October 20 - Manistee, Michigan

The wind kicked up during the night and I was occasionally awakened in the morning by occasional loud “thock” sounds as if someone had thrown a rock on our roof. These were loud enough to startle both of us and we were quite puzzled until we figured out that the oak trees we were parked under were shedding their acorns in the high winds! This intermittent pelting continued for the next 24 hours as a strong, gusty wind kept blowing along the lake, first from the south and later from the north after the front passed. Our campground was sheltered by the dunes all around us, but these oak trees were large enough that their tops received the full brunt of those winds with the resulting hail of acorns. Fortunately we never were actually hit by one because they did seem to have some Momentum after dropping from 70 feet up or so.

We got off to a late start because despite the intermittent noise I felt like I just had to catch up with the journal and back up all the pictures for the last two months onto CDs just in case the hard drive on the computer died. Since we download the camera every day and re-initialized it, there was only the copy of the pictures on the hard drive of the computer. I know full well how risky that is, having had hard drives crash on me since I first built an Apple II+ computer in the late 70s out of RAM, BIOS chips, a Cherry keyboard, motherboard, and a +/- 5 volt, +/- 12 volt power supply scavenged from an old teletype machine. (In case you’re curious, it worked fine until I killed it with static electricity zapping the chips.) Goodness has a lot happened since then! But the lesson of redundant storage and backups remains, I find, just as valuable now as back then except that now it is easier to be lulled into a false sense of security because the catastrophic computer failures are few and far between. In any event, I finished the backups and we were finally on the road by 11 to drive up to Manistee, Michigan for another walk.

The route of the Volksmarch in Manistee resembled nothing so much as a strand of limp spaghetti that had been dropped on the floor. First we dipsy-doodled thru the neighborhood around the city for an hour, turning every couple of blocks. Fortunately the directions were good and a map was included, which helped greatly. Working against us was the tiny size and poor placement of the street signs in Manistee, roughly ¼ the size of signs in our hometown and placed unpredictably on any corner of the street—so bring your bifocals or opera glasses for this one and keep your eyes peeled! The town of Manistee in general was a good example of a small lake port town and some of the houses along the route were true mansions built during the lumber boom of the late 1800s—beautiful old Victorians.

Two buildings were so intriguing that they made me literally itch to get inside and wander around. The first was a fire station built in 1888 and still in use! The building was huge, solid brownish brick, and had turrets and garrets that made me wonder just how this was all organized into useful spaces for the firemen. Out of consideration for active fire fighters, I did not pop in the door and ask for a tour, but I wish I could have. The second building was a 1902 theater/opera house that again is a massive, ornate structure made from brick. This building was so entrancing that I couldn’t help it, I just popped into the lobby and looked around at the frescoes painted on each end. I was rewarded by a scene called “Arcady” with scantily-clad nymphs on one end of the foyer and another bucolic scene at the other—they were perfectly preserved and beautiful examples of American art frescoes. So here’s to the dramatic society folks who saved this thing from demolition in the 1920s and have been protecting and preserving it ever since! I really wish I could have seen a performance there, in part just to see what it is really like inside. They do put on performances there—a lady behind the counter was selling tickets when I popped in—so consider that if you’re in the area sometime and have a spare night.

We continued zigzagging our way thru town until we came out on the west side near the lake. There the route branched out to the harbor’s edge to have a good view of the Manistee harbor lighthouse, which lies at the end of the breakwater on the opposite side of the harbor. I was hoping to have a Coastguard cutter as a part of my picture, but they doomed my hopes by dabbling around in the inner harbor and then motoring up the river to fill up with fuel at the city docks. I was disappointed, naturally, but did find a big old propeller in the park to act as a foreground for the lighthouse so I was somewhat mollified.

From the shore-side park we walked back about a mile on the river walk. We had nice views up and down the river but it was rather empty at this time of year, of course. Coming back up to the streets, we walked down the main street paralleling the river and then bent back to the finish point. Unfortunately, the stamp for this walk was missing from the box, so we wrote the POC a note with our payment asking her to send us some stamped insert cards when she got the chance. All in all we felt that this was a very pleasant walk with pretty neighborhoods, some impressive houses, an interesting river section, and a nice “small town” main street.

That evening back at camp we had yet another beautiful sunset to enjoy and photograph. Altho there was the basic similarity of the sun setting in the lake, the formations of clouds and water were quite different each day and in fact changed minute by minute. We were near the 45th parallel and sunsets were always fairly gradual, which gave me time to take lots of pictures. In contrast, in the Caribbean where the sun dives almost straight into the water the sunsets were very brief and I found them difficult to photograph because they transitioned so suddenly from bright day to dark night.

We enjoyed our campfire after sunset and finished “Justice Hall” before going to bed—it’s a lot easier to sleep if you can get to the end of a gripping mystery rather than stopping in the middle of some dramatic or high-action scene and then trying to sleep.