This past two to three weeks has been an absolute whirlwind for my wife and I. We made two pretty significant camping trips within five days of each other. It basically gave us enough time at home to do the laundry before we had to load it all back in the trailer to leave again.
Days in my office have been rare and days that I get to post on Hive have been even fewer.
As good as it feels to be settling back into my routine, I am going to miss the days of traveling, exploring, and breathing in the fresh air of Michigan's Upper Peninsula.
Make no mistake... this is going to be a long, drawn out series of posts about our recent travels. I hope you enjoy reading it and I hope you gather something useful from at least one of the posts.
Think of this post as an introduction to what will be filling your feed over the next couple of weeks. I will try to break them up into short segments to make it easier on you as the reader.
As I mentioned, we made two separate trips to the "UP" of Michigan. We felt obligated to take a picture of what used to be Sanford Lake as we crossed over it. This past Summer we had a massive (once in 500 years they say) storm that caused the failure of several dams.
The area you see in these pictures used to be completely covered with water. Now it is just the original river flowing through what used to be a lake before they dammed it. If you want to learn more about the flood, just Google Edenville Dam failure and you will probably find a ton of videos and pictures as well as lawyer pages because of the class action lawsuit that is going on against the companies that own the dams.
Speaking of obligatory pictures... Even as a native from Michigan (Michigander), you never go over the Mackinac Bridge without taking a picture (unless you drive over it every day for work...).
The Mackinac Bridge is a five mile long suspension bridge that connects the Lower Peninsula and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. We call those who live in the UP Yoopers and they lovingly refer to us LP people as trolls (because we live below the bridge).
Just to give you an idea of the scope of our two trips... Our first camping trip took us eight hours away from our home. The second one was about four hours.
Once again, to give you a point of reference...
The state of Michigan is just about 250,493 square kilometres in area. Here are a few comparisons:
- England ~130,279 square kilometres
- United Kingdom ~244,820 square kilometres
- Spain ~504,782 square kilometres
- Nigeria ~923,769 square kilometres
Remember, Michigan is just one state, if that helps to give you an idea of just how big the US is.
With all of the day-trips we took, our first camping trip clocked about 1400 round trip miles on our truck (that's ~2253 kilometres). The second trip had us racking up ~660 miles (~1062 kilometres).
I wanted to keep this post to around 500 words, so I will leave you with a couple more pictures of the Mackinac Bridge before I call it a day.
