Month: August 2017

Martin decided we would go on a big adventure; get into his big Mazda car and drive up to Lake Superior. Liz and Martin packed a load of camping gear and food into the car and we set off from the cottage and headed north (ish). Martin set the Sat Nav in the car, and was also looking for directions on Google Maps on his phone. Confusion arose when the two systems gave different directions, and some foul language was spoken as we figured out which way to go. It’s a long way to Lake Superior, about 300 miles north through Wisconsin and Michigan.

Our destination was Munising, which is in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, which is to the north of Wisconsin and completely separated by water from the rest of the state. People in the UP call themselves Yoopers. The route is mostly concrete dual carriageway with many heavy trucks and cars. The peculiar thing is that they have very few white vans over here, I don’t know what they use for local deliveries and tradesmen.

We stopped at Walmart to buy a cheap barbecue to cook on, and a Frisbee for fifty cents. At about 7.30 we got Munising and the State Park, where Martin expected to find a campsite. There wasn’t a campsite. bummer! So we drove back to the local Information centre to find other campsites. The Catching Crickets campsite didn’t have any power, but we got the last pitch at the municipal campsite right next to the lake and started putting the tent up at 8.30. It was very dark by the time we had cooked dinner and got a few beers down our throats.

Most people on the site have RVs, some of them are the size of a coach, and have a jeep towed behind, with bikes on the back. The campsite was full, but the shower block was quiet and there was no queue for the shower. Then I realized that everyone has their own shower and toilet in their camper van.

 

 

 

The 12$ barbecue that Martin bought was a bit crap, and Lizzie was annoyed with it. It did prove adequate enough to cook a large piece of marinated beef that Liz brought in a huge cool box. After a few beers and some food, we almost forgot about the epic journey to Munising, and sat around the camp fire, ate beef and drank beer. I did get lots of smoke in my eyes and in my clothes, but it kept the mosquitos away.

 

Martin has a cottage on a lake in Wisconsin, the state to the north of Illinois, so we drove up highways 294 and 94 in his Miata (which is and MX5 in the USA). When I last drove in the States in 2003, everyone drove at 55. Now they all go at 70 or 80 mph, and it feels a bit intimidating when a massive Mack truck goes past when you are sat in a little sportscar!

On the way, we stopped at Bass Pro Sports to see how men spend their recreation time in the Mid West. It is a huge shop, a shed the size of a big Tesco or Asda, that sells huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ gear. The walls are liberally covered with dead animals, either their skins or heads, and there is an aquarium in the middle full of native fish. The shop has a vast selection of fishing rods, guns, bows, ammo, clothes and lots of stuff I didn’t know existed.

 

 

It even had a big selection of fishing boats with huge engines costing up to $50,000. Most had two engines, one to tear off across the lake to get to the fishing spot, and then a “trolling” engine (often electric) to chug around slowly. I wasn’t in need of any deadly weapons or overpriced clothes, so didn’t get anything. I did have fun trying on daft hats, especially the Cheese Head, worn by fans of the Green Bay Packers football team.

 

 

We arrived at the cottage on Eagle Spring Lake in the early afternoon. The weather was warm and sunny so we headed out onto the lake on the pontoon boat. It is a platform on two aluminium tubes with couches on it, basically a party boat. Eagle Spring Lake is actually a mill pond since it is dammed at one end and once powered a saw mill. It is quite shallow, only about six feet deep and quite weedy and muddy. It is connected by a channel to Lake Lulu, which is a proper lake and up to forty feet deep and much better for swimming in. Martin anchored us in the middle and we spent the afternoon eating snacks and drinking G&T and beer. If one finds the right sort of music on Spotify, once can also boogie on down on one’s pontoon boat. Coldplay’s Adventure of a Lifetime was a perfect tune for dancing in the middle of a lake.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It was time to get outta town, so Martin drove us down the highway in his Mazda MX5 into Indiana, the next state to the south. Martin is a mechanical engineer, so we went to a steam museum at a place called Hesston (not the one near Hounslow). It was a lovely site in meadows and woods a few miles from Lake Michigan, that was run by enthusiastic volunteers. It had a full-size steam engine with a marvelous Shay engine that drives all the wheels so it can tackle steep hills. There were several small engines running on 7.5-inch tracks, but capable of taking twenty people around the track. A steam engine ran a complete saw mill which was cutting logs with a frightening four-foot diameter circular saw. For lunch we had some slow smoked brisket in a roll with barbecue sauce, sloppy and delicious.

Lake Michigan is over 1600 miles around and is 290 feet deep, it’s as big as the North Sea! At the southern end is the Warren Dunes State Park, a beautiful sandy beach with dunes two hundred feet high. We got out some folding chairs and watched the kids swimming in the lake in the warmish fresh water. When the sun clouded over it felt like a good time to climb the steep dunes to admire the beach from on high. Jeez it was hard work! Slipping sand is much tougher to climb than firm rock or grass, and we ended up ascending like monkeys on all-fours.

It was time to take the plunge into the lake to cool off. Guess what? I had forgotten my swimming shorts, so I swam in my M&S underpants. They are well made stout British underwear, and performed perfectly well, no one laughed and pointed at my soggy pants. On the way home Martin bought some sweet corn (12 for $1.99) and peaches from a farm shop in New Buffalo. He barbecued the corn when we got back to his house, it was really sweet and fresh, the best I have ever eaten!

August 5th 2017

The suburban trains in Chicago are clad in stainless steel and are double decked, so they look very cool.

 

Martin and I took the train from Clarendon Hills into Union Station, a very grand classical building with a cavernous ticket hall. There was a pop festival on in Grant Park today called Lollapalooza, so the city centre was full of lightly clad young people. We walked through the park past Anish Kapoor’s giant shiny steel bean, and then Frank Geary’s Millennium Park, an outdoor theatre with a curlicued titanium proscenium arch.

Martin had brought some food along, so we ate it sat on a wall overlooking a marina. I ate half of a supermarket sandwich which must have had a pint of assorted cold meat in it. A steady procession of yachts and motorboats came past us heading towards Lake Michigan, so we smiled, waved, and said all sorts of terrible things about the boats and their occupants.

Chicago city centre is very impressive, and has many of the best skyscrapers in the world. They date back to the first steel framed buildings in the 1880’s, and there are many beautiful Gothic skyscrapers and some that look like wedding cakes.

I last visited Chicago and the city has changed since then. There is now a walk along the Chicago River, with restaurants, bars, boat trips and gardens. It could rival the walk down London’s South Bank. By then we wanted a bit of culture, so we got an Uber to the Museum of Science and Industry. It is sited a few miles out of the centre in a huge classical styled building, a proper temple to learning. There are many excellent interactive displays, buttons to press and levers to pull to make things happen.

We returned through busy traffic to the city centre and went to the Trump Tower for a drink. It has a bar on the sixteenth floor with fantastic views of the river and surrounding buildings. The President didn’t show up, he was playing golf in Florida. Martin thought there were some good bars in an area called Rush and Division, but we only found one underwhelming Irish bar for a pint of Samuel Adams. Walking back to Union Station we had to wait an hour for a train, which was then half an hour late setting off! It was crammed with teenagers going home from the festival, in high spirits but well behaved. Arriving back at Martins at midnight, he made us poached eggs on toast.

4th August 2017

The Captain of our 757-200 has announced that we need to wait for fifteen minutes before there is room on the runway at Gatwick for our takeoff. I’m flying to Chicago with Icelandair via Keflavik airport. I haven’t flown with Icelandic before, and so far it appears pretty good. There is enough legroom, and there is a headrest I can rest my head on! The plane is designed for mighty Vikings, with more space than Asian airlines. There is even storage for one’s battle axe and shield, which is always a challenge on EasyJet.

I’m on my way to Chicago to see my cousin Martin. We meet up every few years, but I haven’t been over to Illinois since 2009. The plane is full, and I have got an aisle seat so I can see what my neighbours are watching on their seat-back screens. I’m quite enjoying a Harry Potter film and bits of Beauty and the Beast. On another screen, I can see that we are now somewhere over the Hebrides and there are about ninety minutes to go to reach Keflavik.

The airport was congested and slightly chaotic. Announcements on the PA asked for volunteers to stay over in Reykjavik because some flights were overbooked, including my own. After grabbing a tuna roll and a Coke (£10) I went to my gate and queued for the flight to Chicago. I’m on the plane now, but we still haven’t taken off yet, it’s already half an hour late. When I was as ascending the rear steps to the 757 I saw what looked like a dent where the tail plane attaches to the body of the aircraft, I’m hoping it’s not important!

The second leg from Keflavik to O’Hare airport has n Chicago took about six hours. I watched The Accountant starring Ben Affleck, which was a really good action movie about an autistic accountant who is also a deadly assassin. It wasn’t like Rainman!

Martin met me in arrivals at about 8 pm local time, and we drove back to his house in Clarendon Hills. It is the highest point between Chicago and the Mississippi, at a scary two hundred feet! We stuffed our faces at a local pub, I started as I meant to go on with a brisket sandwich with onion rings, American cuisine at its finest!

 

I went to bed at 11.30, which was 5.30 am London time. It was a very long night day.

The weather was quite iffy in Gartmore, as it had been for the last few days in Scotland. So hiking up a mountain and getting sucked into a bog was not the order of the day. I mean, who wants to get sucked into a bog? So we drove a couple of miles to Aberfoyle, the local tourist trap, and had a walk for a few miles round there. It was damp and woody, and uppy and downy. Here's some thistles, they are the national flower of Scotland, nice.

Walking in the rain was no fun, so we drove back tae Glasgae, and went to the Glasgow Science Centre. We went in expecting a science museum, but it turned out to be a science experience centre for kids, like the basement of the actual Science Museum! So we went straight back to the entrance and asked for a refund, and whoopee they gave us one! On Pacific Quay outside of the Science Centre the Waverley was docked. It is the worlds only sea-going paddle steamer, a beautifully preserved ship which is seventy years old. I took a group of school children on the Waverley when it visited London in 1985, when I was a science teacher. I met Anneka Rice on board when she was a kids TV presenter, I mix so naturally with the rich and famous. Did I tell you about me and Rick Wakeman?

After that it rained again, several times. We dropped the car off at Europcar (in the rain) and got a taxi to our next AirBnB which is in the basement of Fortrose Mansion overlooking a cricket ground in the West End.

On the recommendation of our hostess Christine we went for dinner at Roastit Bubbly Jocks Bistro on Dumbarton Road. The food was modern Scottish, and by 'eco was it good. It also gets the prize for the daftest name name for a restaurant.
I devoured and thoroughly enjoyed:
Whitebait and tartare sauce
Six hour slow roast beef with roast veg and Yorkshires
Mango cheesecake with mango sorbet
Orange dessert wine
It was the best meal we have had in Scottyland. The chef, Frank, was a very genial and good humoured and had very very good taste in music. He had a great playlist going on his music system, every tune was a goody. All in all it was the edible highlight of our trip north.