A Week of Sundays

      When I was a kid there was this thing called Sunday Drives.  That meant our parents would load us all into the car and we'd roam the area to see what we could see.  There was no purpose to the drives, no destination, we would just, well, just drive.  I enjoyed them and would opt to go even when I was a teenager, long after my brother and sister opted out. 
 

  PH and I just returned from another week long road trip into the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (the U.P.) where he was selling farther into the area than we went last May.  This time we were all the way to the border of Wisconsin, sometimes even IN Wisconsin on our way from here to there.  We passed back and forth between two time zones, not ever really sure where we were and when, especially when we were looking for someplace to be open.
    This time we were heading for the Porcupine Mountains, situated on the Lake Superior border way off to your left on the map, bordering Wisconsin in that little corner.
     It was a lot of driving, probably 15 hours to get there. And lots and lots of driving while we were there.  Everything and everybody is at least 30-50 miles apart. It felt like one very long Sunday afternoon. While PH got in and out at various businesses I either sat in the car and read or got out and took a walk.  Depended on how long he would be busy.

 We saw a ghost town, beautifully tended.

 Rogue apple trees everywhere.  They lined the sides of the road and were all different kinds.  One person told me they were probably left from old homesteads and farms, another told me they were planted by the birds.  She has 300 apple trees on her property and she planted maybe a dozen of them. Neither of these explained why they lined the roads so uniformly.

 We stopped at fishing villages

 It rained for a couple of days and since the U.P. is nothing but trees, it's a great breeding ground for fungi. 

 I bought chances on this quilt and learned even the tiniest communities can have a thriving quilt life.

 We saw bears.  Huge, enormous bears.  This wasn't in a zoo, these bears came out of the woods to eat at this site, like in the old days when they would go to the town dump but there aren't dumps anymore....because of the bears.

 We relaxed at the end of a long day in the car, but while PH chose to relax this way,

 I chose to relax this way. 

 On the way home, across that Mackinac Bridge, the one I USED to be so afraid of, we saw a parade of tractors crossing, thank goodness, in the opposite direction from us.  Thank goodness because there were 1,387 tractors taking part and they created an unbelieveable traffic jam.  Phew! We dodged that one!

Statistics:
4 bears
3 bald eagles, one just sitting in a tree on the side of the road ( !!!!!! )
FLOCKS of turkeys...oh, my, they were everywhere
turkey vultures
sandhill cranes
of course, deer
one waterfall
met some really nice people
We listened to two Bill Bryson books while we drove: The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid and laughed out loud, and One Summer  and while we drove I knitted.
I read two books:  Wonder by Emma Donoghue (she wrote Room)  and The Orphan Mother by Robert Hicks
we drove over 1,300 miles

It was a really interesting week but it's good to be home.