Tourist Mode.. Off.

We’re always varying up the pace and style of our travel. Some weeks it’s more focused on work or being in one location. Other times roaming while in between set destinations.

For the past two weeks we’ve been in more of a tourist, roam and explore mode. And after completing several months of intensive work hours, it was a nice change of pace to be more relaxed and focus on seeing some sites.

After leaving Madison, we of course attended the EAA Airventure and then off we set to explore the UP of Michigan. It was probably easier to fall into more tourist patterns given it’s a summer vacation destination for many. That’s not to say we don’t roam through such destinations on a regular basis, but by and large we limit our touristy activities.

In the past 2 weeks, we have spent more on tourist tours than is usual for us. Here’s some of the things we’ve done:

– Pictured Rocks boat tour ($35/ea)
– Soo Locks Boat Tour ($23/ea)
– Agawa Canyon Train Tour ($85/ea – Canadian)

For someone on vacation, that might not seem so unusual. But for us to do that much ‘touring’ inside of two weeks is not really normal for us.

And of course, we’ve picked scenic routes between them all, adding to enjoying the beautiful scenery up this way.

Here’s a wrap up starting from our previous UP Michigan post of our exploration:

Sault Ste Marie

We ended up staying a few more nights in Sault Ste Marie – it’s a lovely little town right on the St. Mary’s River, with Canada in view. We found two campgrounds with waterfront sites. After staying at the county run one, we moved on to the commercial Soo Locks Campground down the road . We were able to snag a canal front spot for the weekend.

The sites were pretty tiny, but unlike the county run park – they have no rules against pulling straight in so that motorhomes can maximize their view. At the county park, apparently there was once a fist fight when someone did this and the neighbors, now awning to awning, fought over where their yards where. Woah. So they only allow backing in.

We did end up awning-to-awning at Soo Locks Campground, but our neighbors were incredibly nice and we’re pleased to report – no fist fights.

Unfortunately, just moving down the road we took a hit on our signal strength for all our cellular networks and their WiFi wasn’t all that stable. And we were unable to tune in any TV station but a Canadian one. Usually, we don’t even remember we have a TV – but we’ve been enjoying watching the Olympics. It was actually rather fun to see the games from the Canadian perspective and follow sports we weren’t seeing on NBC – such as roller derby style BMX biking, Tae Kwondo, women’s wrestling, kayaking and more.

While in Sault Ste Marie we enjoyed the 2-3 mile walk into town most evenings, attended a concert in the park, checked out the local brewery, witnessed a paranormal convention (we think we escaped without any alien probing) and shopped at the local weekly farmer’s market. This in addition of course to the Soo Locks boat tour that we already mentioned.

And since we were there for a few days, we decided to try one more toursity thing – crossing the border into Canada and taking the Agawa Canyon Train tour. The train leaves from the Ontario side of Sault Ste. Marie and goes 114 miles northward into a canyon. It then stops there for an hour and half where you can go on various hikes to waterfalls.  It goes through some beautiful countryside and as an added special feature – there are screens in each car displaying an engineer’s view of the tracks from the front of the train.

It was a fun and relaxing day, and we really enjoyed being on a train again (reminding us of our month long Amtrak adventure to find our bus last summer).

When we pulled back in, we stumbled upon Buskerfest 2012 – a gathering of street performers from around the world. It was fun to see some of them perform, each unbashfully reminding the audience that they earn their living by tips.

Crossing back in the USA lead to an entertaining encounter with customs.  He asked where we were from, and we answered ‘we’re full time RVers, but based out of South Dakota’. This apparently prompted him to do more research on us – because we were obviously too young for such things.  He couldn’t find any dirt on us, handed us back our passports and wished us a good evening being the youngest people at the campground.

St. Ignace

We left out Sunday morning from Sault Ste. Marie with the intentions of starting our western Michigan routing.  We had two nights before we had told our hosts in Grand Rapids that we would arrive. While the drive could easily be made in one day, we decided to take the highly recommend M22 route out of Traverse City. So we left with no plans or intentions beyond finding the first waterfront campsite we could for the night.

We hit the jackpot on the very first try when we pulled into Straits State Park. They had a few waterfront sites available and we picked one out with a clear view of water and Mackinac Bridge! And for just $20.

So much for making many miles that day, but we just don’t pass up serendipity like that.  We set up camp for the day and enjoyed a lunch with a magnificent view. We enjoyed 5 mile round trip walk into town to check it out, where Chris finally sampled a Pastie (a local pot pie hot pocket type thing pronounced ‘pass-tea’ –  not to be confused with pasties).

We sat out in the late evening just as the clouds cleared and enjoyed meteor showers on the banks of Lake Huron with the bridge light up in front of us. Just steps from our front door.

Delightful.

We seriously contemplated catching a ferry over to Mackinac Island in the morning. We even inquired with our Facebook followers if it was worth it for the short amount of time we could spare.

In the end, we decided against it for this trip through. After having done so many tourist tours in the past weeks, we just couldn’t get excited about another one.  Especially an island accessible only by ferry – after all, we lived on such an island (St. John). And from all the feedback we were getting, we really should leave more than an hour or so to experience the island.  So we passed.

M22

Given our short driving day, we made plans to make Monday a day of scenic driving and getting a good number of the miles in. We routed down through cherry country, through Traverse City and then over to Sleeping Bear Dunes via M22.  As anticipated, there were no spots left at Sleeping Bear so we moved on down the road.

M22 is 2-lane road most of the way – and by Michigan standards, quite twisty and turny. It is a pretty drive and routes through some very quaint coastal towns that we’d love to have the time to stop and check out. However, we were honestly hoping for more views along the route. It was mostly tree lined, which is beautiful – but gets a bit mundane after a while. For the extra fuel expenditure of adding nearly 75-100 twisty miles to our routing – we’re not entirely sure it was worth it.

Once we realized that camping options along the beach were still quite a distance ahead of us, we called ahead to the closest one – Orchard Beach State Park. They did still have spots available, so we continued on for 50 more miles to make it in. When we arrived, we were a bit disappointed.  The campground itself is pretty old school travel park style set in an old orchard with very small sites and little division.

Oh, and no lakefront visible from the campground itself.  It’s not that it was bad or anything, just not what we were hoping for. But we were definitely ready to call our driving day done.

We decided to go take a hike and discovered a massive staircase leading down to the beach.. which leads to what seemed like miles of open beach walking. It was really quite beautiful and definitely perked up the stop!  We managed to top off the day with a nice 3 mile beach walk.  (Have you noticed a theme here..  we’re getting more and more walking into our daily life.)

Up Next…

The next day we pulled into Grand Rapids to meet up with a long time reader who invited us over. We’ll talk about that awesome stop in our next travel update post.  But it was the marking of an end to this chapter of us roaming on our own with no commitments and being a bit touristy.

That’s one of the cool things about this lifestyle is that you can morph into a bit of a vacation/tourist mode without any extra planning, packing or preparing… and then snap right back out of it without an overgrown lawn awaiting your return. It’s all just regular life to us.

We’re currently at a bus rally near Flint, MI – where we’ll spend the weekend connecting with fellow bus nuts. After that, we start our transition southwards with our next major stop being Chattanooga, where we’ll catch Zephyr up on her bus maintenance and a couple projects. Next week we should pass through Toledo, Dayton, Cincinnati and Knoxville – let us know if we might be passing by!