I was so scatterbrained when I wrote my last update…I’ve spent the last couple days remembering all the various things I meant to mention, which of course I’ve now more or less forgotten, or are just completely irrelevant now. I was a tad distracted since I hadn’t heard from Chris like I thought I should have, and he has a tendency to get shot at pretty frequently anymore (don’t ask, I don’t). Needless to say, I was getting a bit worried. I’ve since heard from him, he’s got a few new stitches but is otherwise fine, and now that I’m no longer panicky, I’m much more focused, and I’ve regained my usual sense of humor. Yay!

Road Construction…For a while there it seemed that Michigan’s Upper Peninsula was going to win the award for most road construction (even more so than Alaska), but Milwaukee (just the city alone) may actually beat it out. If I saw one more “Injure/kill a worker $7500 + 15 years” sign in Michigan, I thought I might scream. And I don’t imagine Milwaukee would be a bad place to drive under normal circumstances, but it is currently a jumbled mass of confused detours. I almost said to hell with photographing the one lighthouse I had planned on shooting there, but then I happened to stumble across it by pure luck. While the Midwest definitely has my vote in the “Most Road Work” category, I must admit that the Canadians are by far the most serious about it, the Yukon Territory in particular. I had meant to mention this eons ago, but when I was driving back down from Alaska I stopped to wait for a pilot car and was rather mindlessly watching the dump trucks along the lake where the road was being repaired, not really paying any attention to how large they seemed given the distance. It wasn’t until I was being lead through the construction that I realized they were the super dump trucks, the kind they use in Kennicott Mine….the ones that are about two stories tall and have a set of stairs that lead up to the driver’s seat. And they’re fast! It was quite the experience to be driving along next to one, well, to be passed by one (four, actually). My 4Runner didn’t even come up to the top of the dump truck’s wheel! But yes, I am Thoroughly sick of road construction and am very much hoping that the lower portion of Michigan, where I’ll be spending the next couple days, won’t be covered with orange cones and barriers. Fingers crossed…

Good Weather…I am also so SICK of good weather! I’ve been looking forward to shooting lighthouses for months and months, and now that I’m here on the Great Lakes to do it, I’ve had the plainest, most Boring blue sky you can get, which equates to highly uninteresting pictures that aren’t the least bit interesting to take either. The only thing worse would be a plain gray sky. Give me some clouds!!!!! The Great Lakes lighthouse (Little Sable) that I’ve been most excited about shooting is on tomorrow’s agenda, I’m desperately hoping something will come along to liven things up a bit…Is it bad luck to cross one’s toes?

Toilets, Showers, Electricity and Skunks….I spent last night in a state park in the northeastern corner of Illinois, right on Lake Michigan. It had real flush toilets, showers, and electric hookups. It was wonderful. I’d spent the night before that at a rest area (where I slept fully clothed since I half expected to be awakened by someone beating on my window and telling me to move along), the night before that at a campground out in the boonies with particularly smelly vault toilets, and the night before that in the boonies (there might be a pattern here) where I never even went in search of the bathroom, since it was late, dark, dark, dark, and really, who needs a toilet when the edge of your campsite will work just fine? It was certainly dark enough to be private (did I mention it was dark?). It was quite nice to be at a campground with all the niceties, and to be able to shower after I went for a run. I ran a couple laps around the road that went around the campground, and I was so in the running zone that it took me a couple seconds to realize that a gentleman in a truck was trying to get my attention. He thought I might want to know that there was a skunk not more than five feet away from the edge of the road where I’d been running. Good to know! When I registered the campground host told me that they have a pair of albino skunks that answer to “Here, Kitty Kitty…!” I’m not entirely sure Why anyone would want to call a skunk in the first place, but people are strange. And often stupid.

Human Contact….I was chatting online with my friend Dave tonight while I was editing pictures and I told him that I’ve been starved for human contact lately. He said “Where are you, Mars???” I probably should have said I’ve been starved for human interaction. With Chris out of the office so much lately I’ve been missing my usual morning conversations, and since my dad has been in town, even my mom is busier than usual and not particularly chatty. Mostly it just seems I’ve spent an awful lot of time driving, which doesn’t really help with the whole meet-people-get-human-contact-fix. Things brightened up greatly in that regard yesterday though (finally!). I chatted with a couple retirees who were fishing from the pier when I stopped in Algoma to shoot sunrise (which I kinda missed, I’m so not a morning person!) and then met the most wonderful woman when I was taking pictures further south. I am terrible with names, they go in one ear and right out the other, though I *think* she said her name was Kathy. Regardless, we met at the Wind Point lighthouse and chit-chatted for a bit, turned out she’s a lighthouse enthusiast from Green Bay who travels around the Great Lakes area to take pictures of the lighthouses. We talked about some of the lighthouses I’d just been to, and where she had been, and then said our goodbyes since she was intending to head home and I had to be getting to Kenosha. An hour later I’m shooting in Kenosha, and there’s a familiar black truck, and lo and behold, Kathy had decided that since she was so close to Kenosha and she’d never seen the lighthouses there, why not? Wound up chatting on the beach for quite some time, she cracked me up with stories about her family (she has three boys who are all a bit older than me). She’s one of eleven children, and before her parents got married they went to a fortune teller, who told one they would have five children, and the other that they would have six. It’s now the family joke that they weren’t supposed to add the two numbers. She’s been one of the people that I have thoroughly enjoyed meeting along my trip, and I even had the pleasure of meeting her twice!

I’m sure there are other things that I had intended to ramble about, but not much is coming to mind at the moment and I need to be tearing myself away from this internet connection and finish my day’s driving. There are new pictures, though I’m not all that excited about a lot of the lighthouse ones, but I was pretty pleased with a couple of the shipwreck shots from Au Sable Point, and I really enjoyed a couple of the cemeteries I hung out at today. And that will have to tide everybody over for a few more days….

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 16th, 2006 at 10:53 pm.