within the consecrated grounds of a cemetery, we left behind Mackinac Island, though I do hope to return some day. And when I do, I will also be returning to the Mystery Spot, a real place just north of the straits bridge on the Upper Peninsula.
….Except I’m not gonna talk about that right now! Because it is late and I have work tomorrow and you, dear reader, have probably had enough of my shit jokes and old man slideshow presentation for one afternoon. How about we meet back here, same time next week, and I can give you the rest of the pictures and the rest of the story to piece it all together for yourself, hmm? This way I don’t have to stay up until midnight trying to rush something out and then regretting it all day tomorrow! Sound good?
Perfect, great! I’ll see you next week, the door is over there. Watch the dog on the way out, we don’t want him getting outside and being carried off by the unearthly alien bats now, do we? Can’t have any more pets falling into anomalous hands, now that the end of days are upon us. Well, travel safely, and I sure hope that your lich-light doesn’t go out on your way through town and are assaulted by the undead. Au revoir!
F$&king hilarious! You just crack me up. 😊