The next morning I got up early and cleaned off my bike with some bike rags that the hotel wisely provided. You don't want people using the guest towels to clean motorcycles. There were a couple of guys loading up their bikes to go golfing! One of them had a beat-up old Gold Wing from the 70's. He threw his club bag on the bike and made another ding in the gas tank. They were a jovial bunch and nothing seemed to bother them. Upper Michigan sure is a funny place
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We stopped at a lighthouse along the way.
There were 4th of July celebrations going on in some of the towns. In one town, the Air Force flew a couple of fighters over the parade. You can't see them in this picture because they are so stealthy. And fast.
Since the growing season is so short, the flowers try extra hard in the time that they have. Some of the colors are spectacular shades, and there were some purple flowering trees that were fantastic.
And waterfalls,
We ran into this hombre at a gas stop so we rode with him for a while on the way to Escanaba, then we stopped at a good Mexican place and had dinner. On the way there, I had see a deer bolt out of a yard and sprint across all of the lanes of the highway without hitting anything. It was amazing. The hombre headed off into the sunset, and we found ourselves a liquor store and then a campsite.
We set up in a nice campground just outside Escanaba.
I had drank a couple of 40's before hitting the sack so I got up in the middle of the night to take a leak. It was dark and I was sort of sleepwalking and I heard this low roaring machine noise coming through the woods so I started walking towards it. It was a big factory of some kind, covered with pipes and lit up like a miniature sun in the middle of the night. It looked very surrealistic out there in the Michigan woods.
The next morning we got an early start and headed south into Marinette, Wisconsin. We drove along the bay to Oconto, then headed back along more familiar roads westward across Wisconsin back to Eau Claire. There was some exceptional scenery along the bay, especially with the morning sun breaking low across the water. It was the end of another sweet trip. Thanks for coming along for the ride!
POST SCRIPT:
Remember the poison ivy I told you about in the beginning of this story? Well, it wasn't from picking berries at all. It was from a tire iron that I had found in the road during a pub crawl a few days earlier. I heard cars hitting it from a mile away, so I ran out and got it out of the road. I hid it in the weeds and picked it up on my way home. I had to dig around in the weeds in the dark to find it. I put it in my garage and forgot about it. Then we went on our Michigan trip. After I got back, I happened to look at those weeds in the daylight, and I could see that it was a patch of solid poison ivy! Mystery solved! Also another example of no good deed going unpunished.