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.