Crossing the Bridge into St. Ignace

 8-26-2021 Thursday

On the road at 10:00. One of our two bear mascots on the front dash of the motor home was on its side. Last night Joe read about a bear that got shot and he thought someone had shot our Monty (the black one).  But I straightened it out for him, I said we were driving in Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore and Monty was just sleeping.

Took a while to drive through Traverse City. I think we have driven every side of this town. There is a lot of frontage on Grand Traverse Bay but we finally got through (we drove through the main street) and picked up Hwy 131.

We passed a hops field — we have seen 3-4 of these lately. All we have seen look like they have already been harvested, but Wikipedia says they are harvested at the end of summer, so maybe we just don't know what they look like when they are growing.  

As we passed Mackinaw City heading onto the bridge, we saw this hotdog restaurant.  We had just eaten, but it looked good.

Lake Huron on right -- see the boat, looks like a matchbox boat.  Lake Michigan on the left.

We started across the bridge at 1;55, we just sailed right across, took us 4-5 minutes (I think it is 4 miles long).  In 5 more minutes we were at our campground, and 10 minutes later we were set up and ready for our naps.  We are in the second row, but we do have view of the lake (between the campers on the front row).

This is a pretty nice campground (Lakeshore RV Park in St. Ignace), full hookups, pull-throughs, and a laundry.  Easy to find with a view.  We would stay here again.

We are both tired today from yesterday’s rockhounding. Plus I woke up too early this morning and couldn’t get back to sleep. so it didn't take us long to lay down for our naps.  When we got up, we headed out for dinner.  Joe had spotted a family restaurant as we came through, so that's where we headed.  The air conditioner was blaring so much I had to go get a sweatshirt from the Jeep, after we had changed tables once to try to get away from the air stream.  There was a cool moose on the parking lot just down the street.

Then we took a short drive along the lake for a view of the bridge.  It wasn't dark enough to see how much it lights up at night.  And we didn't see any big ships out there.

I needed to find the post office so we drove into town, the post office was right across the street from the ferry dock for Mackinac Island.  And we happened to find an ice cream shop.

It was 72 degrees in town, a lovely evening.  Traffic was light but there were several cars in the parking lot for the ferry.  We got back to the RV before dark and called it a night.

Our drive today was 141 miles.  It cost $14 to cross the bridge, a little pricey we thought.  We (well, Joe) have driven over 6500 miles in the RV since we left home in May, and I don't even know how many in the Jeep.  I will have to figure that out, I guess.  but we are headed home -- very indirectly, but we are headed home.