Friday, July 28, 2006
A Week in Michigan: Part 1
As I mentioned previously, the first real stop on this trip is a week on the shore of Lake Michigan with my mom, dad, and sister, and my brother's kids. My brother is there as well for the first day only before he has to go back to Ohio and work, which is part of why I had to speed across most of Pennsylvania and all of Michigan to get here.We're at a place called Palisades Park Country Club, where my mother's father built two cottages about seventy years ago. One of them still belongs to my mom's sister, and three of her kids and their kids are around. My parents have rented a cottage fronting the lake about a quarter-mile up the beach. Aside from the beach, there are dunes and woods to explore and a few tennis courts, but mostly it's about waking up in the morning, going for a swim, coming in for breakfast, reading the paper, going for a swim, eating lunch, taking a nap, going for a swim, making dinner, watching the sunset, reading a book, going to bed, getting up and doing the same thing all over again. It's a pretty idyllic place.
Well, except for this, which is right next door:
(My various relatives will likely disagree, but in truth I have to say the folks of Consumers Power have been pretty good neighbors for the last thirty years or so. But all in all, I think I'd rather vacation next to the Palisades plant than the noxious exhausts of a coal-fired plant. Of course, that statement could be rendered completely risible tomorrow.)
Anyway, vacation:
My first day at Palisades Park happens to be the day of the annual Half-Mile Swim, a race / endurance test for the kids vacationing at the park. They have to swim a half-mile down the lake without touching bottom. It means everybody I'm there to see is gathered to see the start:
That's my sister Kathy and cousin Amy in the left foreground. Here's another shot of them engaged in a favorite family activity:
There are probably fifty people taking pictures at the swim, and I'm related to about 48 of them.
I do a few other things in Michigan besides go to the beach. For one, I finally get my bike out of the car and take it for a ride on the Kal-Haven Trail, which runs from the nearby town of South Haven to Kalamazoo. That's about thirty-five miles; I do the first third or so to a dot called Grand Junction.Once you get past the dunes on the shore, this area continues to be fully midwestern in its flatness, but the dominant crop in this part of the world is blueberries. On the return leg of my ride I pass a group of laborers who have just emptied their machine and are getting ready for another pass through the field. I ask if I can take a picture of their machine, and they oblige. They're from Monterrey, but clearly spending a good part of the year up here: after the blueberry season they're off to Wisconsin to pick apples. And then home for Christmas, one of them tells me.
This is how your blueberries get picked.
The fellow on the left, who did almost all of the talking, seemed a bit amazed by my willingness to drive from one end of the country to the other. But Monterrey, Mexico, to South Haven, Michigan, looks to be about 1800 miles, and I'm guessing they did it in considerably less accommodating conditions than a 2005 Element.
On the way back to town I pass a couple of noteable signs, like this one:
which is not far from this one:
And I later pass this one, which causes me to consider, for Judy's sake, another possible definitional criteria: the Midwest is where they call it "pop." I do not, however, stop to investigate why "restroom" is encased in quotation marks.
