Destination Dreamland, Day Four
Day four, featuring rain showers, mystery spots, a love of music and so many shooting stars
Music drew Jason and I together. We met online, on a music sharing website, where we quickly discovered we shared musical tastes closely. We were friends online for a little over a year before we first met in person. Jason refers to this as the time we were “seducing each other with songs,” which I love. It's also highly accurate.
While riding on the motorcycle, we plug two sets of earbuds into one of our devices, sharing whatever we're listening to using the headphone splitter my kids use to watch DVDs on long car trips. Wires trail from his ears and mine down to the device, which I shove into the front of my jacket to keep my hands free. We ride tethered together this way.
It works well because our tastes are so similar. For me, taking a road trip with a guy, I'd expect him to attempt to maintain control of the music situation … and probably go heavy on the Springsteen. Traveling with Jason, there are no bad jams. Some are better than others—for these, he throws up devil horns with his left hand to show his appreciation. Sharing tunes was his idea. “If we were listening to different music … it'd be like we were on two separate road trips,” he says. “What's the point?”
On Wednesday, July 6, we wake at the Dreamland and pack up our room. Check out time is 10, and we waltz into the restaurant right on time.
“Good morning, you two,” the career waitress greets us with a voice as rough as sandpaper.
Today we are bound for Mackinaw City, at the base of the bridge. First we plan to cruise around the Upper Peninsula, but there is a chance of light rain on the radar. We pack up and head off—we don't have rain gear, but we plan to get as far as possible before the weather gets bad.
We're on the road about ninety minutes when the rain starts to fall. Jason has a windshield in front of him, so his visibility isn't impaired as we ride in the drizzle. Our goggles, helmets and jackets keep the top halves of our bodies dry, but our jeans get wet fast, our knees and below taking the brunt of the wetness. I'm wearing the same pants I've worn since we left Detroit—part of my packing light strategy was to only bring one extra pair of pants, but honestly I think next time I could even go with just the one pair. My knees are met head-on by unsuspecting bugs as we ride, meaning there's not much point in putting on clean jeans—they don't stay that way for long.
Everything on this trip seems to fall into place for us, so shortly after the rain starts, we ride into the small town of Naubinway and quickly find a coffee shop where we can sit out the rain storm.
The coffee shop's air conditioner is working overtime, and we are soaked, so we sit outside and watch the rain fall while sipping on warm drinks and using the cafe's wifi to check in, read the news, watch the weather radar. After about an hour, the rain clears up. We check the radar one more time and see no showers on the horizon at all. Dry, caffeinated, we hop back on the bike and head toward the mainland.
Ninety minutes later, we pull into the parking lot for the Mystery Spot—a roadside tourist attraction featuring an anti-gravity room, which is just fun, even if I spend the entire time certain I'm about to fall over and roll across the floor at any second.
After I spoil the wonder of what makes the Mystery Spot work for Jason, we sit out front, share a cold cherry Coke from the vending machine, take selfies.
Back on the motorcycle, we pull into St. Ignace, the town just north of the Mackinaw Bridge, at the southernmost part of the Upper Peninsula. It's a lakefront town, and is significantly chillier than any place we've been through today. St. Ignace is probably the cutest town I saw on our trip. It's a tough competition, and even thinking on it now I'm not 100 percent on this rating. But with restaurants and marinas hugging the coastline, and with the air temperature being just about perfect, it certainly feels like the perfect place for a late vacation lunch after a half day on the bike.
We eat, we have a beer, we walk across the street to the marina, strolling on the dock and over the water. All that's left to do is ride back over the bridge to the Lower Peninsula. I ask Jason if he's nervous again. He says he wants to cue up Sympathy for the Devil to listen to as he transports us over the bridge this time. I think it helps.
Right over the bridge, we check into our next adorable little hotel, The Lamplighter. All the rooms have themes—ours is the Venetian Garden room. We relax a while, take showers to wash off the road dirt, enjoy the cable television and air conditioning before heading into Mackinaw City for drinks and dinner.
We have small town martinis and take over the jukebox at a bar called the Keyhole before eating fish and chips for a late supper. We're waiting out the late-setting Michigan sun, waiting for hard dark because tonight is the night we hit the Headlands.
When this trip was in the planning stages, Jason was discussing it with friends who asked if we were going to visit the dark sky park while we were up north. We hadn't even known it existed, but it quickly because one of our most anticipated destinations. The Headlands is a 600-acre preserve where nighttime light is prohibited. This makes for incredible star gazing. Our trip coincides with the new moon, meaning we should get some fantastic star gazing opportunities.
The Headlands is a short ride west of Mackinaw City. From the parking lot, you walk a mile in the pitch black to get to a lookout point on the rocky lake shore. Flashlights are only allowed if they have green or red filters. Preparing for the trip, Jason gets us a red-filtered flashlight, and we use it to navigate our way to the lookout. It's as quiet as it is dark. We can tell we're surrounded by trees, but we don't hear even a single cicada. We occasionally see other visitors leaving the park, but it's mostly just us, on our own, working our way towards the lake.
At the lookout point, we recline on some giant rocks right on the water. We cover the rocks with our leather jackets, luckily it's not so cold that we need them, and recline to look up at the endless, ink black night sky, the water gentle lapping right at our feet.
The dark sky park is incredible. There was no point in even trying to take photos, but it was easily the best stargazing I've ever experienced. Between us we see at least six shooting stars race across the sky. They come fast and furious, burning bright for a second before fading away just as quickly. Each one is as beautiful and amazing to see as the first.
Finally our backs start to get a little cranky because they're pressed against giant, pointy rocks, and we make the walk back to the motorcycle. At the bike, Jason checks the time and we're both shocked – we'd spent more than two hours lying there watching the sky.
We ride back to the hotel and drift off to sleep, continuing to marvel at how lucky we feel for so many things. The sky. The weather. The trip. The fact that we are here, together. The fact that we found each other.
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