Thursday, June 27, 2013

Good morning crew,

We weren't on the bicycle path around Mackinac Island for more than five minutes when the Grand Hotel hove into view on a ridge above us. It is impressive.

The Grand is a Victorian-style structure that opened in 1887. Fans of the 1980 film 'Somewhere in Time' starring Superman and Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman will remember it as the setting for most of that movie. It is still fully functional as a hotel, but because of its significance you cannot get onto the grounds unless you are a guest, or you want to cough up a $10-per-person visitor's fee. That keeps out the looky-loos.

I really wanted to take a look at the lobby and have a drink at the hotel bar (despite the fact that it was ten in the morning), but I am cheaper than I am adventurous, so instead of paying the visitor's fee the wife and I broke in.

Okay, breaking in might be a slightly dramatic way to describe the act of petty trespassing we committed, but by parking our bicycles at the foot of a hill, we were able to climb up through a stand of trees, and over a small wall to access the hotel grounds from the back.

There are beautiful grounds surrounding the hotel dotted with decorative flower beds, plants and fountains, all completely hidden from street view. We wandered around a little bit, took a few pictures, but every time we tried to get around to the front of the hotel and access the interior (and the bar), we saw a bellhop or some other hotel employee in a uniform apparently patrolling the place, and I was hesitant to try to dodge past them.

I wanted to look around, but I also didn't want to get escorted to the street by some polite security person. The wife was of the opinion that since we were already on the grounds we would be taken for hotel guests, but I was afraid our bicycling gear would give us away. In the end we settled for a few pictures of the grass and the back of the hotel, which was still pretty impressive, mind you.

Continuing our tour around the island I kept getting pulled off the path by distractions. There are a number of paths running through the interior of the island and I just could not resist such exciting-sounding names like Skull Cave, Arch Rock, Devil's Kitchen and Mackinac Airport.

You don't get to see all that stuff by riding around the perimeter of the island. Of course, the advantage of the path surrounding the island is that it is relatively flat. Once we started bicycling through the interior we hit some significant hills.

Huffing and puffing along at about 2 miles-per-hour in bottom gear we labored our way through dense stands of creepy-looking trees and past an even creepier-looking cemetery. By the time our aching legs got us to Skull Cave we were ready for a really impressive geological phenomenon of historical significance.

It turned out to be a crack. Apparently some fur-trader had hid in there from hostile natives a couple hundred years ago and discovered the floor of the crack was covered in human bones. Voila! Skull Cave.

The other tourist attractions were equally mundane in their origins, but it was still fun. We even got to see the giant metal head of President Gerald Ford (please don't ask). All-in-all we bicycled 15 or 16 miles up and down the island in an effort to see everything. This took us through the small residential area a few times and I personally thought the large, stoic-looking colonial-type houses were more impressive than a crack in the rocks. Especially since we kept having to bicycle around the horse-drawn carriages, and all of the consequent road apples, we met on the streets.

With a little bit of imagination I could just about pretend it was 200 years ago.

But after more than three hours on those damned bicycles our butt cheeks were telling us it was time to wrap it up. It was still barely three in the afternoon and there was more to see and do, but any more details will have to wait for next week. The weekend is almost here and I am looking forward to some much needed relaxing!

Laugh it up,

Joe

joe@gophercentral.com

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***
"New York City now offers free pedestrian maps. I went up to one of those maps ? this was really spooky ? and it said 'You are here.' And I said to myself, 'How did it know?'" -David Letterman

***
"Tourism officials in Paris have launched a campaign to make Paris friendlier to tourists. First step? Kick out the French." -Jay Leno

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"Apple's new operating system lets users give Siri a male-sounding voice. The sad part is that every time you ask him a question, he says, 'Let me ask my wife' and then it's right back to the female voice." -Conan O'Brien

***
Rushing to get to the movies, my husband and I told the kids we had to leave "right now"at which point our teenage daughter headed for the bathroom to apply makeup. Her dad yelled for her to get in the car immediately, and headed for the garage grumbling.

On the way to the multiplex my husband glanced in the rearview mirror and caught our teen applying lipstick and blush, which produced the predictable lecture. "Look at your mom," he said. "She didn't put on any makeup just to go sit in a dark movie theater."

From the back I heard, "Yeah, but Mom doesn't need makeup."

My heart swelling with the compliment, I turned back to thank this sweet, wonderful daughter of mine just as she continued, "Nobody looks at her."


*-------------- Guaranteed to Roll Your Eyes --------------*
A teenager brings her new boyfriend home to meet her parents. They are appalled by his haircut, his tattoos, his piercings.

Later, the girl's mom says, "Dear, he doesn't seem to be a very nice boy."

"Oh, please, Mom!" says the daughter. "If he wasn't nice, would he be doing 500 hours of community service?"