Mackinac Island Getaway

In 13 years of marriage, Shannon and I have spent, I think, 4 nights together away from our girls, and never more than one in a row. So, for a three-weeks-after-our-anniverary gift to ourselves, we went away on our own for three whole nights. (Shannon's parents were nice enough to stay at our house with the girls.) We decided to take our romantic getaway to Mackinac Island, which is a small island between the upper and lower peninsulas of Michigan. (Lesson time: Mackinac Island is near Mackinaw City and yes, that's how you spell each of them. They are both, however, pronounced the same - "Mackinaw".)

Part of the allure of Mackinac Island is that there are no cars on the island. So if the whole point of the trip is to have a relaxing weekend with your spouse, no driving sounds pretty good. In our quest for a quiet, car-free weekend, we strapped our bikes on the back of the car and drove 7 hours to get there. Late May is really the earliest you want to try and vacation in northern Michigan. The daffodils were out up there, and the tulips were just starting, but we mostly avoided the rain and had temperatures in the 50s. The advantage to going in late May though, is that the hotels are about 15% cheaper before the main tourist season starts, and the island is much emptier.

We spent 2 nights on the island at the Cottage Inn, which is an 8 or 9 room B&B. Because I'm nuts, I got up the first morning and went for a run around the island. Literally, I ran around the whole thing, because I guess I wanted to be able to say that I had. (It's 8 miles around.) I went back to the B&B, had breakfast with Shannon and then we rode around the island together. There's a state highway that goes around the island, but because there's no cars you only have to contend with walkers, bikers and horses and horse-drawn carts. (The horses mostly stick to town.) Here are some sights:

 

Arch Rock. This is a sea arch from when the Great Lakes were deeper. This shot is from the road looking up at it. Once you climb the 6 kajillion stairs to the top . . . 

This is from the top of the arch, essentially. You can see the road around the island through the trees.

 Panoramic shot from the arch looking out across Lake Huron

Shannon at the beach. You can see the Mackinac Bridge in the distance, which connects the two Michigan land masses. While I did run and bike the island, we didn't do more than stick a finger in the water - it was extremely cold.

 Shannon at British Landing. The British landed here at night and sneaked up on the American fort on the island before they had even realized that the War of 1812 had started.

 Here's the view from the fort looking down on town. This is the main tourist part of the island. We stayed in the yellow house just to the left of the church steeple. The island is basically just tourists and people there to sell fudge and t-shirts to the tourists. I asked one college aged girl working at the fudge store what they all do on the island for the whole summer. Her response was, "I'll be honest with you. We work a lot of hours, and then we drink."

 From the fort looking over the town and harbor.

Having been around the island on day one, we used the second day to explore the interior of the island and head down dirt roads and trails to exciting sounding places like "Skull Cave" and "Crack-in-the-Island".

 Shannon was super impressed by Skull Cave.

This is Sugar Loaf rock.

This is Shannon standing inside Sugar Loaf rock.

 The sign said that there are many cracks in the island. This is the largest one. I can't imagine how we missed all those other ones.

 

Downtown Mackinac. I even saw a horse drawn street sweeping machine.

The Grand Hotel. We're far too poor to get any closer to the place than this, but it is beautiful.

After two days on the island our rear ends were tired of our bikes. We went back to the mainland and spent a night in Mackinaw City and then drove back home through the Upper Peninsula and Wisconsin. (It wasn't all that exciting.)

MLK Autobiography

For a rare treat, here's an entire post about just one book that I've read recently: The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. You may recall that three years ago, I tried to read a biography of Dr. King, and it didn't go so well. But despite how terrible that other book was, I still wanted to read more about Dr. King, so this was attempt number 2.

As is fairly obvious, this was written by Dr. King (autobiography, duh!) but kinda-sorta not, too. Dr. King never sat down to write an autobiography, so this is more of a collection of his writings that have been compiled to tell his life story. This has both positive and negative effects. On the one hand, there's no author to get annoyed by beyond Dr. King himself, and you get everything from the horses mouth, so to speak. On the other hand, there's no outside analysis of anything going on. No real discussion of greater impacts of his work, no dissenting opinion, and no real closure at the end, obviously. For me, this wasn't too important though.

This was very interesting to read, particularly in the current political climate, and made me think about some of the differences between his work, and what is going on today.

First off, Dr. King was a staunch believer in non-violence. No, that doesn't go far enough. He believed in non-violence not just as the best means to an end for civil rights, but as a moral imperative. He preached constantly that no amount of provocation warranted retaliation - and he remained steadfast in this conviction even as he was insulted, jailed, defamed and has his home repeatedly bombed. He refused to work with other groups that would not agree to his non-violent methods.

Second, the civil rights actions lead by Dr. King had a goal and had a plan. These days there seems to be a march every week or two. A women's march, a march for science or global warming, or something else. And then, having marched . . . . who knows? The famous Montgomery bus boycott spurred by the arrest of Rosa Parks went on for 380 days before their demands were met. For more than a year, people walked, biked and carpooled rather than be further subjected to racism. They didn't have a "March for Civil Rights," they had a focused boycott of a single industry with specific goals and they refused to give up until they achieved those. Other campaigns were focused on voter registration laws, or housing in Chicago.

Finally, it was impossible to read the book without thinking about thinking about what I would have done in that era. He was always quick to point out the many whites that participated in their actions, but was also fearless in calling out those who stood by and did nothing. Millions of people were being systematically kept from voting, from employment, from education, from housing and they were often told that they shouldn't be expecting so much change so fast. They were told that they should be more patient. What would I have done if I were there?

More books

The National Parks: America's Best Idea by Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns
Ken Burns made a documentary about national parks. I haven't seen it. But I have read the book they made to go along with it. This is a large book with lots of pictures; it borders on becoming a coffee table book, but it has plenty of meat to go along with the big beautiful pictures. It covers mostly the early history of the idea of the national parks with a lot of focus on Yosemite and Yellowstone. Having been to more than a dozen of these parks, it was fun every time the book got to one that I was well acquainted with. The book starts with a long preface (it's only like 8 pages, but the pages are really big) that about made me want to poke my eyes out as it went on and on talking about how nature feeds our souls or something like that. Thankfully that part ended and it stayed, for the most part, just a history book.

There's Nothing in this Book That I Meant to Say by Paula Poundstone
I love listening to Paula on Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, and she has a new book out. This is not it. This one is 13 years old. But it was available at my library. The premise of the book is Paula comparing and contrasting herself with historical figures in each chapter. So there's a chapter on Joan of Arc, one on Sitting Bull, one on Hellen Keller, etc. It pretty much goes like this: "When Joan was 17 years old, she took command of a company of troops. When I was 17 years old, I got my first pet turtle." And then you get three paragraphs about the turtle. It seems to be what most comedians do when they write a book - invent whatever system they want which is basically just a vehicle for writing out jokes. But Paula also gets very personal very quickly, covering her arrest for child endangerment, her problems with alcohol, and the year that her kids were taken away from her. And yet, she made me giggle through all of that.

Fletch by Gregory Mcdonald
Hopefully you've seen the film adaptation of this book with Chevy Chase, because it's terrific. Tracking down this book, though, was a lot harder. It was written in the 70s, and doesn't seem to be widely available. The movie follows the book relatively closely, so if you've seen the movie there won't be too many surprises. It was a good read, though, if you pick it up, be warned that there is more drug use, prostitution and language than the movie has.