I'm gonna move, I'm gonna go,

[austin_dern]

Although we'd driven through it several times we hadn't properly seen Traverse City, the city, and that's what we made our main goal for Tuesday. While it may not be a very large city, it's still got a respectable-looking downtown with the desperate need for parking garages which brought us to one that had a mere four levels, but identified them with not just numbers and colors but also seasons of the year, which was cute. The parking deck was named in honor of ... I forget just who, but someone who'd been beloved in and employed by the city for decades, so there was a little bust of him just outside the elevator, and a hanging display of car hoods painted up because that's what the city is like.

If that sounds kind of Ann Arbor-y, well, it is: Traverse City gives off very strong vibes of that city's feel. The main downtown strip, for example, is not just alive and apparently healthy with a variety of non-generic shops, but it's also got great mid-century modern signs and storefronts that are still well-kept and, where neon comes into the things, brilliantly lit, as at the State Theater. (They were showing Rise of the Guardians or whichever one was the one with the Mad Russian Santa and Emo Jack Frost, not the one with the magic steampunk owls.)

We ate at a coffee shop that was clearly the next stage in Pokemon evolution from the Gone Wired Internet Cafe down the block, as it's reached the point where instead of mismatched secondhand sofas they have stark Apple Store furniture, and instead of menus written out in colorful chalk changed by whoever can turn the words ``cheese omelette'' into flowers the menu is ... actually kind of hidden and all the prices are given as digit-less, symbol-less numbers, eg, ``6'' or ``5.5''. We got bowls of egg-based meals (mine turned out to have bacon which I didn't realize when ordering) and for all the feel of the place we had a good time and saw another chipmunk poking around the outside deck. (We might've eaten outside, if it had been a tiny bit warmer; cool weather would plague the whole week.)

We spent probably the most time that day in a bookstore, one the size of your bigger Barnes and Noble or former Borders and one that sprawls over three floors within town; but it's a local store. I kept circling around the good-sized local-books section, some of it simply local-authors, some of it about the localities. If we had any particular goal it was finding reprints of a book bunny_hugger had had about ghost towns of the lower and upper peninsulas. There were several such books around, though not the one she'd been thinking of. The bookstore, I note, supports not just a really good-sized magazine section with imported magazines I haven't seen since leaving Singapore, but also two coffee shops. And it's not two locations --- one inside and one with street access --- of the same shop, at least based on their labels; they just support two cafes.

We also spent a good while looking into Toy Harbor, a nicely stuffed toy shop with among other things --- like coloring books full of dragons, animals, and baby animals --- a lot of puppets, I think mostly Folkmanis brand. I put on a raccoon and got several people professing surprise that I'd either brought an actual animal in the store or that it wasn't an actual animal in my arms. This is the sort of thing that goes right to my head, of course. To the extent I have any good puppeteering skills it's that if the puppet isn't doing anything, I try to keep flexing and releasing my wrist so the animal moves in a way that kind of suggests breathing, which, since it keeps the puppet from being motionless, keeps it looking alive. But they're probably just being polite.

The last shop we were really able to crawl around in was selling cherry-based foods. The area grows a lot of cherries, and bunny_hugger hoped to have us stop at some roadside fruit vendor to pick up a bunch of fresh cherries. We kept missing chances to do that, but at least we could try out their samples of cherry jams and salsas and whatever else. This would also be a good source of souvenirs to bring to our parents. Mine haven't yet figured just what to do with their cherry jam but, as long as they eat it they're pretty much doing it right.

The reason this was the last shop was that while we were in it, bunny_hugger's brother called. He and his girlfriend were spending a week out in Michigan, a rare visit home for him, and naturally he could only get the week that we were already committed for. But he was happy to spend a couple days in the Leelanau peninsula, and from this point our days would be partly split between our wandering around and our meeting up with them. He was calling because he was in town, now --- she had asked him to call when he was about an hour away so we could drive back to our hotel without feeling rushed --- and he was hoping to borrow bunny_hugger's tent. Working out that they were there and arranging a chance to meet up took surprisingly long and, obviously, cut short our browsing at the store. (Someone at the store did tell us we were a cute couple, which is awfully flattering of them.) We did walk back the other side of the street, but we didn't feel we could take the time to visit the fudge shop or the ``Trains and Things'' hobby shop or the like; maybe later. We also failed to find a Christmas shop, or any evidence that it was around, and worried that it might have closed.

Her brother and his girlfriend were figuring to camp at the state park around the Grand Traverse Lighthouse. And we were glad to support them, but we probably could've handled the handoff of the tent better (particularly, if they'd called sooner we could have had them meet us in Traverse City, and we could've brought the tent in our car). But, the park had camping sites available yet --- a lucky stroke, although the coolness and that it was midweek probably helped us --- and while it was getting terribly cold for mid-August by my standards overnight the tent is to all reports a really good one, and they were kept warm enough.

They went off to set up, and we went to diner back in Suttons Bay where once again we couldn't find whitefish paté. Clearly there's something bizarre going on, or at least there was. We figured they would call us when they were set up and ready to meet us again, but then discovered that bunny_hugger's phone had no service within Suttons Bay (and none for a fair distance around the town). I failed to bring my phone with us --- I'd left it in the hotel room, where it didn't do us any good --- but they wouldn't have had that number to call and might not have accepted a call from my foreign-to-them number. We drove far enough out of town to learn where they actually were, which was the bar in Omena where we'd been on Sunday early-afternoon.

The bar-and-restaurant at night has a different atmosphere, naturally enough, and we were at the bar portion instead of eating on the patio. It also had more atmosphere, or at least atmosphere that could better support folks like bunny_hugger's brother, who after all is a professional hipster (I'm only slightly joking). We spent a couple hours hearing family stories and watching them piece together what they could remember about the bar's earlier incarnations (her brother pointed out that one of the rooms had been closed off, but contained everything he might have wished for, when he was a kid, stuff like arcade games or motorcycles or such), and of course, making fun of her brother for having gotten an iPhone and going to ask Siri for the kinds of things people pester Siri for.

When we went home --- hoping that the tent would be warm enough --- we discovered on a light bulb outside our door a stick insect, standing on top of it like a giant insect bestriding the globe (at least, the globe of Mars, based on the color). It'd be back the next night, but the night after had moved to the next room's door.

Trivia: The Sears Catalogue listed covered wagons for sale at least as late as 1924. Source: The Grand Emporiums: The Illustrated History Of America's Great Department Stores, Robert Hendrickson.

Currently Reading: Hitler's Secret War In South America, 1939 - 1945, Stanley E Hilton.

PS: From ElKement: May The Force Field Be With You, pointing to a fine set of articles about quantum field theory that you don't have to know mathematics to read.