8/30/18: Thursday- This was our sunset last night. Beautiful! Almost as good as fireworks for our anniversary!
Month: August 2018
Days 168,169,170: Hot and humid days in Indiana
8/27/18: I am reminded of when I was a little girl. My dad’s parents lived in Indiana, around Monticello. We usually went to visit them in the spring or fall, I think. They lived on a lake, or somewhere with a dock on the water anyway- maybe it was the Tippecanoe River. My brothers and I begged dad to take us to visit in the summer. He always said it was too hot in the summer, but he finally agreed and we went to Indiana in the summer…. once. Oh man, it was miserable. I had prickly heat, and my grandparents did not have air conditioning. Mind you, this was in the 1960s. It was hot and wet. Being from Washington State, we kids had no idea what hot humidity was like. Dad reminded us that this was one of reasons we lived in Western Washington, and not in Indiana. Yep – it is hot & humid here in Indiana in the summertime! Wait a minute. Isn’t this why we are not in Florida in the summer? It feels just like summer in Florida! Read more
Day 167: State #12! Indiana and Central Time!
8/26/18 Sunday Fogday: This was not a very exciting day for pictures! Most of our day looked like this:
FOG. Lots of hours of FOG!
Day 166: Tootling around Muskegon
8/25/18 Saturday: This was a no travel day due to big wind and waves on Lake Michigan again. So that means I did some tootling around on my bike, and got some history on Muskegon buildings today on my photo safari. My primary purpose for going to town was really to check out the Farmer’s Market. Along the way, I went past these nice townhomes. Not all of the homes in town are this nice looking, I’ll just say that and leave it there.
Day 165: The weather and plans in Muskegon
8/24/18 Friday: This is one of the weather apps we’ve been using while on Lake Michigan. It is called Windy, and it has four different forecast models, so you can see what the they all think is coming. This is the wind forecast for the next few days. Gray is awesome- under 8mph: blue is ok -up to 10mph: green is not happy- up to 20mph: and yellow/orange is no-way-Jose: over 20mph. Of course, the gray tends to appear from 0:00 to 6:00am. And we don’t go out in the dark. How is that helpful?!
It also shows predicted wave and swell heights along with direction. When you have wind, waves, and swells all coming from different directions, it is NOT comfortable! We really don’t want to go out in purple waves on the chart. So Sunday is our only chance in the next five days to travel. I think we might go a really long ways on Sunday.
Another good one is the NOAA site. It has wind and wave graphics for every three hours that you can scroll through. We only want to go if everything is a nice dark blue. Right now, there’s some really big dark green waves northwest of us, which according to the chart is 9 foot waves!! Holy capsize, Batman!
And www.marine.weather.gov. adds another look. In my opinion, 3 no’s on this page = NO GO! Small craft advisory, waves 4-6 feet, waves 5-7 feet. No way Jose.
All of these things say we aren’t going anywhere until Sunday. And then, where ever we are, we’ll be there until at least Wednesday. Saturday, Monday & Tuesday are bad. We are considering making a long run: 112+ miles – all the way down to Michigan City, Indiana. We have reservations there for a week starting on Wednesday, at just $40/night. We could probably add on some nights. We plan to leave Island Girl there for four nights over Labor Day weekend while we drive down to Indianapolis for the NHRA Drag Races. I have mentioned that Kenny is a Motörhead, right? He loves the races, and I love being with him in his zone, so we always have fun at the drags. As a matter of fact, we first met at the drag races…. 44 years ago! In the last couple of years, we’ve enjoyed seeing races at various new places. In addition to Pacific Raceway in Kent WA, we’ve been to the Gatornationals in Gainesville FL, and Thunder Valley in Bristol TN. Now we’ll add the U.S. Nationals in Indianapolis to the collection of venues visited.
But – back to our schedule. It is disappointing to go so far in one day. We will miss some great stops, such as Grand Haven, Saugatuck, Holland, South Haven, and St Joseph. That’s a bummer. The problem is that not all these towns have rental cars or great marinas to leave the boat, so our choices are limited. But we do have a window that can move us down the lake. Then also to consider if we stayed here, there is no guarantee that the weather after Labor Day will be good either. Chances are that it will be, and we could leave the boat up here and continue on after Labor Day from here. But I think we’ll go ahead and move on. Michigan City puts us within 40 miles of Chicago – just one good weather day needed to get off of Lake Michigan and on our way down the rivers into a whole new set of challenges and places to experience. If you want to see where we are going after Chicago, look at my main menu at the Page called “Great Loop:”. It will show you a map.
Today we stayed on the boat and I was in my sweats all day! Tom from Sum Escape stopped by to say hello, and it was really great to see him! We missed Julie. She was busy getting ready for a big birthday party tomorrow for Tom’s mom who is somewhere in her 90’s. This evening there was a free concert in the park, but it was rainy and drizzly. We could hear jazz music every now & then, but it was just too wet to go out and explore. So we watched movies. We only get 3 channels on the TV, so we didn’t have much to choose from, and there were some really weird ones! We’ll check the weather again tomorrow, and make a plan. It would be nice to only go half way, like 55 miles? Wednesday could shape up for another travel day, and that would work perfect… but it’s looking more like Thursday will be the good one … which would be later than we want for all of the other stuff we have lined up. We’ll see!
Day 164: Lake Michigan thinks its an ocean!
8/23/18 Thursday: We knew that the wind was forecasted to pick up in the afternoon, so if we were going to make a break for it, we had to get up and go! Tomorrow (Friday) is forecasted to be ‘small craft advisory’ AGAIN. The wake up alarm was set for 6:15! 😳 We were out of the marina before sunrise – woah- we haven’t done that for awhile! This shows the SS Badger smoking away. It makes two runs across Lake Michigan each day. It just came in at 6:30am – I’m glad we weren’t leaving 15 minutes earlier!
Day 163: The sun is out, the wind is down
8/22/18: Wednesday- Ahhh – another sleep in day. When we arrived here a couple of days ago, we docked bow in, and there is a bright dock light right above our bow. We put aluminum foil across the hatch over our bed to try to dim the eternal daylight blazing through our eyelids. It made the room more like a cave and it did help with sleeping. The only problem with that is…. we don’t know when it gets light out. It’s kind of like an interior stateroom on a cruise ship- it’s hard to wake up when it’s dark all the time. Oh well – it was OK today, because we weren’t going anywhere anyway. We checked the forecast, and although the wind had calmed down, and there was big beautiful blue sky for a change, there were still some gnarly waves predicted out there. So we decided that we’d stay put for today, as did most of our looper friends. Read more
Days 161,162: Hiding out in Ludington
8/20/18 Monday: I had someone ask me about our journey down Lake Michigan to Chicago. Here is a little map that I marked up with all of the stops we’d like to make. As I mentioned before, there are ‘safe harbors’ about every 30 miles or so, and they are all unique little lakeside towns. At the top of the map is Mackinac, then we went west to Beaver Island, then back east to Petoskey. From there, we’ve just been jumping our way down the coast. The dot about half way down is where we are now – in Ludington. Our plans are changing, as the weather has become a little rougher and windier. Now we likely won’t stop at all of the places that I marked, but we’ll probably make longer jumps and stay a few days, rather than short jumps every day or two. The bottom left is Chicago. Our hope is to jump to Chicago from Michigan City, Indiana, which makes for just a 36 mile jump. The stop before that is St Joseph, which would be a 60 mile jump to Chicago.
Day 160: No fudge or ice cream in Manistee?
8/19/18: Sunday – We’re making our way down the coast line of Michigan, about 30 miles at a time. It was a cool and cloudy – almost foggy – day on the water today. The weather reminded me of boating in Seattle. And there were dozens and dozens of boats out fishing today! You can’t see them all, but there are at least 8 boats on the horizon in this random shot. The water was a little wavey, blowing in our face from the south, so it was a day to wear our fuzzies. And it felt damp, but the clouds did not settle down on us, thank goodness.
Day 159: In and around Frankfort, part 2
8/18/18 Saturday: We started our day at Crescent Bakery, with a nice iced latte and donuts! This was a very busy and tiny place!! Then the gang picked us up around 11:00, and away we went to see the surrounding area.
