I don't know if Kevin and I necessarily come across this way, but we kind of do things on a whim. Unless the activity we're doing needs a babysitter, we just kind of do things.
Although our success rate is generally low when it comes to recruiting people to join our last-minute escapades, we were lucky enough to find friends willing to join us in seeing the major sights of the Upper Peninsula in a day (even after we changed the plans on them a couple of times). I chalk it all up to my skills in persuasion -- "If you come with us, you get to spend about twelve hours in the car with . . . . us."
By some miracle, they agreed to it! And so we found ourselves Friday night buying snacks, looking at dozens of tourism websites, making sandwiches, and having trouble falling asleep in anticipation for our adventures that would begin in about 5 hours.
The next morning, we all met at the church and headed north. A couple of hours into the drive, Kevin noticed the sunrise in the rear view mirror.
And that's when things got really good. Suddenly, we were enveloped in a world of vibrant reds and oranges and gliding through dense golden forests. As far as we could see there were tunnels and rolling hills of color.
Not, of course, that my camera could capture it.
I definitely tried though.
We arrived in Mackinaw City a little after 9 and decided to see the McGulpin lighthouse. Maybe it's just that I'm a bit taller than I was the last time I saw lighthouses, but this one was significantly shorter than I remembered those lighthouses being. They told us it still worked great, and since we saw it lit up later that night, I suppose they were right.
Chelsie and Lyndon! . . . and Kevin's shadow and Joseph.
Just us and our shadows.
We all liked throwing rocks in the water (especially at a big rock because they would break), but Joseph threw the biggest one.
No lighthouse is complete without an organ. How else would you play songs like this?
Don't get vertigo.
The view from the lighthouse.
After swinging past another lighthouse and a colonial thing that cost money, it was time to cross the bridge! It didn't collapse while we were on it, so we made it to the Upper Peninsula! At this point, I would have been content to turn around -- we had seen fall colors and we had set foot in the UP, but we figured that since we were here, we may as well actually see it.
And so we continued on. To our amazement, Joseph hardly protested being in his car seat so much of the day. I suppose when you've got two humans, one bear, one elephant, one gecko, one giraffe, and one meerkat to keep you company, drives aren't nearly as boring as they are usually.
Our first stop was the Tahquemenon Falls. Joseph's primary concern here was that he could throw rocks and sticks into the waterfall. He got to throw them into the water, at least, if not the waterfalls themselves.
For some reason, all these colors remind me of Skittles.
We ran into the Teicherts! Twice! Great minds think alike.
They say the brown color comes from tannin, whatever that is, but I think this must just be the runoff of some root beer float supply, complete with foam.
I think there was something cool in this picture. That big stick, maybe.
At the Upper Falls. These pictures seriously take me back to my fast food days of soft drink dispenser spills.
He was probably protesting the stroller.
Looks steep.
By this point, it was mid afternoon, and we weren't sure what to do next. Although it wasn't on the itinerary, we figured we may as well see Pictured Rocks since we were sort of close. So off we went again, all of us jamming to the ultra-cool music we had brought along (the coolest being Garretts' Mulan music). Joseph was pretty stoic about it all. Although the landscape as we drove had a lot more half-dead coniferous forests than I was expecting, there were still some glorious colors, especially as we approached Pictured Rocks.
Once there, we walked around, saw water, saw rocks, took pictures, tried to avoid landing in people's wedding photos (we seriously need to stop running into weddings), and then decided we were hungry.
A hoodoo! Looking out at it was just like Bryce Canyon. Only blue.
and a little green.
Sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy.
Sunshine in my eyes can make me cry.
Sunshine on the water looks so pretty.
Sunshine almost always makes me high.
After eating some exceptionally healthy pizza (grease is good for you nowadays, right?), it was time to head home. By this time, the early morning wake-up was getting to us (well, maybe mostly me), and we found ourselves singing louder and louder and acting sillier and sillier, especially when "One Day More" from Les Mis came on. When I checked on Joseph, he had a look of concern on his face. Within about a minute that concern was replaced by full on sobbing. Oops.
Incidentally, out of the blue the next morning he said, "I was sad."
"Why were you sad?"
"Because I wanted you to turn off your singing."
He sure did, and it took a long time and a lot of silence to calm him down after that. He had one more meltdown after that, but the rest of the drive home went fairly smoothly. For all my talk of "I need to stay awake to help prevent drowsy driving and I don't have the life skills to fall asleep in the car (which is generally true)," I was the only one who slept at all on the way back. Go figure.
A little after 1, we pulled back into church parking lot. Our super duper Upper Peninsula adventure had come to an end.
wow, so pretty! i can't believe you survived all that driving, though!
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