last sunday, september 18th, kevin and i drove to starved rock, where we’d been in the spring, and then we spent three nights on mackinac island.
for one thing, i want to stay on mackinac for at least a week next time. at least. and take our own bikes.
but first, starved rock…
when we went there in late april, most of the leaves weren’t out on the trees yet. this time it was a little bit warm outside, and we spent two nights in this cute cabin. well, in 1/4 of it…we were in one of two parts of the cabin that had a fireplace, which sounded like a great idea except it was much too warm to use our free firewood that came with the place.
here’s the path right outside the cabin; it was very convenient to get to a trail right outside the door.
i didn’t bring my video camera, but i kept taking little videos with my phone. the quality isn’t smooth and lovely like i’d like it, but you can get a good idea of what the inside of the cabine looks like, plus there’s some video of one of the canyons.
ok, so we left on our trip on sunday morning, and i decided to go running before we went. i had piled a bunch of snacks on the dining room table, thinking that we could go through them and select some.
but since i was busy, kevin did the packing – and he brought everything! we had so very many things that we could have lived on them for about a month, if we would have been ok with just eating nuts and crackers and many many many cliff bars. here’s a portion of all our bounty.
but better to much than not enough, right?
after we arrived, i saw a bride standing outside the cabin across from us. she was there with a bridesmaid, and she said she was going to get married at 5! that was at about four o’clock, so it was happening soon. it was kind of warm for an outside wedding.
we wandered around a bit, because kevin had been feeing sick and we didn’t want to start hiking. instead, we walked around the lodge and watched some people setting up a drum circle outside.
we had dinner at the outside patio behind the lodge. kevin tried to capture a picture of the light hitting the chimney, and i don’t know why his fancy camera couldn’t do it. my phone did.
our cabin is on the right, very close to the entrance to the pool/hot tub area. i brought two bathing suits, assuming that i’d want to hot tub both nights. it was waaay too hot to hot tub, though. but it was convenient that we were so close to the lodge, but also separate.
we went to bed fairly early, but i woke up about one in the morning, and i was getting bitten by a lot of mosquitoes. kevin was up, too, also getting gnawed on. i shut the bathroom window because i could see a gap under the screen, and kevin closed the flue in the fireplace – it had been left open, a perfect entryway for the mosqitoes. he also dug out a couple of citronella candles and lit them.
we didn’t sleep very well, though, and when we got up we realized that two of the three windows that we open had big gaps at the bottom, so the mosqiutoes were continuing to buzz on in.
whew. we closed everything up and kept the candles burning all day.
when i stepped outside, the bride’s dress was hanging next door. i had to wonder if it was all worth it for her, the wedding hoopla. since we were there right after our 10-year wedding anniversary, i thought about how exhausted i was on our wedding day, and that it all could have been much simpler. but hey, 10 years!
luckily kevin was feeling better, so we took a nice hike, but didn’t venture out till about 11 in the morning. we went back to St. Louis canyon, one of the many that we saw the last time we were there. beautiful.
after our hike we drove into nearby Utica, and kevin wanted to stop and take a picture of a door. a guy was outside working on a b&b, and he was very friendly and chatty, and told us about this one “secret” canyon over at the nearby matthiessen state park.
this is lake falls, and the guy, named john, told us that this canyon is completely man-made! i can’t remember why somebody would have constructed this, and maybe john didn’t even tell us, but since he told us the story we felt that we had to go see for ourselves.
man-made! how is it possible? why did they do it? i can’t even find anything about it online. we hadn’t planned on walking down the many steps to the falls, and i was wearing flip flops, but we felt the need to go down there. john said that he liked go sit there and study the canyon, contemplating how “doc matthiesson” had done such a splendid job of it.
this is the view down the stream.
after all that excitement, we finished our day with a good dinner at the lodge dining room. look at the size of that fireplace! it’d be fun to sit there on a winter day, but i don’t know about doing any hiking in the snow…
we had a good night’s sleep, but i did liberally spray myself with buy spray before getting into bed.
we got up really early on tuesday morning to drive to michigan to catch the ferry for mackinac island. we left at 6:30!
but that’s for another post.
ok then,
mrs. thursday morning hughes.