What’s Not To Love?

What’s Not To Love?

A blindfold would help me out, a lot, driving down the highway trying to get to our destination. The eye cover is not intended for me, being the driver, but for Elaine, my wife, who is ever alert and curious. She’s the trip planner and has a habit of stealthy factoring in the inevitable possibility of a multitude of spontaneous side trips, otherwise known to me as: butterfly stops—think of an orange and black winged Monarch flitting in a sunny field of blooming flowers, alighting on petals, sipping, and then flying to the next, each one holding the possibility of being tastier than the last.

Like the butterfly, it’s often a wildflower along side the road that Elaine wishes to visit–with flower book in hand, but it’s not just flowers that require the screech of brakes from our truck camper—along with horn blowing and hurled curses from the tailgater. It might be a billboard promising a never-before-seen-the-likes-of Yooper tourist trap or a what-looks-like to her a quaint establishment that must be perused. In other words—she often points out, in what sounds to me to be a superior tone—it’s the path not the destination…Yada-yada-yada.

Then there are the dirt roads leading back into the woods that catch her longing to explore: Elaine imagines a forest Shangri-La; l envision banjos, Bubba and his meth-toothed friends, which encourages me to paddle the truck camper past, as fast as I can and mutter, “Sorry honey, I didn’t see it in time…no place to turn around.” My head bobbles side to side to demonstrate my earnestness.

Her eyes roll.

To counter twenty-seven years of butterfly travel, I finally come up with a plan—obviously, I’m not the fast study my mother claimed I was. I propose to Elaine in a manner promising novelty and excitement, “lets have a travel theme for our trip, this time.” The underlying message that I hope she isn’t picking-up: if it doesn’t fit the theme, we don’t stop.

To my surprise and delight, Elaine likes the idea, but since I came up with the plan of targeted travel, she insists on choosing the theme. Fair enough. I figure, as long as it isn’t: planet Earth, I’ll be good with it. Being the fair-minded woman she is, she throws me a bone by suggesting I pick the back-up choice, a theme B, as it were—which, she warns, will only go into effect in the case of a catastrophe, such as a nuclear blast. I suck on that thought while she ponders what her focus will be, then she lights up and announces: Waterfalls.

I like it.

In fact, I love waterfalls with their peaceful, relaxing sounds, remote and beautiful locations…

What’s not to love?

How about way too easily accessed waterfalls, (Who thought it a good idea to build roads to these places?) with t-shirt shops and junk food?) where crowds of noisy on-lookers  block my view and don’t move on in a timely fashion, taking countless selfies of every imaginable combination of backgrounds and persons in their group.

Then there are the cotton candy fingers of little kids that find their way to my outfit de jour—for the record, I need no help grubbing up my my clothes. Then, my worst fear happens—at the third waterfalls. I fall victim to a lethal stabbing from a triple-decker death-by-chocolate ice cream cone straight to the back of my pants.

That’s what’s not to love…and that’s my nuclear blast.

As Elaine tends to me—in public—sopping up the brown creamy mess from my pants, I’m grumbling and becoming agitated. Being an ex-social worker, she recognizes when a melt down is imminent. She says, in an attempt to keep an obscenity-ridden (but totally justified) outburst at bay, “how about we just go to Tahquamenon Falls, we’ll  skip the next nine smaller ones.”

I perk up from being  a petulant child–her description, not mine. Whatever! But, I do, almost, forget about my wet stained pants. Besides, I’m remembering that there’s a brewery at Tahquamenon, flipping my mood 180 degrees, and I know that Elaine likes that place and will enjoy a craft beer there: I’m back to: What’s not to love? Especially since my theme B was: Bars of the U.P. (Pic: Elaine enjoying a glass of beer at the Tahquamenon Falls brewery’s deck.)

I love bars, not the popular ones, and not for the booze—though, I confess, I do imbibe while I’m there, in order to fit in, of course. But it’s the old ones that I love, the ones with personality and history, the older the better. I study them. So much life has happened in these places.

It’s archeological. It’s science.

Not that the Tahquamenon brewery is old, but it will be one day and I won’t be around to study it, so I got to take what I can get, now. Maybe I can add a few nicks, table carvings, and spills for future archeologists. We still have a lot of miles between us and Tahquamenon—the grandmother of Michigan falls, so I pull out my guide to Yooper Bars and announce we’ll be heading for the Up Chuck bar and grill; the next day, the Pine Stump Cook shack and Drinkery; from there, on to the Red Flannel bar; and then,  Tahquamenon Falls and brewery; and we’ll be finishing it all off with a grand finale: a tour of the Barmuda Triangle in the early settled city of Sault St. Marie (13 bars in three blocks)— advertised as: You won’t disappear but your troubles will…

What’s not to love?

(To hear more about our travels, scroll down to: “A Stopover in Hell.”)