It is Saturday afternoon and we are at a campground north of Port Huron and south east of Sandusky, Michigan. The weather is hotter—a high of 82°.

Last night we were at a campground at Harrisville, Michigan on the shores of Lake Huron. If I didn’t know it was a lake, I would think I was at the ocean, listening to the waves and seeing only water on the horizon.

Halloween seems to be a big deal especially at the Harrisville State Park. They have decorations everywhere and here is one of the Park Rangers carts.

We have seen lots of other Halloween decorations at the houses we have passed by.

Lots of nice communities along our route on the shore of Lake Huron. If one could handle the harsh winters (as low as 17 below and 84 inches of snow) it might be a nice place to live especially since the median price of a house is $219,000. The homes are all so tidy and well kept with really large lawns. No drought worries here.

The further south we traveled, the more large farms we saw. It looked a lot like the Central Valley of California, although the fields are mostly corn. There are lovely little farm stands with flowers and produce, and it appears that payment is on the honor system as we have not seen any farmers at the stands.

Many days we look for an interesting café or restaurant to stop for lunch. Breakfast and dinners are usually at our campsite. Today we stopped at Elk Street Brewery and Taphouse in Sandusky.

Our lunches have all been delicious and very enjoyable.

Tomorrow we intend to cross into Ontario in route to Niagara Falls. We have adjusted our original route going through Northern Michigan and down Lake Huron versus heading towards Chicago and skirting the Great Lakes from their southern shores. We have heard Niagara Falls from the Canada side is a better way to go.

We left the most northern point of Michigan and headed south along the east coast of Michigan and Lake Huron. The coast of Lake Superior was rocky with some sand, but the shores of Lake Michigan that we saw are all sand dunes, and the shore of Lake Huron appears to be sand and some rocks

Yesterday Steve had to jump into Lake Superior and take a short swim.

The forests in Michigan are full of slender trees, unlike our redwood and oak forests in California.

Most of our travels are on two lane highways bordered by beautiful trees. We do not plan to do any big cities.

We have gone through so many small nice towns with central business districts, and their light posts are hung with these beautiful hanging flower baskets. Most of these areas get very cold and full of snow in the winter. Makes you wonder where all these hanging baskets go in the winter

We are camping in the beautiful Michigan forest. We hiked to Au Sable Light Station this morning.  The shore of Lake Superior is dotted with still working light stations.

I find mushrooms fascinating, and there were lots of different kinds growing in the Michigan woods. Professional photographers and golfers have their “money shots“. I have my “mushroom shots“.

We reluctantly left Pauline and Randy’s loaded with venison, garden vegetables, flowers, and their homegrown maple syrup.

We drove over 350 miles from Wisconsin to the Michigan coast of Lake Superior . We stopped for lunch in Woodland, Michigan.

We are camping at Picture Rock National Seashore for the next two nights. We needed a day without driving.

A couple of words about Jasper: we love having him with us, but he doesn’t really like traveling in the car. He spends most of his drive time, hunkered down in one of our laps. We joke that he dreams of calling an Uber to take him to grandma and grandpa‘s in California.

Due to travel and connectivity, we are a bit behind in telling you about our travels.

On Tuesday, we hiked the Gooseberry Falls before leaving the area. Lake Superior is so large. It appears to be an ocean with waves and choppy waters. During two days of storms in 1905, 20 ships sank or were heavily damaged on the western end of Lake Superior. Fog rolls in from the lake and we were shrouded in the fog.

We forgot to mention that on the trip to Fargo we crossed the Mississippi River . Didn’t realize it came so far north.

On our way from the western shore of Lake Superior to Cumberland, Wisconsin, we drove through Duluth, Minnesota, which is the capital. Duluth looks like a smaller version of Seattle— hills, lots of green, at the edge of a body of water, with a downtown area.

We had a fabulous dinner and visit with Pauline and Randy in Cumberland, Wisconsin. They live in a house built in the early 1900s and lovingly restored by Pauline and Randy. It is filled with antique furniture and furnishings collected over the past 30 years. They live on 4 acres and own the adjoining 40 acres that they manage and preserve for the deer and some bow hunting.

Greetings from the Gitche-Gumee. Gitche-Gumee was popularized by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow‘s poem “The Song of Hiawatha”, Gordon Lightfoot’s song “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”, and is the name the Ojibwe people used for Lake Superior. It is actually a variation of the Ojibwe word “gichi-gami or “great sea”. It is also the largest and deepest of the Great Lakes.

We are camped on the West shore of Lake Superior. We left Fargo North Dakota this morning and traveled east across Minnesota. What a beautiful state! It is called the state of 10,000 lakes and we can understand why. So many lakes in the small area we saw. The state is very green with varieties of pines and deciduous trees, many of which are changing colors.

Here is our campsite last night in Fargo.

Tomorrow we are headed to Cumberland, Wisconsin to visit Pauline Nelson. Pauline was our family haircutter for over 20 years and moved to Wisconsin to be near her family.

We are blown away by the extreme diversity that we’ve seen so far in our country—the topography, the people, the towns, the neighborhoods, the types of houses, and the traffic and lack of. And we are only about sixth of the way into our sojourn!

We drove almost the whole width of North Dakota to Fargo on I-95 today. This freeway is like I-5 in California — straight and fast with few interesting sites, but much greener. 

We are camped along the Red River in Fargo tonight.

No pictures today, just a few observations. Gasoline is and will be our largest expense on this trip. Fortunately it has been much cheaper in the states we have traveled through thus far. Today we paid $2.79 a gallon.

Grocery prices appear to be comparable to California.

We stopped at Walmart in Fargo today for some groceries and propane. The customers were a blend of people from all over the world. Even more so than Walmart in the Bay Area. We have seen little to no political signs so far.

We are currently plotting our course for tomorrow’s exploration.

Yesterday we drove from Forsyth, Montana, where we had camped the night before.

Our destination was Theodore Roosevelt Natl Park in North Dakota. We traveled out of east Montana into North Dakota. Scenery was mostly rolling hills, farms, and some rivers.

Ever wonder where “ home on the range”is? There is an exit for it off of I 94 in North Dakota.

Today we spent the day exploring TRNP. There are two sections to the park separated by 60 miles. We are camping in the south section and drove to the north section through undulating hills covered in grasses (the largest grasslands in the USA) dotted with round hay bales, and fields of corn and sunflowers with a few scattered small oil wells. We have often seen small herds of antelope.

After the rolling grasslands, it was such a beautiful surprise to see buttes, canyons, the Little Missouri river, and the beautiful cottonwoods in TRNP. Here are some pictures from our day.

It was a too short visit with Lia, Zach, and Mikian. They left this morning early to fly to Vermont for Zach’s grandfather‘s funeral.

We headed out to Bozeman as we had plans to stop for lunch with Jenny Watson. Her husband, Doug was in California for business but her youngest son, Luke, was there. The Watson’s used to live in Lafayette and were our Burton Valley neighbors. We had a great lunch at their gorgeous home catching up before heading east.

Our destination was Forsyth, Montana to a campground along the Yellowstone River.

Montana is a big state! We especially like the Bozeman area. The terrain is varied with lots of rivers.

In route, we got hit with a horrific hail storm. We had to seek shelter under an overpass with other travelers to wait out the storm.

Tomorrow we are headed to Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota.

We left Antelope Reservoir as the sun rose and headed to Boise to meet Paul Tamburri. Paul was my boss at Relation before I retired. He has retired and moved to Boise to be near his kids. 



Before meeting Paul for lunch, we stopped at the Aquatic Center for a refreshing swim and better showers than the ones in our trailer.

We had a delightful lunch catching up with Paul. We then drove north to McCall Idaho to visit our friends, Dave and Wendy. Steve has known Wendy since they were young kids.

We had a great time with Dave and Wendy and the lake at McCall is as pretty as Tahoe.

Wednesday morning after breakfast with Dave and Wendy, we set our sites for Missoula, where our daughter, son-in-law and grandson live. Most of the drive was a two-lane highway beside rivers and through pine forests.