the end of up (the beginning of over)

loyal readers,

we greet you from the land of the yoopers, who are so far extremely nice. if you were hoping to indulge yourself with our snide and/or catty remarks or mocking observations of the locals, i must regretfully disappoint you. even our fellow tourists have comported themselves gracefully.


i do have a few comments, however, about the insects. in the above photo, i am standing next to the tent wearing my favorite pair of skin-tight white slacks. i like to wear them while camping because they put me in mind of my dancing days back in middle and early high school. why, you gentle readers are no doubt wondering, do they appear so dark-colored? the answer may shock and revile you. my marvelous trousers are completely covered in flies.

they're called stable flies, apparently, and while they can live on the nectar of flowers, they are really psyched to bite humans. they look just like houseflies except that houseflies usually aren't all over you.

we made the best of it by wearing non-white clothes and installing a system of airlocks around the tent. [warning: the next sentence is gross. feel free to skip it.] our neighbors across the way put out six or eight flypapers every day and also a water trap about the size of a bucket that was see-through (for some reason!) and was completely full of dead flies.

otherwise, pictured rocks was just about perfect. our campsite was right on the lake, and the beach was covered with very pretty rocks.



we took a bottle of wine down to the lake and drank it right out of a paper bag, just like they taught me in that wine-tasting course in college.



we awoke refreshed and ready to hike. the ranger recommended a ten-mile hike called the chapel-mosquito loop. abbie is strangely drawn to any coincidence of seemingly unrelated words, so we went for it. she's also drawn to nice flowers.


and to amazing sandstone formations. this one is called chapel rock. it's hard to get all the amazement into one photograph, but we tried.


it's a huge column, and it's right on the water. the part that looks like a tunnel through the column is in fact a tunnel through the column. and there is in fact a single, stately tree right on top. and those two tree root looking things that go across to the mainland are in fact tree roots. i'm sure the tree grew under more or less normal circumstances and the landscape sort of fell away around it, but anyway it comes out looking pretty badass.

here's another view where it looks like it's coming out of my lap.


we kept hiking along the coast for a while. the eponymous pictured rocks were starting to seem cool. we took this admittedly not spectacular photo just before The Fog came.


so, if you take this one, and imagine it along twelve miles of coastline, and add some spectacle, you'll have about as much sense as we do of what the fabled rocks are all about. we really enjoyed the trees and just got used to "scenic overlooks" that were completely white - no horizon, no nothing. sometimes you could hear the water.

abbie doesn't like heights under normal circumstances. not being able to see how high she was (or even whether the edge was actually the edge) understandably intensified her fears. i made sure to stay well back as i frolicked.




towards the end we climbed down a little ladder thing to check out a beach that wasn't really a beach.


it was more layers of sandstone. they were cool.


now we've made it to scenic marquette, michigan, which provided us with sorely-needed beers and fish suppers and a clean and reasonably-priced motel with internet.

and where tomorrow? we don't know. but we know that we love and miss y'all, and that we don't have cell phone reception here or else we'd call. good night!