Rear-view mirror

        In the week since we got back from Michigan, I’ve boiled down the trip into a couple succinct impressions. To wit:

n The weather was good when we needed it to be good, which was that one day on Mackinac Island. That’s where I got all the sun that’s still making me tan.

 

 

n When my sensitive tooth acted up in Mackinaw City the night before we went to the island, the nearest bottle of aspirin was at WalMart, some 20 minutes away, or down in Cheboyban, which was even further. Fortunately, the island had aspirin. In Doud’s, the nation’s oldest grocery store.

 

Mackinac Island was the highlight of the trip. And the highlight had its highlights:

n We spent the most time at Fort Mackinac, witnessing a rifle firing and a cannon firing and poking our noses into almost all the buildings. A backwater after the War of 1812, but great history there.

 

n Tourists that we are, we lingered on Main Street, with its bicycles and horse-drawn carts (no cars allowed on the island). We immediately were drawn to the island’s signature fudge shops. We bit first at a new Sanders in a  bicycle-themed shopping arcade, then discovered fudge-making in progress at Murdick’s, the island’s original purveyor. Fascinating, the way they pour the hot liquid onto marble tables, then shape it as it cools. The guy at Murdick’s turned the shaping process into a dance and was the most artistic fudge guy we saw all day.

 

n Big disappointment was the island’s most prominent attraction, the Grand Hotel. $10 just to walk in the door and an officious young woman making sure you didn’t get too close to the entrance without anteing up. Brother Bill, his wife Sue and I opted for $5 ice cream cones while Monica paid her $10, went inside and took pictures. Not that much to look at, she reported.

 

Secondary highlight was Frankenmuth, the “Little Bavaria” Christmas community, which we reached by driving through a torrential rainstorm, like going through a 50-mile-long car wash at 75 mph. Happily, it let up long enough for us to hit the biggest tourist traps:

n What else would you eat in Frankenmuth but one of the famous chicken dinners at Zehnder’s, where there’s a sign posted saying it’s served the most meals of any independently-owned restaurant. (Unless, of course, you’re Monica and order a Caesar salad.) Quantity did not equal quality, however. The fried chicken dinner was merely OK, and our poor waitress in her German peasant uniform was just plain inept.

 

n Where else would you duck into when the rain started up again but Bronner’s, the world’s largest Christmas store? It was so overwhelming that I went through all five stages of denial, finally arriving at acceptance, i.e, feeling the urge to buy an overpriced Chinese-made ornament. As if we ever have a tree on which to display it.

 

And then there are the things that I’ll hardly ever get around to mentioning:

n Best idea that ought to get transplanted to Buffalo – the Great Lakes Maritime Heritage Center in Alpena. Basically, it’s a museum of shipwrecks, mostly Lake Huron shipwrecks – Alpena has seen hundreds – and it was an hour-plus well-spent. Lake Erie has seen some pretty spectacular shipwrecks, too. Add in the War of 1812 boats, the Crystal Beach boats and the Erie Canal barges, plus some lake weather-related exhibits (the Seche of 1844, the Blizzard of 1977) and we’d have a terrific addition to Canalside.

 

n Eating and drinking local. In northern Michigan, that means fish – whitefish and bass, breaded and fried. (Monica stuck to chicken.) I went for fish entrees in Alpena and Mackinaw City, even had a fish sandwich during our late lunch under the spiffy tin ceiling at Horn’s Gaslight Bar and Restaurant on Mackinac Island’s Main Street (a tip from the Win-Some Women conference-goers we sat next to on the ferry). Michigan wines are a pale shadow of New York wines and internet commentators say the only ones worth drinking are the Reislings. Most Michigan wines we saw were pricey and Monica wouldn’t chance them. Craft beers, on the other hand, are abundant and I sampled several. That fish sandwich at Horn’s was washed down with a couple Widow Maker Black Ales from Keweenaw Brewing Co. in Houghton, Mich., which I highly recommend.
 

 

n Best accommodations? Brother Bill’s house. Separate bedrooms. Our own bath. A shower with multiple heads and a built-in radio. And, after the weather turned cold upon our return, that fabulous radiant heating system. Warm tile floors. Heaven! On the road, heat was quirky – either too hot or too cold – during our two nights in the lakeside Best Western in Mackinaw City. And the best that can be said about the Days Inn in Alpena is that it was cramped, minimal and nondescript.

 

n Which are faster – the Canadian expressways or Highway 3 and the local roads? Buffalo to Highland, Mich., took 6½ hours, using the two-lane routes to cut off the loop through Hamilton, Ont. Highland back to Buffalo via the 402, the 401, the 403 and the Queen Elizabeth Way took roughly the same 6½ hours, thanks to getting lost in construction detours approaching the Blue Water Bridge in Port Huron, Mich., an extra Tim Hortons stop, and rush hour crawls on the Lincoln M. Alexander Parkway in Hamilton and the QEW. Give me the local roads, please.

The mother of all mother's days

12 May 2014

Spring days don’t get any better than the 100th anniversary of Mother’s Day in lower Michigan. Shorts and shirtsleeve weather. The thunderstorms they were predicting never showed up. Brother Bill went off to promote something he’s doing at a go-kart race and we found a Starbucks in the nearest Target store to fuel up for our drive to see Monica’s cousin Ronnie outside Ann Arbor.

Actually, Ann Arbor, which is totally overwhelmed by the University of Michigan, isn’t that far from where we’re staying – half an hour, maybe less, down Route 23. Our destination, however, was the countryside outside the town. That turned out to be a little more complicated and, once again, it was complicated even further by the iPhone GPS.

Out here the famous Eight Mile Road, the dividing line between Detroit and its northern suburbs, turns to dirt, as do several other roads leading up to it. Ronnie lives on a dirt road off a dirt road off the dirt part of Eight Mile and, thanks to the GPS, we saw a couple more dirt roads getting there. There’s a bit of an uproar in Michigan about the roads, which in general are crappier than the ones around Buffalo, and even more of an uproar about how much money is needed to fix them up, which nobody wants to spend.

We wondered just how rustic Ronnie’s place would be, but it turned out to be another version of my brother’s spread. A little less land, a little smaller country house, a somewhat smaller barn, but with just as many cars in it. Maybe more. We didn’t see them all.

What we did see were three Ford Pintos from the ‘70s, two with California plates still on them, and a red DeTomaso Pantera, a sleek, low-slung, Italian-built race car, also from the ‘70s. Ronnie said she drove it once and zipped up to 130 mph in seconds.

Ronnie’s husband, J.C., whose profession was hinted at by the three pistons atop their mailbox, is a Ford man who worked for many years for Roush, a Ford-based NASCAR racing team, traveling all over with them, fabricating engine parts and such. He once drove the Pantera to Vancouver.

At any rate, Ronnie, a retired teacher who works part-time at the U of M Medical School as a practice patient, took us into Ann Arbor and gave us a little tour of the town and the two U of M campuses.

J.C. fired up the grill when we got back and, while I drank hard cider and made friends with their dog, Jethro, he tended to racks of ribs (chicken for Monica). It was a classic barbecue dinner – beans, coleslaw with a kick (jalapeno peppers in it) and roasted potatoes – along with the Menage a Trois red wine we bought Saturday at the gas station-liquor store joint.

We begged off on dessert – brother Bill had a tart cherry pie that he pulled from the freezer and baked up Saturday night – and got back to Highland with the low fuel warning light flashing. Next to the gas station, in what I’m starting to recognize as classic Michigan symbiosis, was a party store and, voila, more Yellowtail Bubbly! This time there was a choice – white or rose. Same low price. $9.99.

Michigoing, michigoing, michigone

On the face of it, going to visit my brother and his wife in Michigan should have been effortless. Sunshine. No line at the Peace Bridge. No line at the often-congested Blue Water Bridge from Sarnia, Ont., to Port Huron, Mich., either.

I never have a problem at the bridge when I go to St. Catharines, Ont., every Friday to play cards. But tell the customs inspector that you’re going to Sarnia, or that you’ve come across from Buffalo, and they want to know more. At Port Huron, the guy wants us to open the trunk. Monica thinks this is all my fault. Stop chatting them up, she says. Don’t tell them anything.

I know, I know, if there’s any fault around, it’s mine. It was certainly my fault, since I was behind the wheel when we started this trip about 1:30 p.m., that we didn’t take the expressway, the Queen Elizabeth Way, up to Niagara Falls, over to St. Catharines and Hamilton and then onto two other expressways – Highways 401 and 402 to Sarnia.

And why should I? Look at the map and that’s a loop. The direct route is local, Highway 3, to the halfway point, around London. But after slow going through Port Colborne and Dunnville and a few smaller towns that hardly rated a post office and a Tim Hortons doughnut shop, Monica had enough.

She forgot her main GPS unit – the Garmin – but she still had two others to consult (the car’s in-dash unit and the one on her iPhone) in lieu of looking at the falling-down barns, the horses and some shaggy yak-like cattle, and the yards blazing with dandelions. What the phone GPS was telling her, whenever it would find a signal in the boonies, was that we should immediately turn down the nearest side road and find that stupid expressway.

Eventually, succumbing to predictions that we would arrive an hour later than we allegedly should, I took one of those side roads, came up on the backside of the Hamilton, Ont., airport and connected with Highway 403, thence to the 401 and 402. The Acura ILX’s running gas mileage report, which ran up to more than 35 mph on the back roads, sank to a fairly steady 33.3.

 

After a pit stop at a Tim Hortons near Woodstock, Ont., we switched drivers, which gave me a shot at putting the albums I brought along into the car CD player – the Both (I still haven’t heard enough of that one); "Shine On," the new Sarah McLachlan (which Monica couldn’t stand); and the latest from bluesman Ray Bonneville, "Easy Gone."

A sign along the 402 warned of what happens to anyone who exceeds the 100 kilometer-per-hour speed limit by 50 kph, which would be around 93 mph – a $10,000 fine, immediate seizure of your license and same for your car. What happens if you do only 145?, Monica wondered. Fortunately, she wasn’t going that fast when we spotted the only Ontario Provincial Police radar car we saw all afternoon.

GPS guides aren’t infallible, we discovered in Michigan. Ours routed us down a six-lane main highway lined with malls and choked with late afternoon shoppers. Think Niagara Falls Boulevard without an end. Here we found a gas station-convenience store that also sold wine, albeit at prices Monica didn’t want to pay. I, however, had no trouble picking a $9.99 of something from Yellowtail called simply “Bubbly.” Turned out to be a lot more drinkable than the alternatives on the shelves – Friexenet, Cook’s and Asti.

Other better liquor stores showed up further down the road into Pontiac, but the landscape continued to baffle me. This isn’t how we usually go to brother Bill’s house. It was a lot less countrified. Once we arrived shortly after 7, we learned that the GPS took us on the shortest route, but not the best one.

After a tour of my brother’s expanded pole barn – it’s doubled in size since the last time we saw it, in order to accommodate half a dozen vintage Chevys and Plymouths from the 1930s, plus a Model T Ford – we opened that wine and settled down to dinner and a round of Cribbage.

The accommodations, meanwhile, are far superior to what we offer Bill and his wife Sue when they come to Buffalo on Thanksgiving. There’s like a little apartment on the north end of the second floor of his house – a bookcase-lined den with a high-def TV over the fireplace, a full bath and a bedroom, with a privacy shade that can be pulled down to block it all off. I opened a bedroom window to let in some country air. The first time I awoke, around dawn, there was a hallelujah chorus of birds.