Country Back Roads and Other Rainy Places: Michigan Tour of the UP

Michigan Tour day one

We pulled out Thursday around 9:00 AM, 9/5 headed for Michigan. We were headed for an “Adventure Cycling Tour”. Around 9:30 PM we pulled into a Holiday Inn in Dundee, Michigan for the night. We were still 300 miles from Mackinaw our final destination. We were finding the great frozen North to be a long way from Travelers Rest, SC.

Friday 9/6

We got up around 7:00 and headed for breakfast. We quickly noticed we were right next door to Cabela’s. We could not leave without checking it out, and man is that place huge! It also full of more stuffed animals than most zoos have alive. The Cabela’s, Dick and Mary, must have come close to single handedly causing the extinction of half a dozen different species. I couldn’t find a single animal they had not killed, multiple times!

We finally arrived at the Tee Pee campground around 3:00. The weather has been beautiful but we can suck the joy right out of a pretty day when we setup a tent. Today seems to be no exception. The forecast is for rain tonight but for now the sun is shining and we head to town.

Mackinaw City is a tourist town on the dividing line between Lake Michigan and Lake Huron. Neither of us has ever seen the Great Lakes and these were pretty cool. We could not get over how clear the water was, even along the docks. The town itself looked like many tourist town we had seen before but we enjoyed it anyway. As usual Susan bought lots of stuff and I caught up on my reading. Got to love those Kindles.

After eating supper downtown we headed back to camp in a light sprinkle. Within the hour it was a down pour. Now, we have three tents. The one we bike camp with which is absolutely waterproof. It is almost submersible, but it is small. We didn’t take that one. We have a big tent we truck camp with. It is an LL Bean and it’s like having a roof over you, but it is heavy. We didn’t take that one either. We also have a 4 man dome tent we bought for sixty bucks brand new when we first started camping because it was cheap. It is also now old. We took that one. Brand new it was barely moisture proof. As we lay in the tent I soon discovered it had gotten worse. Much worse. Water seeped through the fly and ran down the underside of the fly until it dripped into the tent making small puddles around our queen size blowup mattress. Fortunately we were high enough above the puddles to stay dry. That was night one.