Grumpy Bulldog Does America Day 2: Loose Ends

Today I went from Lake to Lake, as in Huron to Michigan.  Now I'm in Stevensville, MI, which is near Benton Harbor/St. Joseph, which is near the Indiana border.

It took a circuitous route getting here.  Something I realized last night is that motels, especially, old cheap ones, suck at having outlets available.  And of course I have a lot of stuff that needs charging--laptop, cell phone, MP3 players, etc.  It occurred to me I have like a half-dozen extension cords in the storage unit where I put my shit and that the storage unit isn't really that far off of I-94, which was on my route.

So the first thing I did was go to the storage unit.  The extension cord I wanted was right inside the door.  It's one of those that you can roll up and has four outlets, so that should be good, though of course tonight I don't need it.  I also rearranged some furniture to make more room and access my file cabinet, where I'd left my passport.  Now I can go to Canada or Mexico!

I decided for the hell of it to visit Atchison Park in Lyon Township.  It's another one of my favorite places.  There's so much you can do:  walk, play basketball, play baseball, and so forth.  And there's a really nice view of the surrounding area.  Most Saturday evenings it was pretty free of people.  It's just too bad in the last few years they've neglected mowing parts of it, so it's harder to navigate.  Anywhere, here are some pictures of it:

After that I went to Howell to a Chinese restaurant with good food but crappy service.  I stopped for gas too and finally remembered to reset my trip odometer so I can keep track of how many miles I've gone.  It's close to 200 for the day.

On the way to Stevensville, it became clear that semis are going to be my bane.  It's awful on a highway with only two lanes when you get one semi attempting to pass another.  It takes forever and everyone else has to slow down 10-15mph to wait while this selfish jackass finishes going around the other truck.  The worst was when this one semi at the back of a convoy decided he had to prove how macho he was by going to the head of the pack, which took miles and miles.  Ugh.  And there are those people who just go so slow they might as well be a semi.

Here are some random pictures from along the way:

I've probably been to the lighthouse pictured in my motel room here, though my pictures aren't so big.  After chilling out in the room for an hour or two, I went wandering around.  I wanted to find Lake Michigan.  Of course the fat cats make that hard by always fencing off so much of it.  

First I stumbled onto this little park with a swampy lake, where I attempted to clean my windshield:

See the frog?

I did eventually find a winding trail that went to a little beach, so I was able to see Lake Michigan with the sun starting to go down:

This is the kind of stuff my nature photographer character Frank Hemsky would do in The Best Light.  Except his pictures would turn out better I'm sure.

Tomorrow I head to the Chicagoland area.  I hope I don't get there at a peak traffic time, because the commuter traffic there is about a hundred times worse than Detroit, yet probably a thousand times better than LA.

Until next time...