Michigan

 Well, we're back.  We think this might be PH's last selling trip to the U.P. (Upper Peninsula) For those not familiar with Michigan's layout, here's a map

Now, I know distance is relative.  We are in Kent County, in the bottom third of the state, just east of Grand Rapids.  We drove across the bridge that connects the two peninsulas to the U.P.'s farthest corners. We crossed the bridge and turned left.  By far the most beautiful and rugged  is the Keweenaw peninsula, the little bit that sticks our at the very top. And to get to that tippy top is about a 12 hour drive from home.  Now, as distance is relative, we were the farthest you could go and still be in Michigan.  If we went south we'd drive that long and be in Chattanooga, Tennessee. It sounds like  in Australia, a 12 hour drive gets you to your doctor appointment (small exaggeration there!) and in Europe you could pass through several countries in a 12 hour drive. We didn't do it all at once but if you did that's how long it would take. 

We've done this trip for 6 years  and the route is the same so while PH must make the same sales stops each time we try for doing something different just for us.

We were told last year by people who shared the same motel we always stay at that this is the place to be on Friday night for fish. It's just a food truck on their front lawn.  The husband of the couple who live here is a commercial fisherman in Alaska so they operate this just in May and September when he's home.

I ordered the ribbon fries. They look like potato chips but they were soft and  melted in your mouth. But the fish!!!  All we could say was, "Mmmmm" over and over. SO fresh!!

You can see their front "yard" was huge and while we got there right away, by the time we left the tables were full and families shared empty seats with others.  It was hold-onto-your-hat windy and truly, some food flew right off the plates.

At Fitzgerald's, still on the Keweenaw peninsula just south of Copper Harbor, you needed a reservation if you wanted to eat there.  We stopped one evening to make a reservation for the next.  We had a choice of 4 p.m. or 8:45 p.m.  We chose the first.

Look how close the restaurant on the right is from the lake.  Lake Superior is the  largest, deepest and coldest of the five Great Lakes and the saying is it doesn't give up it's dead.  There are hundreds of shipwrecks in this lake because the storms can be viscious and  can and  does sink ore freighters.  If you go down, you don't come back up.  It's frigid, deep and  rough.   Except for  while we were there. I've never seen Lake Superior this calm, the  whole time we were there!   Barely a ripple.  I sat on this deck and  tried to imagine the November storms and what they must do to this restaurant each November.

See what I mean? Calm.  Unheard of.  This was our view on Tuesday while we ate our pasties for a picnic.

Coming home on Thursday we stopped at Cross Village, at the very tip of the hand of Michigan, just west of the Mackinac Bridge on the map, and ate at Legs Inn.  It's a Polish restaurant serving Polish food and served by a wait staff from Poland.  The owner brings college age students here from Poland for 6 months to work at the restaurant, improve their English and have a couple of months to travel the U.S.  Of course on such a beautiful day we ate outdoors.

I turned around and this was our view of Lake Michigan.

While we drive, because it's so many hours in the car, I   have to do something to keep busy.  I'm not a good passenger, I get bored and antsy.  So this time I knit.  And  by the time we were a couple of hours from returning home I realized my finger joint hurt and when I looked I saw that I  had poked a hole right into my finger with the knitting needle. It was a stiffer yarn and needed some encouraging  with each stitch and eventually a hole wore in to my finger. This wasn't an indent, it was a real hole.

Upon getting home and checking a thousand emails I was so glad to see that Chooky scheduled a zoom session for Friday evening (my time) and since it was another nice day, I sat outdoors zooming for four hours till it got too dark to see my stitching and my battery ran down.  We paid homage to The Queen, pinpointed on  maps exactly where we all lived, had show and tell, caught up.

My work station.  I'm  appliqueing Liberty circles onto backgrounds for a circle quilt.  Friend Barb and I are each doing one and I'm sure she is probably finished with hers.  

And I'll close on this note just to show you how bad it can be here. We joke about not getting  people upset because, as I say, "they'll just pull out their gun and shoot you."  While I say it's a joke, it really isn't, as you can see every single day on the news. 

This is what's wrong.  Notice this fund raiser and the "prizes."  The first prize is  an assault weapon, the kind that is involved in the mass shootings going on every single day in the U.S.  This raffle means any Tom, Dick or Harry nut job out there can purchase a raffle ticket and potentially win an assault rifle. And then use it.  Somewhere. Sometime. Potentially on Someone.