austin_dern

There was a little coda to the trip, the day after we got home. We had to get to bunny_hugger's parents' home so we could pick up our pet rabbit. He was well and only spent a couple of days sulking about having been dislodged from his main home, this time. You know pets like this. We spent a good time snacking and talking and describing what the trip was like when bunny_hugger's brother and his girlfriend got back from wherever it was exactly they'd gone out that day. They had been staying with bunny_hugger's parents when they weren't up north and had returned, if I have this right, later in the evening, after leaving the tavern, rather than spend another night camping.

We all went out, in two cars, to a Mexican restaurant in the area (and now I'm reminded that bunny_hugger's brother and girlfriend declined to try out the Chinese-Thai place we recommended in Suttons Bay, nominally on the grounds that places which do two types of food don't do either very well, which might be a sound guiding principle in Brooklyn but this wasn't Brooklyn); if I remember this right, we'd actually all more or less figured on going to another Mexican restaurant and somehow ended up at this one instead. We like them both anyway.

And we were all having a great time sharing the experiences with bunny_hugger's parents, until both her brother and his girlfriend started feeling sick. They'd come in a separate car, so they were able to leave, and get back home before anything catastrophic happened. The rest of our meal wasn't so fun, though, and I think the waiter looked curiously at the remains of our party.

We returned to her parents' home and talked some more, including some speculation about what they might be sick with. (They were recovered enough to not think they were particularly contagious for the others on their plane flight home, at least.) Her brother came downstairs, groggy, to mention that while they were trying to sleep, the way the vents in the house were, pretty much every word we said went right up into their ears, so we promised to continue having a passive-aggressive conversation about them. He was good with that.

So we spent some more time, and tried to comfort the dogs --- who are always nervous but were more so what with me being around and what with these ill people upstairs --- and finally took our pet rabbit and went home. He hopped into his cage and declared that he was never ever going to leave again ever. He was wrong, of course.

Trivia: Gravesend, Brooklyn, was the first western New World settlement founded by a woman, Lady Deborah Moody (an Anabaptist exiled from the Massachusetts Bay colony as a ``dangerous woeman''), accepted by the Dutch to settle southwestern Long Island. Source: The Island at the Centre of the World, Russell Shorto.

Currently Reading: Technology in Postwar America: A History, Carroll Pursell. (I had expected a basically pop-history-of-science piece about inventions in America 1945-60 or so; it's actually a more academic study of American and world culture and technological development, from stuff like indoor bathrooms to suburbs to atomic power plants, and how they affected not just lifestyles but how people saw their lifestyles. I'm impressed by the book and also that I got it from the city library, not the university library.)

After we'd finished eating and all the kids had run and fallen down and cried we continued on the trail. One of the scenic overlooks has a lovely two-level patio and a bunch of elderly people, possibly the same ones from the Horseshoe Curve in Altoona, and a plaque commemorating Pierce Stocking, the lumberjack who worked so hard to build the scenic trail that now guided people around the Sleeping Bear Dunes. (Looking at the many and beautiful trees we had to joke that his heart wasn't really into lumberjacking.) It gives great views of dunes and shore and trees and grasses and people walking along a long trail in the distance that we just didn't have time for.

We got back to our hotel for our final night there. The stick insect which had been on our door's light for two nights running had moved down to the next door. The cooler was still so cool as to have ice in both bags, one of which was a couple days old at this point. That's quite a cooler.

Trivia: It appears to have been the idea of Manny Gerard, in 1979, to get a license for Space Invaders to be adapted to the Atari Video Computer System, the earliest recorded arcade game licensed for home play. Source: The Ultimate History of Video Games, Steven L Kent.

Currently Reading: Sodom By The Sea: An Affectionate History of Coney Island, Oliver Pilat.

PS: Reading the Comics, October 8, 2013 ... remember the comics?

Back to the Leelanau Peninsula, though I wanted to mention I just discovered that I passed my 3500th Livejournal entry back in August, and didn't notice it. Obviously I should hit the magic 3653 come January.

With the lighthouse well-explored we went out to the shoreline, which we could see had clearly receded in recent years, just like the water depths level chart and the question about the lighthouse moving implied. This has a good side since it means there's a lot of beachfront, although quite a bit of it is pretty rocky. I thought over in the distance I could see people walking out on a spit of land and bunny_hugger humored me by going out along it too. This had the marks of being some land that's only been above the waterline the past few years, or at least was a string of little islands until fairly lately.

We wandered out, managing to not forget his girlfriend's dress despite a false start, and down the neon-lit buildings of Front Street.

Trivia: The Board of Proprietors of West New Jersey (owners of all unclaimed land in the western half of the colony-then-state) have issued dividends --- granting warrants to land --- to Proprietors seven times, most recently in 1859. Source: New Jersey From Colony To State, 1609 - 1789, Richard P McCormick. (They still exist, having merged about fifteen years back with the Proprietor of East New Jersey at last.)

Currently Reading: Road to Revolution, Avrahm Yarmolinsky.

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.

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.

There's a couple things from Saturday that I managed to forget to include. Well, one may have been Sunday --- I'm not positive --- but bunny_hugger thinks it had to have been Saturday. Let me fill in those gaps. Also, if you've been looking for photographs of our various trips and are impatient waiting for mine, you should know bunny_hugger is doing her own trip report with photographs integrated into the events. Those pictures are just a subset of those she's got on Flickr, so please don't overlook that all.

The one set on an uncertain day was while we were in Northport and looking for somewhere we could eat and not quite finding anything offhand because the restaurants were aimed at tourists a bit more upscale than we were. bunny_hugger said to me, in a quiet tone, something like ``Boy, and I used to think Suttons Bay was the more chi-chi place''. A guy the other side of the street and walking the other direction called out ``That's what I thought too!'' and strode on. We were amazed by all this repeatedly over the week.

Another moment was again in Northport as we wandered around the beach. A guy and two kids were there, with the younger kid running out into the water and the bigger kid standing warily at the edge. The little kid and the adult were trying to coax the bigger kid into the water and he was having none of that, asking such background questions as ``are there fish in there?'' And yes, they admitted, there are fish in the Traverse Bay, but they aren't going to be bothering him. ``Are there eels in the water?'' And the adult granted that there were eels in Lake Michigan, but they were not going to be anywhere within wading distance. The little kid kept pressuring the bigger one and finally the bigger kid stepped out far enough to maybe get the lower half the lower half of his ankles wet, under protest. The adult looked to us with a ``can you believe this?'' I just marvelled at getting to see the real live Petey from the comic strip Cul de Sac.

So we drew our thoughts more intensely to the part that isn't the moral law within us, at least until we'd had our fill of the meteors and of the cold.

Trivia: The French Republican calendar month of Messidor was translated into Italian as Messidoro, into German as Erntemonat, and into Dutch as Oogstmaand. Source: Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History, EG Richards.

Currently Reading: Project Orion: The True Story Of The Atomic Spaceship, George Dyson.

And now for the next big trip report: about our visit to the Traverse Bay area, in the northwestern corner of the lower peninsula. I'd never been there or anywhere near there, for self-evident reasons. bunny_hugger had been there often, as part of the usual family summer vacation, and a couple of trips in adult life. She hadn't been there in years, though, and she'd wanted so much to share this part of her past with me.

The drive up took less time than she imagined. It's probably only about as far to the Traverse City area as it is to Cedar Point, and that feels comfortably enough nearby. Somehow it just felt farther, possibly because it's driven less and unfamiliar drives always feel longer. Possibly it's because it does go, after about the first hour, into increasingly rural areas, with greater stretches between towns and even, to my surprise, stretches where the road doesn't just dwindle to two lanes but starts featuring signs warning that there'll be (say) 7 passing zones in the next 35 miles, with countdowns to the stretch where the road temporarily expands to two lanes to allow more convenient passing. I'd never seen that before. This isn't really deeply rural, like the upper peninsula, but it's still not the big cities like Alma or Mount Pleasant.

Traverse City, meanwhile, looks like a substantial city with miles of strip malls guarding the inner core and looks much bigger than the population Wikipedia claims it has would suggest. Well, the city does have to supply the Chili's and Tim Horton's needs of several counties. Our hotel, the Red Lion Motor Lodge, was just a couple miles north of Traverse City, opposite the highway --- M-22, signs for which get reproduced as bumper stickers a lot, much like Garden State Turnpike Exit 98 stickers do back east --- from the bay, so we'd have the wonderful sea to the east of us, and was seeped in wonderful 1950s motor lodge style. It's got some lovely heraldic-lion-shaped silhouettes for its icons.

We got in in the early evening and after unpacking drove north a little, to Suttons Bay, for dinner. This we found at a pizza place where we split a small pie while reading over the local free weekly and shaking our head at the letters to the editor. One of them was nominally about the cost of health care, and seemed to be very interested in impressing upon people the conspiracy of pharmaceutical companies to ... we weren't exactly sure. It wasn't a very coherent letter, and the others were just worse, and we realized that these were the best letters to the editor that they got the past week. We also learned that we'd missed a film festival in town by one week.

The pizza shop had an ice cream parlor that wasn't exactly built into it, but was kind of carved out of a corner of the place. We'd figured to go there after dinner, but they closed earlier than we imagined. And that was probably all right, as it was cooler than we figured and we hadn't brought our hoodies along --- it was early August, for crying out loud, it shouldn't be cold --- and after sunset --- which was nicely late, not really getting dark until around ten --- so we just walked around town a little bit, scoping out things such as the science shop with an array of telescopes around, and went back to our temporary home.

The Red Lion Motor Lodge didn't promise to have Internet, but it did anyway, a wireless network with a password that we really should have guessed. But the network had an irritating tendency to just disappear without warning, going from a pretty good, pretty fast connection to absolutely nothing. This would be fine for stuff like reading my comics or getting e-mail, but would be rotten for any kind of chatting, and we just hoped that whoever was in charge of the hotel's Internet would work out their issues with the router.

Trivia: James Watt measured the performance of his steam engines with a mechanical device that automatically plotted pressure and volume within the steam vessel. The indicator appears to have been developed around 1796 by his assistant, John Southern. Source: Inventing Temperature: Measurement and Scientific Progress, Hasok Chang.

Currently Reading: Tower of Glass, Robert Silverberg.