Ignace to Green Bay

I have been continuing, as much as travel permits, my normal physical activities.  It takes about two weeks to see a real decline in fitness from not running, so I tried to increase my mileage before I left and I am hoping to be able to run in coming days.  There have also been some fitness centers in our hotels, some of them very good, and pushups are an old standby.  We have also tried to walk as much as possible, and I have not missed my morning Tai Chi.  This morning for the first time I was actually a little chilly, standing outside the Bear Cove Inn in the darkness; we are at a pretty high latitude, equivalent to the state of Maine, and locals tell me they have heavy snowfall during the winter.

This becomes even more apparent when we discover that our "Rise and Shine" is in a massive ice skating rink in St. Ignace.  I wander around the perimeter, interested especially in an aerial photo showing the lake frozen so solidly that cars are parked on it.  We discover, too, that our "Surprise and Delight" is a snowmobile museum farther down the road (we each receive an ice scraper); although I know nothing about snowmobiles, viewing them is like seeing an old car show.  It is not hard to believe that the ice skating rink is the center of activity for this community during the winter; you crank up your Arctic Cat and come here to skate and exercise in order to avoid cabin fever.  I thought these vehicles parked along the back wall looked like Mini Coopers parked in a row.

I spend some time this morning looking at the many stickers adorning the Minis in the parking lot of the ice skating rink:

• Stop Staring at my Boot
• Street Legal Go Kart
• Keep Calm and Follow the Mini in Front of You
• Life is Too Short to Drive a Boring Car
• You've Been Smoked by a Clown Car
• Good Girls Gone Mini
• We May be Mini but We Are Many

The drive westward from St. Ignace is a beautiful one, the fields filled with an explosion of wildflowers that brief summers seem to encourage.  We see wild rice and smoked fish for sale along the way, and pasties everywhere ("Best Pasties in Town").  We finally stop to buy one in Escanaba, a vegetable pasty and quite good, and we make a picnic out of it and some "Yooper Ale" (Yooper for U. P., or Upper Peninsula) at a little roadside picnic area.  We stop, too, along the shore of the lake, as big as an ocean, with waves lapping up on sandy beaches, grassy dunes, gulls, and this lighthouse.

Then we are in Wisconsin, and we find our hotel in Green Bay is located in a very safe-looking area near several sports fields.  (For some reason there seems to be a lot of enthusiasm for football here!)  Down the hallway there is a reunion of some kind going on in a large meeting room; everyone is gazing at a little hymn book and singing "We gather together to ask the Lord's blessing."  We have arrived earlier than on any other day, so we lace up our shoes and go for a little afternoon run on the sidewalks in the area.  All is going well until Martha trips on a crack and goes down hard, something that I usually do.  Ouch!  Her knees are banged up badly but she carries on, although this will be her last run on the trip.

Beer is a big thing up here in this northern climate, as it is in Germany and in Belgium, rather than wine as in Mediterranean countries.  Our evening event is held at Titletown Brewery, located in an old railroad depot, which we discover is the Number One Brewpub in the entire nation.

So we enjoy a cold beer (the best in the nation!) and gaze out over the parking lot, a lake of Minis next to the Fox River.  (On the way into the parking lot, a young child is heard excitedly telling his mother, "Mama, look at the little cars!")  This is a beautiful city!  The nearby Stadium View Sports Bar has a huge monument to the Packers, the faces of players and coaches etched into steel.  The young woman who took our order had a dead-on Wisconsin accent, don't you know, but it turned out she was from Jupiter, Florida.

We have been sailing westward through all the time zones; now we are in Central, and soon we will pass into Mountain and Pacific, sailing beyond the sunset.

"Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars . ."  Tennyson