Chapter 3: Milwaukee, Michigan Coastline, Petoskey

Look at this, two posts today. Woohoo!

Where was I . . .

Oh yes, Milwaukee.

My original plan from Milwaukee was to take the ferry across Lake Michigan from Milwaukee, WI to Muskegon, MI. I figured, it's a two-and-a-half-hour trip, that should give me time to work on this blog and also maybe read or something.

I failed to take into account, though, the fact that Normal People take the ferry to commute, every day. So when I went into the ticket office at 8:45 (four hours before the ferry) thinking naïvely, "Oh yes, this will be lovely!" the lady very nicely informed me that there was no more room for vehicles on that ferry, and there was no other ferry that day.

Which meant that I had to drive back through Chicago, around the bottom end of the lake, and back up the whole dang Michigan coast.

Fine, I thought. I'll drive through Chicago again.

Urgh.

But this time, I got some nice pictures of the skyline!

 . . . Or, as nice as they can be considering I was taking them while driving SHUSH MOM I'M FINE I WON'T DO IT AGAIN GOSH

Then I just sort of drove for a few hours.

Here's some pictures and videos of Indiana! The sky was really beautiful.

Eventually, Indiana gave way to Michigan, and the trees got even prettier. 

I spent the next several hours driving up the coast of Lake Michigan on I-31, during which time three exciting things happened. One was the afore-posted AC/DC incident, which was seriously really really cool. 

The second exciting thing wasn't really all that exciting, but I thought it was cool. Specifically, it was driving past this sign:

Dear citizens of Covert: a large road sign isn't.

After I passed it, I started thinking of a bunch of stories of the spies that work in Covert, and how they're all really bad at actually being spies. 

And then the third exciting thing was much further up the coast, after passing lovely trees:

 . . . and lovely highway.

When suddenly, on the left of the road, I saw that one of the trees had started to grow something other than leaves. I found someplace to turn around and come back, and I took pictures.

So . . . yeah. Shoe tree. 

At lunch today, I asked Stellaria about it, and she says it's been that way as long as she can remember. In fact, the tree used to be bigger, and have branches that went over the highway, also covered in shoes. Someone would come by every once in a while to clear away the shoes, but people (mostly kids, I think) would pretty swiftly put 'em back. Weird and cool, right? I really wish they'd have a Supernatural episode centered around this tree. It creeped me out, and I was really glad it was full daylight when I saw it. 

And that was the drive up to Petoskey! I was in the car for about 8 hours straight, which was pretty rough. But on the other hand, today was a nice day of hanging out with wonderful people, so it was a good tradeoff!

On that note, I'll write more tomorrow about how I spent the day in Petoskey. For now, I have been commandeered by Stellaria's two youngest sons to play video games. 

From Petoskey, MI . . . 

Julia