St Ignace to Empire, MI

We stopped at the Father Marquette National Memorial in St Ignace to take a picture of the Mackinac bridge from that perspective.

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Then we, finally, crossed the bridge.

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It’s a toll bridge but so it cost us $7 for our two-axle motorhome.

So we are no longer on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, generally referred to as the UP, where the residents are known a Yoopers.

I would have sworn the sign said this stretch of road is maintained by the “Straits Area Geocaches.” It must have said “Geocachers” though, since geocachers are people and geocaches are the things they hide. Geocaching is a fun activity that is very popular with RVers since they can hunt caches all over the world. We’ve hunted a few and will likely do more some time as they often lead us to interesting sites.

In Pellston, Michigan, the train depot is now an historical museum. Lots of former train depots have been converted to other uses. The most common seems to be history museums, art galleries, coffee shop/cafe’s, realty offices, and visitor center/CVB offices. On our former Midland Industrial Railroad we modeled several of those conversions. If you are interested you can see some of them in the photos on our web site at http://www.sandsys.org/. Click on Model Railroading then Models Built.

The sun came out which has happened so rarely lately that I felt compelled to comment.

We stopped at Walmart so Dave could drop off a new prescription. Unfortunately we did that when the pharmacy was closed for lunch. Oh, well.  the best laid plans and all that.

We stayed the night at Fisherman’s Island State Park. We could only stay one night because the site, #34, was already reserved for the next night. For $12 we had no hookups but we did have a lake view with our own section of beach.  Nice, huh?

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The next day we moved on to Traverse City, Michigan, where we had better luck with the timing of our visit to their pharmacy.

I saw a sign that said, “Viewtiful weddings.”  Cool word.  OK, it’s not a word but it is very descriptive.

The next sign said, “Peace Pole Makers.” What’s a peace pole? I’ve heard of a peace pipe and a totem pole but not a peace pole. I’ve never heard of a war pole either. Although, I suppose a lance could be called a war pole.

So, I looked it up on the internet and learned “A Peace Pole is a hand-crafted monument that displays the message and prayer May Peace Prevail on Earth on each of its four or six sides, usually in different languages. There [are] tens of thousands of Peace Poles in 180 countries all over the world dedicated as monuments to peace.” It’s part of the same movement that displays those “Visualize world peace” bumper stickers. I’m in favor of world peace but I prefer the bumper sticker that say, “Visualize whirled peas.” That one tickles my funny bone.

Then we traveled on to Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. But that place deserves it’s own blog so I’ll stop this one here.

TTYL,

Linda

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