Road trip!

So I put 500 miles on my car today (after ridiculous amounts yesterday were spent getting it back into good condition … and I didn’t even know anything was freaking wrong with it) on a road trip with my dad, who is visiting for a long weekend, and is a great travel companion.

We went from Ann Arbor, up 23 and I-75 up to Hartwick Pines State Park, over to Lake Huron, and then back to Ann Arbor.  It looked like this on the map:

Road Trip with Dad Route

It’s fall, and the colors everywhere are awesome.  The maples look like they’re on fire they’re so red, and the rich golds in other trees are really beautiful.  We stopped in Grayling to get lunch before heading into the park (at the appropriately named “Grayling Restaurant”), which was a diner that looked like it hadn’t changed since the 60s.  We had pancakes at 12:30pm, and were called “hon” and “sweetheart” repeatedly by the waitress, who greeted most of the other customers by name.  We were bystanders in a conversation about a 14 point buck that someone found in their backyard as they bragged to the booth on the other side of us.  It was kind of surreal.  I didn’t see a single person take out a cell phone the entire time.

Then on to the park.  Hartwick Pines was recommended to me by a professor in undergrad who said it was one of the only places left where you could see an old growth white pine forest, which is apparently what most of Michigan looked like before the Europeans came to colonize the area.  It was pretty surreal, like being in a different time.  The trees were so tall that I took a panoramic series of 4 pictures going vertically, and since their shade blocked out the sun, there was no undergrowth to obscure the distance.

We wanted to see some of the lakeshore here, and since Hartwick Pines isn’t too far from Huron, we went East on 55 until it dead-ended on the lake.  I’ve seen Lake Michigan in Chicago, and the brown nastiness that is western Lake Erie from a plane, but Huron, with its sand dunes and lighthouse at Tawas, was really like being at the ocean more than anything.

Then we went to Olive Garden in AA and gorged ourselves on breadsticks, and now we’re back at my apartment, watching UT kick Missouri’s ass, and making fun of my twitchy, spastic cat.  I’ll post pictures of the trip after I get them all sorted and resized, but that’s not happening tonight :)

~ by Jess on October 19, 2008.