Destination Dreamland, Day Two
When I was a child, on family vacations, my father would invoke a little club he referred to as the Dawn Patrol. This meant that he and the kids (my brother, me, eventually my little sister, sometimes a traveling cousin or neighbor) would rise early and get out to explore, swim, fish, or do whatever physical outdoor activities were available to us on that particular trip. When I became a parent, I realized the goal of the Dawn Patrol was to ensure worn-out kids who would crash early without complaint, leaving the adults free to enjoy peaceful, child-free vacation evenings. It's a smart move … if you're the type of person who can hop out of bed at 8am after a night of holiday drinking and somehow desire to spend your morning surrounded by children.
Jason and I are not early risers. There is no Dawn Patrol on this trip.
10am July 4 finds us still in bed at Jason's grandmother's house in Traverse City, but not for long. Jason's family starts to trickle in; many of them are gathering in town for the holiday weekend. The first to come are Jason's cousins, along with their sweet and adorable children—a five-year-old boy and an eight-year-old girl.
We get up and get ready, then spend some time catching up with family. The kids have a ton of questions about the motorcycle.
“Where do you ride?” “Do you put your hands around his tummy?” “Does he use these mirrors so he can look at you?”
Jason's aunt and grandmother show up and we take pictures, shares tales of our travel thus far, pull on our gear and load up the motorcycle.
“You look like a bandit!” one of the children tells him.
Jason's very kind family waves farewell as we hit the road. It's noon. Hungry, we stop on the way out of town for lunch, digging into two large and tasty pulled pork sandwiches. Today we're sticking to backroads, traveling up the northwestern coast of Michigan, crossing the Mackinac Bridge to the Upper Peninsula. Our destination for the evening is Gulliver, home of the Dreamland Motel.
The actual town of Dreamland is an additional 220 miles north, but Gulliver will be about as far as we're going to go. We possibly could have made the trip all the way to Dreamland, but it might have meant taking the car. It might have meant racing the clock, pushing ourselves to make it there and back before Jason has to be back at work. We decide instead to call the Dreamland Hotel just as good, for now, so that we can ride at our leisure. We'll make it to the real Dreamland someday.
After lunch we ride for about 90 minutes to our first pit stop: the Big Rock Roadside Park on Lake Michigan. This is my first time seeing the Great Lakes (aside from Eerie) up close and I'm in awe of their size. Every time we encounter a lake on the trip I ask Jason “Which lake is this?” trying to get my bearings. He never knows. I can't fault him—I don't think I'd do much better identifying lakes in Texas.
I grew up on the Saint Lucie River and am no stranger to large bodies of water. The Great Lakes feel familiar. Like the ocean, they're seemingly endless—their blue waters appear to stretch on forever. Barges, sailboats, yachts float on the surface. And there are waves, brave souls surf the lakes in winter when the wind whips the water into whitecaps. The Great Lakes even have minimal tides. For me, the enormous difference is the lack of salt in the air. I stand on the shores of Lake Michigan, and later Lake Superior, and I can almost convince myself I'm standing next to an ocean … only the air feels completely different. Weightless. No salt clings to my face, there is no scent of the sea. It's pleasant, if also a little disconcerting, for a Floridian. At some point on the trip I see stores selling, “No salt, no sharks, no worries!” t-shirts, but I don't know. I grew up between Lake Okeechobee and the Atlantic Ocean. I have a hearty distrust for fresh water.
We ride another hour or so into Mackinaw City. The town is adorable. It looks like the setting for every coming of age summer movie I saw in my youth--the cute little coastal tourist town. Jason says the area is big on fudge and he is not kidding. We cruise around looking for a liquor store and I notice at least one fudge shop on every block. We stop and stretch our legs, take pictures, buy a bottle of wine and a bottle of Scotch. We'll be back in Mackinaw City in a few days, but today our job is to cross the bridge to the UP.
I'm excited about crossing. Five miles long, the Mackinac Bridge is the longest suspension bridge in the western hemisphere. (Here I learn that sometimes it's spelled Mackinac and sometimes it's spelled Mackinaw, but it's always pronounced like the latter.) Jason tells me that in the 80s, a woman driving a Yugo was blown over the side of the bridge. This just makes me glad we're not in a Yugo, though the motorcycle probably weighs only half as much as her car did.
The view from the top of the bridge is beautiful. I lament not being able to safely take pictures from the back of the motorcycle, but instead I do my best to take in as much as I can see and commit it to memory. I look left and right; I lean back and look straight up as we pass under the structure. We are 200 feet above the water.
Once we cross the bridge, we are officially in the UP and as far north as I have been in at least a decade. We ride for about an hour and stop for fuel. Jason tells me how nervous he was driving over the bridge. He let himself take brief glances to the left and right, but mostly went to a place of deep focus to make it over the bridge. I'm surprised—I couldn't tell that he was anxious at all, which speaks to his ability to stay cool. I'm also selfishly glad I didn't know that he was nervous at the time, while I was being a tourist on the back of the bike, swiveling this way and that, taking in the views.
Frequently on the trip, we're approached by other bikers who want to say hello. Mostly they ask about the motorcycle, or where we're from and where we're going. Just over the bridge, one biker approaches us and starts to complain about having just received an error-riddled tattoo somewhere on his nether regions. He just barely passes on showing it to us, thank goodness, before running into the gas station for a fifth of whiskey to enjoy on his trip back to the tattoo parlor to get it fixed.
Jason comes out of the gas station and tells me I have to go inside “Just for the smell.” They make and sell smoked fish and jerky in there, and it does smell like heaven. I look longingly at every fish market we pass, a hangover from my seaside youth—you hardly see fish markets in landlocked central Texas. It makes no sense for us to buy a pound of smoked fish on this trip, sadly, but I still get excited every time the opportunity presents itself.
“I love fish markets,” I muse at some point.
“I've noticed,” is Jason's reply.
We arrive at the Dreamland Motel just about an hour before the restaurant closes. It's a quaint little motor lodge right on the side of the road with a large BIKERS WELCOME marquee outside. We check into our room and have supper at the diner, celebrating America's independence by eating gravy-laden beef, pork, and washing it down with a couple of Budweisers. I can't recall the last time I drank a Budweiser, but at the end of a day spent traveling Michigan's coast by motorcycle, sitting at a booth in a remote roadside motel, the beer, served in an icy mug, tastes better than it has any right to.
We retire to our room and spend our July Fourth evening watching local news from the UP, which is as adorably small-town USA as it gets. Parades. Parades. More parades.
It's so quiet in our room that I have a hard time falling asleep. There is no a/c. No dogs barking. No crickets. We're right on the side of the road, but the traffic is so infrequent it doesn't provide that white-noise hum of the highway, more like the sudden whine of a semi truck that jerks my eyes open every few minutes.
We curl up on one of our room's double beds, because there are no queens at the Dreamland, and eventually sleep overtakes us.
Related Posts
