Down the Mississippi #2

 For those of you who do not know, Rebecca and I live in paradise … in the northwest corner of Vermont on an island in Lake Champlain –– the “sixth Great Lake” according to the US Congress. A poet once referred to Lake Champlain as “that fairest of inland seas.” She was right. We’ll miss it. For now, though, we are on the road again!

We thought about taking the ferry off our island, but we didn’t, because we wanted to get to Ottawa as fast as we could for lunch with our amazing friends David and Toby, now in their 80s, and just about the cutest, fun-est, smartest, most serious, and most humorous people on the planet. Instead, we took the Rouses Point Bridge into New York. That decision whether or not to take a ferry to where we wanted to be will not be our last. A dozen or more ferries cross the Mississippi. I also suspect we will take as many ferry rides as we can. Just because.

Taking the bridge was a fine decision too. US Highway Route 2 spans our island. We drive it every day. It is not only the northernmost east-west US Highway, it also has the distinction of being the only transcontinental US Highway that doesn’t cross the continent. It stops in Rouses Point and resumes again in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. While Interstates 80 and 90 converge at the southern end of Lake Michigan to get around the Great Lakes, US Route 2 just takes a break for a while.

We took Route 2 to Rouses Point, then picked it up again in the U.P., slightly west of its re-starting point. Right now, we are in Bemidji, MN staying on US Route 2 a few miles from the headwaters. I cannot explain why, but I just think stuff like that is cool.

The trip out was perfect! We stopped driving every day by about 3:00, when the sun started getting low in the sky, and we stayed only at little family-owned motels, every one of them clean and quiet.

Upon leaving David and Toby’s in Ottawa and before getting to our first motel, we crossed the Mississippi for the first time. That’s correct. While the U.S. Mississippi  River may be 1,400 miles from Vermont, the Canadian Mississippi is an easy day’s drive, only an hour west of Ottawa. Crossing the Mississippi River on our first day of a four-day drive to the Mississippi River is yet another stupid thing that I just find ridiculously cool.

The Canadian Mississippi empties into the Ottawa River at the town of Arnprior, Ontario. In Arnprior, we 1) stayed in our first (of what we suspect will be many) motels owned and managed by Mr. Patel. In this case, it was Mr. Gary Patel, and he was both a sweetheart and terrific motel operator. 2) Ate at a fantastic Indian restaurant. Who’d-a-thunk to look for Indian food in Arnprior, but there it was (thanks to the nice couple we asked about restaurants as we walked along the Ottawa River). Our goal now is to seek out local ethnic restaurants everywhere we go. 3) Slept in our first-ever active crime scene.

The morning before we arrived, a high-speed car chase across a bunch of Ontario ended in tragedy just down the street from Mr. Patel’s motel, when the speeding car killed a flagperson at a construction site. When we returned from supper, we couldn’t find our motel. The Ontario Provincial Police had expanded the perimeter of the active crime scene to include the Arnprior Motor Inn. We drove in circles until a cop told us what had happened. We parked nearby, negotiated our way around lots of yellow “Do Not Cross” tape, closed the curtains tightly to block the flashing lights, and then slept in the quietest motel ever. All of the traffic was being diverted a few blocks away.

Before leaving Arnprior, we took a fabulous walk up the Mississippi from the mouth. It was gorgeous!

The best we can say about the rest of the drive is that with the exception of Sudbury, most of Ontario is pretty; the next motel we found was quiet, clean, and convenient; and the liquor at the Duty Free Store in Sault Ste. Marie was cheap.

Anyone who describes Sudbury as “pretty” has some very loose screws. Sudbury is in mineral country. From out of nowhere, the stacks of its smelters appear on the horizon. Its industrial plants are immense. Rail lines and long trains seem to appear out of the ether. One of the stacks is more than 1/4-mile high. Fortunately, once it fades away in the rear view mirror, it is gone.

Across the St. Mary River between Lakes Huron and Superior, we re-entered the US of A in the Upper Peninsula, a god-forsaken place of mystery of ever there was one. “Yoopers,” as the people there call themselves, are either the most inexplicable or the strongest people in the US. The U.P. is just freakin’ barren. We found some superb smoked whitefish just west of Sault Ste. Marie, met a couple of super nice waitresses, and that was about it. At one point, we went 100 miles between groceries. When we asked the waitress at the “restaurant” we stopped at for breakfast where we could get some fresh fruit, she shrugged. When nothing is in season, fresh fruit is not a U.P. staple. She knew where a grocery was to the east. To the west, she had no idea. Understandably. It’s a long, long way.

At that same place, I ate my first-ever “cudighi,” a Yooper sausage that was excellent. While eating the cudighi, I suddenly understood the term “Yooper.” They are folks who live on the Upper Peninsula. U.P. Yooper. Get it! That restaurant was also where we channeled Frances McDormand, catching our first “you betcha” of the trip.

My friend Sue Martin in Grand Isle didn’t help matters. She assured me that folks in the U.P. say they live in the Upper U.S. … but she says it with her best Boston accent: Uppah U.S. Say it aloud a few times. You’ll hear it. “Uppah U.S.” became my first ear-worm of the trip. Dammit Sue!!!!!! When I shared that with the guy at one of the Visitor’s Centers in the U.P., he thought it was pretty cute too.

We encountered only two “events” during the journey: the crime scene in Arnprior, and a totally inexplicable moment along the highway in the U.P. Miles rolled by without seeing other vehicles. Then we spotted an area in front of us that must have had 20 pickup trucks stopped along the shoulder. Swarms of Yoopers, all wearing bright orange hats milled around them. One of the Yoopers signaled and hollered for us to stop. When we did, another Yooper with two baying hound dogs pulling hard on their leashes crossed the highway. As the dogs bounded into the woods, the Yooper directing traffic hollered “Go, Go, Go,” and off we went. They might have been hunting a bear or raccoon, but they had no weapons. They might have been chasing some local no-goodnik. It might have been some sort of mysterious Yooper rite of passage. We will never know.

Before leaving Michigan, we hiked gorgeous waterfalls along the eastern edge of Lake Superior, saw stunning rock formations, stayed at the Christmas Motel, ate wonderful fresh fish, and generally had a blast. The Christmas Motel was not so named because of a hokey Christmas theme. It was the only hotel in the hamlet of Christmas, MI, near Munising. The hokey stuff emanated from the shop up the road. The Christmas Motel, on the other hand, sported a photo of a foxy model. The clothing store

 

“Maurice’s,” we learned, once did a photo shoot at the Christmas Motel and presented the owners with one of the prints. Just too inexplicable!

On our last day of the drive west, we took a long walk along the lake in Bob Dylan’s hometown of Duluth, crossed the U.S Mississippi a few times and made it to a damn-near elegant Super 8 in Bemidji, MN. As we approached the river for the first time, driving on Minnesota Route 200 just west of Jacobson, a mature bald eagle took off from the woods in the south, flew in front of us, and soared off to the north. Nothing could have provided a better welcome to the river. Saturday morning, the real adventure begins. Getting here was only the beginning.

ENJOY!