Day 5

Sometime before midnight, the lake started making noise. And a lot of it too. I got up and out of my tent to discover that the air was still just as calm as it had been earlier in the evening, but somehow the waves had begun crashing hard. I stumbled down to the shore (which is difficult to do in these days of low lake-levels and now-ill-defined shorelines) and watched mesmerizing sight of the whitecaps rolling in, lit up by a crescent moon dangling low over the water.

After that, the day's ride had a hard time matching up. The next place with services didn't come up for another 20 miles; when I told the proprietor I came from Chicago, she said "309 miles from Harlem and Higgins to right here!" And no, she wasn't doing a Rain Man, she'd apparently lived there for a long time (and worked just about a mile from my parent's house), but had since returned for the simple life away from the city. "There ain't no money here, but you can't beat the quality of life".

Hard to argue with that when I made it a little farther north to Escanaba, with it's beautiful lakefront park and stately old houses. It's only upon leaving out the northwest end would I discover the slightly less-pleasant part of town. But in between I stopped at the very unique 8th Street Coffee House. I went in mainly because they offered free Wi-Fi access, but was also glad to end up with my first "pasty", which is apparently some sort of meat-filled pot-pie the miners up here invented and cooked on their shovels. As promised by the host, it sure packed a wallop and I think it provided enough fuel to keep my furnace burning for the rest of the day.

I ended up heading north out of Escanaba and rounding the Little Bay de Noc to the east, and going back down south into the Hiawatha National Forest. I think I've been spoiled with some really nice campgrounds, because although there was nothing at all wrong that I could point to in the National Forest Campground here, it just somehow didn't feel quite right to me. Maybe it's because it was just established in 1990, or because the very spot was a popular resort area 100 years earlier. The funny part was that there are three camping loops; two were $10, and the other, because it wasn't right on the lake, was slashed way down to $9. I actually ended up at a $9 site, because I figured it cut down the wind off the bay a bit, and because with the low lake level, really none of the sites were right on the lake anyway. Suckers!