Rapunzel is telling us it’ll take over 2 hours to drive the 106 miles to Ironwood…lots of turns and 55 mph roads. Not a lot to see except trees but that’s okay. Iowa was starting to get its spring green going but we’ve been back in the land of leafless trees and brown grass up in the upper reaches of Wisconsin. Temperature is 67o but the skies are cloudy. That’s one thing about the southwest…it has sunshine. Sure we encountered whooping hot temperatures but hey, it was a dry heat! 😉Arizona and southern New Mexico is straight up desert landscape and I’m not sure if that changes as the seasons change. As we traveled into Texas, where life became green and the temperature was cooler than AZ and NM but still warm, it took a conscious effort to remember that it was early spring and not middle of summer. Minnesota, Wisconsin and into Michigan is more ambiguous…the season of the landscape could be late fall or spring, especially with snow still hanging around.
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We had lunch with the U.P. grandkids….Kevin and Brittany and Tia and Mavis. A little cutie named Jacob joined us also. He’s the 2 year old son of Tia’s boyfriend Matt, who didn’t join us because he had to go to work; however, we did get to meet him. It was good to spend time with them…we didn’t have as much time as we might have wanted but we gave them short notice and we’re grateful that they made time for us.
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Back in the upper reaches of the Mitten State!! There is still snow in the ditches and ice on the smaller lakes and ice along the shore of Lake Superior near Munising, where we ran into rain. I believe it’s the first rain we’ve driven in during this whole trip. However, the temperatures have been in the mid-60s all day so it won’t be long before the white is gone and the green takes over. Jumped back into our own time zone shortly after leaving the Ironwood area, so we’re on real time once again. We’ve been in Central Time for about 10 days; hopefully jumping ahead only one hour won’t make for a difficult sleep adjustment.
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In total we’ve been away from home 45 days and have ridden just under 3,500 miles already in the 2017 season. I don’t have an exact count of the miles because the trip-meter I was using to keep track of total miles was a little screwed up after the big rain in Texas. We slept in a 10’ x 16’ tin box on an air mattress for most of those 45 nights, which isn’t glamorous but suits us. Except for the few days with Bryan and Linda Shumaker, it’s been just the two of us, wandering around the country together…seeing the sights, meeting interesting people and having a good time. 😊
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It happens every time a vacation is nearing its end…my mind starts buzzing with things to do when I get home. First off, I have to get to Petoskey to pick up my sewing machines…took them in for a maintenance check/service while I was gone. Then, it’s getting down to the business of work but I always come back from time away with the intention to not let work become life. This time is no different…my resolve is that life is too short and there’s too many adventures awaiting us to let work consume too many hours. 😏
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Crossed the Mackinac Bridge at 10 p.m….arrived in Charlevoix before midnight. It’s good to be home!!
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The journals I keep while traveling sometimes seem full of crazy details of the little moments, thoughts or results of research. But those are the moments/things that I want to remember. The days can run together when we’re on an exploration vacation…well, I suppose the days could run together if we were on a beach chair vacation, too. Anyway, it’s way too easy to forget the little moments that contribute to the whole experience. When reading a journal a year or so after the trip, it’s those glossed over forgotten details that pop up and make me say, “Oh yeah, I’d forgotten about that! Hey, Kim, do you remember when we…?” I enjoy learning and with the advent of smart phones and the ability to connect with Google almost anywhere anytime, researching to satisfy my curiosity is so much easier than it used to be. In the old days, I’d make a note in the margin of my handwritten journal and when I got home from vacation, the intent was that I would remember to look it up on the desktop computer. Now I carry my laptop with me for typing up my journal and I can get information on my phone and save it to refer to later. And when we’re out riding, I keep a notebook handy to make notes about the day or to note topics I want to research back at camp or in the Walmart parking lot, as the case may be. 😏Whenever we touch down for the evening, I check my notebook and then record the day’s events, thoughts, conversations or whatever. It creates a detailed timeline and memory for the trip.
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This trip, to challenge myself, I decided to use a song title to label each day’s journal entry. I picked out a detail from the day, sometimes big and sometimes small, and would find a song title that spoke to that detail. I wasn’t looking for song content, just a relevant title. It became a fun game to find just the right one…between the two of us we have a library of music stored in our heads, but sometimes I’d have to turn to Google for help. The only time we were stumped was Thursday, April 6…I went to bed thinking that some song title connected with the day’s events would occur to me in my sleep. Well, that didn’t happen but I did come up with a song title that spoke to not being able to find a song title: I Got Nothing, a song by Darius Rucker. 😉 Kim considered that a little obscure so I gave it one more try…and found the song Waterfalls by TLC. It was acceptable to both of us. I bent my rules a little bit right at the beginning with My Way…I entitled it ‘Our Way’ to reflect that I changed the words of the verse.
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And yes, there is a song called Marion Michael Morrison. It’s sung by Ray Stevens, one of the masters of oddball songs.
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One more adventure behind us but more Kim n Karen adventures
ahead……
😎
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| Be it ever so humble...there's no place like home!! |
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