Oregon Trail: Ohio to Lake Michigan

It was still dark when we awoke at our hotel in Macedonia OH and a bit nippy when I took the dogs out for their morning walk. Soon after as the sun was rising above the trees, we found ourselves 5 minutes away at Brandywine Falls in Cuyahoga National Park. Although we only got to see a tiny bit of the park for about a half an hour, it sure looks like a wonderful place to explore. I would wish for more time to look about, not for the last time and not even for the last time today.

Brandywine Falls

This, our first morning out on the road, I made sandwiches for the day. And while they were certainly tasty sandwiches, we found that it wasn't worth the time to make them in advance. In the future, we would just hit the road and pull the sandwiches together in the car as we were driving. Until we ran out of cold cuts about six or seven days in. And then, we just hit fast food late morning for an early lunch and then would have dinner out at our destination, a welcome break from driving and the monotonous scenery of yet another hotel room.

Sandwiches for the Road

There is a short trail from the entrance road to Brandywine Falls that meanders through the woods and then along the cliff face above the river. NPS has done a wonderful job of building a walkway along the cliff to the falls. The river gorge is very steep and the sides are covered in beautiful old hemlocks.

Walkway Along the Cliff

Fall Color: Poison Ivy

Fall Color: Sugar Maples

Fall Color: Tall White Fall Asters

On Our Way to See the Falls

Ferns Along the Cliff Face

Brandywine Falls

Again, Closer

Sedate Creek Turns to Beautiful Falls

The visit to Cuyahoga NP was the only part of our day that we had scripted in advance. Just before bed the night before, we were looking at the road atlas and spied Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lake Shore way up north on the east coast of Lake Michigan. We thought we would try for it probably on Sunday morning, but as it turns out, we made good enough time and decided to visit it on Saturday afternoon.

Bringing a road atlas was a good thing. While our GPS worked great everywhere, the atlas was really the only place we could get an overarching sense of where we were going and what we were doing. While our cell phones were certainly useful for finding things along our route, so much of our country is still without cell phone service. A good atlas is a big help. As is Charlie.

Chuck Giving an Atlas Assist

Hello Michigan!

Our route took us west through Ohio on the Ohio Turnpike, which was a breeze with our EZ-Pass. Once we crossed the Cuyahoga River, the landscape became flat like Northern Neck or Eastern Shore with lots of vast cornfields on either side of the road. These fields would be trivial compared to ones we would see later in Minnesota, but they were impressive nonetheless.

We tried to avoid the main population centers of Toledo and Detroit and for the most part were successful, heading north through Ann Arbor and Flint. Signs of the American automotive industry were everywhere from the big Toledo Machining plant to the Chevy truck plant south of Flint. I have never seen so many trucks in one place: acres upon acres of brand new trucks surrounded the behemoth plant.

For giggles, I noticed the brand of each vehicle that we encountered for 100 miles north of Detroit. I tallied only four foreign cars in 100 miles and two of them had out-of-state plates from Indiana and Ohio. It appears that one does not drive a Toyota in Michigan. We felt OK in our Jeep.

Surfing through the radio, we heard a commercial for Wendy's. The commercial noted that the special being advertised was available in Canada only. I hadn't realized that we were listening to a Windsor station.

North of Ann Arbor, the scenery changed dramatically. We went from farmland to industrial to northern forest with lots of white pines and other pines I don't recognize along with paper birches which are totally unknown in our part of the world. And then we would go by vast patches of spruces, also something we're not used to. This is the first time in the entire trip, but certainly not the last, that we would realize that we had left our Virginia frame of reference. This was quickly and constantly reinforced by the appearance of snowmobiles for sale in front yards, snowmobile dealerships, and snowmobile crossings on the road.

Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lake Shore is far too vast to be seen in a two-hour visit, so the ranger advised us to drive around the Pierce Stocking Scenic Drive. And while it was scenic, it was also swamped with tourists, so we never got any real solitude to take in the gorgeousness of this section of Lake Michigan and its fabulous turquoise-colored water.

Glen Lake

Wish We Had Time to Hike the Dunes

Scrub Along the Dunes

Panorama of Sleeping Bear Dunes

Lake or Ocean?

Grass, Hanging on the Dune

Beaches? In Michigan?

Do You Believe the Water Color?

Gorgeous Goldenrods at Sleeping Bear Dunes

Viburnum trilobum Berries

We ended up spending the night in a little place called the Cadillac Inn in Cadillac, Michigan, some 90 minutes south of the Mackinac Bridge. We were not very hopeful about the condition of the place and were expecting a roach motel especially given the bargain pricing, but we were very pleasantly surprised at how clean it was.