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.

Oregon Trail: Moving Day

And so after years of planning and talking about it, Friday September 15, 2017, our long awaited moving day, dawned for us at 6:30am. The night before, we went to a late movie at Alamo for dinner and beers as there was absolutely nothing for us at the house, no food, no TV, and no place comfortable to hang out other than the bed.

We both showered, packed our very last minute belongings, and were ready for the moving truck which was supposed to be at the house at 7:30. Compounding our sense of ill ease, of being stuck in a place that we could no longer call home and that was no longer a comfortable space, the truck did not arrive until 9:15am, there being some kind of problem with the inbound semi. A smaller local truck showed up rather than the long-distance truck we had been expecting.

After showers, I started putting the final things in the Jeep, the bulk of it having been loaded the evening before. While I was loading the Jeep, Grace got in and would not leave. She was so afraid of being left behind. She's known something has been up for weeks, with everything we owned getting sold or going into boxes, and us acting in ways that we don't normally.

We needed to pick up some food for the road, get some coffee, get gas, get some ice, so rather than go stir crazy waiting for the truck, Ann took the Jeep out on all those errands.

Once she was back with coffee, I had already showed the crew everything that needed to be moved and they were doing their thing, very quickly, because we had spent months getting everything ready to load onto the truck. When Ann got back, we did a bit of paperwork with the moving company and then by 10am, we were ready to leave.

And yet we really couldn't. Our first stop was to be in Morgantown WV to see Carter, and because he didn't get out of class until 3:10, it made no sense to leave before noon for the three-hour drive to see him. We and the movers both left at 12:15. And still we got to Carter's dorm a couple minutes before he did.

Traveling with the dogs is always interesting and setting out on an 11-day journey with them was a bit unsettling. Grace loves to ride in the car, and like many car-loving hounds, she goes insane to hang her head out the window and smell everything that is to be smelled. Charlie, on the other hand, starts shaking uncontrollably at the mere thought of getting in the car and will ultimately vomit all over the car within minutes of getting rolling.

We gave Charlie a half of a tranquilizer to stone him out and help him get through the anxiety of the trip. Fortunately over the course of about four days, he came to find his nest in the Jeep as his safe place and while he was never happy about traveling, he at least tolerated it and we took him off the tranquilizer. It would often be the case that he wouldn't get out of the Jeep for pee breaks, but at least, we had no vomiting on the entire trip!

To give Charlie a break, we set out on main, less curvy roads. So rather than head west on US 50 from Winchester, we took US 522 through Berkeley Springs up to I-68 in Hancock MD and thence to Morgantown WV.

Color was the word of day. South of Berkeley Springs, the roadsides were covered in vast stands of golden orange-yellow Tickseed Sunflowers. North of Berkeley Springs, Tall Boneset lined the roads. My favorite roadside tableau was one in western Maryland comprising tall lavender asters, white boneset, burgundy staghorn sumac, and yellow goldenrod. I was surprised on September 15th to see fall color from Polish Mountain in Maryland and points west at over 2000 feet. The color that stood out for me aside from the roadside flowers was the burgundy Virginia creeper on trees and sugar maples flaming orange red.

Our stay with Carter in Morgantown was necessarily short, our needing to get on towards Akron for the night and his needing to get to what college kids do on a Friday night. We left Morgantown with the notion that we'd stay off the interstates but after making 30 miles an hour on US 250 in West Virginia and Pennsylvania, the incessant curves tormenting Charlie and even making Ann a bit queasy, we opted for faster roads. When we started, we had no idea how big this country is and that backroads, while a wonderful idea, would not get us to Oregon on our 11-day schedule.

One sight that we will probably always remember was somewhere on winding country US 250, a dark grey creature skittered across the road in front of us, a vole or a mole. It looked like a miniature hovercraft going across the asphalt, so swiftly skittering that we couldn't see its legs at all, scurrying like a drop of water dancing across a screaming hot pan.

From Morgantown we headed to Macedonia OH, between Akron and Cleveland because it is about five minutes from Cuyahoga Falls National Park that we wanted to see Saturday morning. We got in late, after dark, walked the dogs, grabbed a quick dinner from our cooler, and hit the sack in preparation for an early Saturday morning.

Friday was our first day on the road and first night in a hotel with the dogs. It was strange at first but after a couple of days, we and the dogs both got into a rhythm.

Surreal, Now That Moving Day is Actually Here

A Big Game of Tetris

Symbolic of the Day

Grace Knows Something Big is Afoot

Grace Camped Out; Not to be Left Behind

Ready to Go

Charlie is not a Good Traveler

With Carter in Morgantown

Charlie Had a Very Rough Day

A Visit with Tom and Ann

Sunday we drove on a beautiful day to Tom and Ann's place in Capon Bridge WV for one last visit before we start driving for the West Coast and to celebrate albeit belatedly Tom's 75th birthday. We brought the dogs with us hoping that they and Levi could romp. Alas, Levi and Grace got into a bad scrap and Levi ended up in his kennel for the afternoon.

This was our first chance to experience their new screened porch off the back corner of the house and it is a fantastic place in which to live. I could spend countless hours there.

Enjoying the Porch

Porch Rules

Tom loves to shop at Zingerman's in Ann Arbor, Michigan and who can blame him? Before I owned a restaurant and had direct access to awesome products, I shopped there too. Their products are second to none, including the awesome Bayley Hazen blue cheese which might be the finest produced in this country. I hear that we might have had some gouda and a slab of pâté except that Levi beat us to it! I could tell a story about my dog Emmy and a certain standing rib roast, but it is not good to speak ill of the dead.

Bayley Hazen Blue from Jasper Hill Farm

To go with the cheese, Tom sliced a loaf of Zingeman's wheat and chestnut bread. The effect was a bit like pumpernickel. I had a hard time picking out the chestnut flour in the bread except for a slight taste of it in the finish.

Slicing a Wheat Chestnut Loaf

Tom secured for us two California Pinots, one from Siduri (Santa Rita Hills) and the other from Böen (Sonoma Coast). The Siduri had lots of candied red fruit and was fairly sweet with little in the way of acidity. The Böen led with a ton of fairly fresh black fruit (blackberry and black raspberry) with a big streak of mocha and chocolate. It had a bit of acidity to help it out. The star of the afternoon was the Speedway Stout from AleSmith in San Diego. This was as fine an imperial stout as I have tasted.

Two California Pinots and a California Stout

AleSmith's Speedway Stout

Catching Up

Grace, the Attention Whore

Chuckie Getting Mommy Kisses

Anxious Charlie Did OK

Grace Napping in the Sun

What a Great Place for Lunch

Tom Slicing Pears for the Salad

Chile Pepper Placemats are Fun

Tom's Arugula Salad with Hazelnuts and Pears

Scallops with Chile-Cilantro Cream and Corn Salad

After lunch we took the dogs for a romp down the driveway lined on both sides with stands of wingstem.

Wingstem (Verbesina alternifolia) in Front of Apple Tree

Bumblebee Enjoying Wingstem Blossoms

Lady's Thumb, Persicaria maculosa

Many thanks to Tom and Ann for a great send off and a belated Happy Birthday! to Tom.

Third Winchester Revisited

We went out for a quick walk Sunday night on Third Winchester Battlefield, which we visited just a few weeks ago. Ann and I explored a trail that we had not been on the last time and when we emerged into the fields through the woods, we came upon an explosion of flowers. I mostly only took pictures of flowers that we did not encounter last time.

The Battlefield is Mostly Grassy Prairie

Emerging out of the woods onto the mowed trails through the grassy fields, we came upon stunning amounts of flowers in bloom, especially many, many kinds of yellow Asteraceae. I'm not very good at telling them apart and I even have difficulty in getting the correct genus, let alone taking the plant to the species level. Here are some of the more interesting ones that I think I have successfully keyed, but I always stand to be corrected.

Orange Coneflower, Rudbeckia fulgida

Vast Masses of  Tickseed Sunflower, Bidens aristosa

Close Up of Charming Tickseed Sunflower

Thin-leaved Sunflower, Helianthus decapetalus

Through the field, we took a side trail down to Redbud Run and encountered a different set of flora in the damp woods and swampy bottom, 50-100 feet below the fields.

Wingstem, Verbesina alternifolia

Great Blue Lobelia, Lobelia siphilitica

Orange Jewelweed, Impatiens capensis

New York Ironweed, Vernonia noveboracensis

Back up in the fields, we continued to work our way towards the Hackwood estate and found several plants of interest growing alongside the trail through the grass. Bonesets were very common and there were at least two species, Eupatorium perfoliatum and altissimum. The Tall Boneset (altissimum) was far more ragged looking and less photogenic.

Boneset, Eupatorium perfoliatum

American Senna, Senna hebecarpa

Spanish Needles, Bidens bipinnata

 The plant below I have speculatively called Sweet Everlasting, Pseudognaphalium obtusifolium rather than Pearly Everlasting, Anaphalis margaritacea, for the simple reason that the Virginia Plant Atlas lists no records of Pearly Everlasting in this county. That said, I have my doubts.

Sweet Everlasting, Pseudognaphalium obtusifolium??

Finally, before descending to the now broken bridge over Redbud Run, our path meandered by the exact same Osage Orange tree that I photographed from a distance previously, stating that it was the largest specimen that I have ever seen. Up close, I took a photo of the fruit which is significantly larger than a softball.

Osage Orange, Maclura pomifera