October 21 - Drive to Sandusky, Michigan

The day dawned cool, cloudy, and damp, but that was just fine since this was our day to drive across Michigan to Port Sanilac on the Lake Huron side of the Lower Peninsula. Cloudy skies made the drive somewhat easier on my eyes than bright sunshine, and the sparse traffic allowed me to relax a bit and look at the countryside as we drove along mostly on 2-lane roads. One word of warning if you try to bypass Ludington by using those secondary roads marked in gray on the Michigan state map—many of them are unpaved! The net result was that I had to handle the rig on dirt and gravel roads before we worked our way back to State Route 10, which I hadn’t really counted on.

As we drove pretty much due east I noticed that the fall season was more advanced in the center of the state than back at Ludington; all the trees had already lost all their leaves. But as we approached the Lake Huron shore we once again saw many trees with fall colors, which I suppose just demonstrates the moderating effect of the lakeshore microclimates. We turned left (north) at Port Sanilac and drove up to Forester to camp. Happily for us, the campground turned out to be right beside the lake

The beaches in this area, unlike Ludington, are rocky or stony beaches. While that is poor for swimming it’s great for rock hounds so after setting up the trailer we spent some time down at the beach looking for, of course, Petoskey rocks. Much to my surprise, we both found some. Since it was raining the rocks on shore were all wet and that made it much easier to see the hexagonal design of the Petoskey fossil rock. I found a piece and once I showed it to Monika and she knew what she was looking for she found some too. The final count after ½ hour searching was Bob 3, Monika 2—not that I’m keeping score or anything.

We also found some very clear fossils of some kind of woody stem, possibly a large fern, or early tree of some kind. These stem fossils were fairly large and easy to spot because I could clearly see the lines of cells representing, if I recall my botany correctly, xylem and phloem. We also found fossils of shells different from the ones we found in Florida (I think), so I’m going to transform my Zen garden at home to house all these fossils, which should look fantastic and remind us of our travels.

But what a thrill it was to finally find something I was looking for, and I have to thank Leah, bless her heart, who taught me about Petoskey rocks when I was visiting my Aunt Ella here as a teenager many years ago. Leah would take us kids on a drive to the beach and one time she showed us a Petoskey rock and described the curiously dimpled surface some of them have when dry. Having now looked at more examples, I’ll give you the hint that it’s much easier to spot them when they are wet, so you might want to walk along stony beaches right where the waves are washing up. Good luck!

After the rock foraging we played cribbage until dinner—the Cribbage Combined Competition (CCC) now stands at 5 to 4. Many of our games are really, really close—that is, decided by 1 point after we have been racing to get to 120 total points. That makes me reluctant to make a dumb mistake, like where I basically give Monika a couple of free points. It’s like not making the point after a touchdown in football—it will often come back to haunt you by the end of the game. Just for interest I’m engraving the games won by each of us by tick marks on the back of the cribbage board, just like I did when we used to play 30 years ago—not that I’m keeping score or anything.

Our evening passed quietly with journal writing and crocheting. We wanted to listen to the radio but couldn’t find an “oldies” or classical music station. We did find the ubiquitous country and western station in English and some French Canadian station that we couldn’t understand at all, so after listening to the news, and weather report we turned it off. The curious thing about this station was that right after the 6 o’clock news but before the weather they went thru all the local obituaries! Not just a mere mention of who died, mind you, but the details of when and where the viewing would be and where to send donations, all that sort of thing. Interesting what sort of priorities would stipulate the newsobituariesweather sequence as an audience grabber. Is this a “senior server” station? They did have a lot of ads for Nexium, but I’m not sure that indicates anything except the wide reach of the saturation ad campaigns of the U.S. drug companies. At least they could have balanced it by given news of all the local births in addition to all the local deaths, but I found that focusing only on the obituary side of things somewhat depressing.