Non-Airstream run out to Michigan

 

Not an Airstream trip, but travel, so I’ve included it in the blog.

The back story is that I was contacted through Ancestry.ca, by a woman from South Carolina who said that she was a relative of mine. My family tree exploration hadn’t dug up anyone in the USA, so I was intrigued. Mary, my contact, gave me the name of one person in the level above the furthest I’d been able to research in my family tree, and from there the whole family tree just opened right up. Thanks to a Mayne from the Leeds branch of my family heading to New York in 1822, there was a vast Mayne dynasty in North America that I hadn’t known about, and yes, Mary is related to me as my fourth cousin, once removed. From that one name, I also discovered a similar Mayne dynasty in South Africa, and a smaller collection of Maynes in Australia. I had fallen down not so much a family tree rabbit hole, but a chasm.

Mary isn’t so far from us in South Carolina, but she told me that she was going to be in Michigan visiting her brother, also a fourth cousin, once removed, or course. It was too good an opportunity to miss, so a trip was planned to Fremont, home of Gerber Baby Foods, in mid-Michigan.

It’s a run of about 440Km, or 275 miles using the Sarnia/Port Huron crossing into the USA. It’s shorter going through Detroit, but much busier, so we settled on the northern route. The weather was set fair as we headed up the eastern side of the St Clair River to Sarnia, followed the signs marked “Bridge to the USA”, and found ourselves on the Bluewater Bridge, high up above the river, stuck in the line for the border. The bridge was down to one lane thanks to construction (isn’t it always?), but once it widened out there was only one lane for cars and RVs to get to the control kiosks. There were only four kiosks open for cars, so it took us fifty-five minutes to reach the booth, although only fifty-five seconds to clear it once we’d arrived there. Border control doesn’t follow normal rules, and a back up onto the bridge is of no consequence to those that are in control, so opening a few more kiosks simply wasn’t considered. I’m moaning, but I know that it can be much worse, so maybe our fifty-five minutes was to be treasured. If I may make a social comment here; certain US politicians will claim that the folks at southern US border are allowing millions of people to cross, seemingly without documentation. I know those politicians are lying, but if those voters that believe them were to try to re-enter their country using a land border point, they’d find out very quickly that what the politicians are saying just simply cannot be true, those borders are closely controlled.

The border guard in the kiosk was not the usual dour, border agent. He actually made a small joke about one of my answers to his questions, then made another! That’s a rare event. Anyway, having established that we weren’t carrying a case of Ketchup chips (crisps), he waved us through with a cheery smile. Stranger things have happened, but not often.

Then we set of westwards on Interstate 69 towards Flint and Lancing. Michigan roads are not the best, but this two lane (each way) highway was quiet, and with a speed limit of 75mph (120kph), we made very good progress. Here’s another social comment; because the Michigan Police actually apply the traffic laws, there were very few drivers going over the 75 limit, well, not by much anyway, and there’s a lesson that I think the OPP could learn.

We stopped off at a rest area before Flint and were very pleasantly surprised by what we found. Michigan’s Interstate rest areas are just that, areas that you can pull off the highway, stretch your legs and have a “comfort break”. There is no gas station, no fast-food outlets and no line ups. There are toilets (very clean toilets), a couple of vending machines, picnic tables, and a dog run. There’s parking for cars and for trucks, and everything is set in a well tended wooded area a few yards back from the road. I couldn’t help asking why Ontario can’t do the same, instead of the commercial crap that the On Route service centres offer.

Back on the road and we were being warned of delays due to the highway being closed just outside Lancing, but there were no delays, just a bit of construction and a quarter-mile length of road closed off, easily skirted using the ramps to an intersection. Don’t believe everything your navigation system tells you.

One weird observation was the number of Deer carcasses at the edge of the road, thirteen between Port Huron and Lancing. These are not small animals, so what on earth is happening to the vehicles that hit them?

Just after Lancing we joined Interstate 96, the road from Detroit, and that was quite a bit busier than the I69. The road surface was also not great, essentially mile after mile of patched concrete. Still, it was getting us closer to Grand Rapids where we were to head off into the countryside. Mid-Michigan seems to be a lot more wooded than Southern Ontario, and the land doesn’t appear to be as intensively farmed which, when added to the gently rolling hills made for a very bucolic run. The highway took us north of Grand Rapids and we drove through some nice countryside to arrive in Fremont, a neat little mid-Michigan town if ever I saw one.

Fremont is famous as being the home of Gerber Baby Foods, a name that resonates even with foreigners like me. There’s a whole history to it, and the main production facility still resides in the town, but I’m not going to recount it all here. If you’re interested, try this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerber_Products_Company

Our home for the next few days was to be the Gerber Guest House, the one-time former home of the Gerber Family. It’s only a block off the Main Street and is a delightful small-town home. The rooms have been retained in a reasonably historic manner, and reflected, maybe, the décor of the later 1940s or early 1950s. The garden and patio is very cute, and the place looked wonderfully set to host weekend gatherings like weddings, or graduation celebrations. The odd thing was that there was no staff at all on site. We were given an access code to the doors and left to get on with it. The system worked perfectly well, but it did seem strange to have no one there except us, and as we discovered later, a family from Norway.

I won’t go into detail about the family gathering, other than to say that it was wonderful to meet my cousins and to spend a bit of time with them. Pizzas from Cousin Cyril’s fire truck pizza oven, he’s a caterer, was a nice end to the day, though.

On our only full day there, Cousin Mary ran us around the area, and took us to see Lake Michigan, so I could tick another Great Lake off my list; just Superior to go, now. We visited White River Light Station, Muskegon and Pere Marquette Park, all great places, even with the wind strong enough for the Kite Surfers to be having a fantastic day out on the lake.

We also had a little walk around the town of Fremont, interesting as it bore more than a passing similarity to our little town. Downtown Fremont is struggling in its original format, a lot of businesses being shuttered on Main Street, thanks largely to the strip mall leading to the big out-of-town stores on the city’s western edge. For all that, it’s a well-maintained place, and the city fathers have made the development a bit more spread out than in our little town, making it seem lighter and more airy. The area behind Main Street was interesting as there was nice, free, parking lot and a covered area that could be used for a market or other community gathering. I think I need to send the Chatham-Kent council to Fremont for a fact-finding mission.

When it came time to leave, my first job was to buy some petrol. Being in the USA, it’s sold in US Gallons and, also because it’s the USA, it’s priced in fractions of a dollar, that is “nine-tenths” rather than its decimal equivalent, “point nine”. Ah, they’re so quaint hanging onto the old ways. I paid $3.429 for a gallon, which worked at around CDN$1.24 a litre. Our going rate is CDN$1.50 or so, so it’s a bit cheaper in Michigan. The thing is, though, that it’s not so much cheaper, and that $3.429 I paid was the lowest we saw in a State with a wild fluctuation in price, some places showing $3.93. Ah well, I don’t mind paying a bit more tax in Canada, and I remind myself of that each time I don’t have to pay to visit the doctor.

We went back the same way as we had arrived, albeit that we had to make a little detour through the streets of Grand Rapids because the on-ramp to the I96 was closed. Here’s the thing, this closing of roads can’t be helped, but it seems to be a North American thing to have drivers very surprised by the closures because nowhere on our route from Fremont to Grand Rapids was there any indication that the ramp wasn’t open. The first thing to see was the orange barriers across the road. That happens a lot in Canada, too, and it’s almost as if they don’t think there will be any out-of-towners using the roads.

We used another really nice, really clean rest area on the I69 just east of Flint. You simply can’t fault these places, and I feel like writing a stiff letter to the Ontario Ministry to Transportation to let them know how it should be done.

At Port Huron, the line up for the border was a bit crappy. Two lanes, one for cars and one for trucks, were both stopped about a mile or so out, in large part thanks to the trucks not staying in their assigned lane. There are two bridges at Port Huron, one for Eastbound and one for Westbound traffic, but today the eastbound span was closed, so all the traffic, masses of trucks mostly, were having to use just one lane. We did get to see a big lake freighter passing under the bridge as we crawled across it, which was nice, and then once into the border check area away from the trucks there was no line and the (predictably) dour border guard asked only question before letting us go on our way. I always like to make trips away, but it’s always nice to get back into Canada.

Before heading home, we indulged ourselves with some Bridge Fries from Albert’s in Sarnia, followed by an ice cream from the little store on Front Street. Even there, though, I went to make a left turn to go to Point Edward and the road was closed; no signage, no nothing, just a load of orange barriers. It’s a thing, this keeping people guessing. Fortunately, grid-system roads always allow for an alternative route.

So, back home safely, it was time to decompress. Mid-Michigan is very pretty (excluding the dead deer littering the roads), and Lake Michigan was a picture. It was an easy run, even with the pain of the border, and I have no doubt that we’ll be back in that area at some point in the future. The Gerber Guesthouse in Fremont was lovely, and comfortable, and the town itself just very typical of mid-Michigan. A good trip all round.