Once I emerged from a steamy cleansing I found them chatting away on the back patio. Todd left a little after I joined them for his shower and Shelly and I began our bonding through our joint interests in genealogy. She has apparently been quite diligent in her studies taking their family all the way back to the original French progenitor who landed in Canada back in the 1630s. Once Todd returned refreshed and clean we were well into the throes of comparing histories, findings, and research explorations.
Shelly has an early morning work schedule, so we were wary of keeping her up too late. Never-the-less we three stayed up talking until a little after morning about their family history, our travels, and I even cooked her up a sampling of one of the rice concoctions after a trip to the store to resupply ourselves. At that trip to the store we also mulled over fishing poles and hunting equipment for our sojourn into the west soon to come. After much discussion, we forewent the fishing gear and picked up a six dollar wrist rocket that might be helpful to try eating the smaller breeds of hunting fare.
As the sun rose Monday morning, so did we. Shelly had said we could borrow her car to get up to Ann Arbor in Michigan so we could sort out all of our REI business we needed to do. We drove her in by 7am and hit up a little greasy spoon diner on the way back to her house. It was a tasty little place called The Barn Restaurant with an amazingly priced breakfast special of an omelet, hash browns, toast, and bottomless coffee for $3.25. That roused us for the morning, and it was there that I decided I was finally just going to cut sugar out of my coffee once and for all.
This sugar decision has been coming for about 17 years now. When I first started drinking coffee I was 16, mostly because the mechanic shops I frequented often due to my $300 car carried free coffee but not free tea. I have a horrible sweet tooth, so a cup of coffee for me held 16 spoonfuls of sugar. That is not an exagerated fact. Over time I've whiddled down under the prodding concerned regulars at various coffee shops I've worked at who thought I'd soon be developing diabetes in myself. The coffees I was having with Todd and Stacey on the drive over had cut that 16 spoonfuls by 75%, down to 4. Anyway, it did me great joy to find I could drink three cups of the stuff with no cream and no sugar at long last, to the great benefit to my health and traveling needs.
After breakfast we got our stuff together and drove up to Ann Arbor about an hour away. It would prove to be a bit of a nostalgia tour for Todd for the day. As we passed through this little town or that one he'd spout out relating stories to his past as I had done back in Mass and NYC. We also got a nice crossing the Michigan border pic illustrating Todd's feeling for the area.In Ann Arbor I had the great pleasure of experiencing the worst customer service help I've ever had at an REI. It was here I discovered they don't carry the Aurora bivy east of the Mississippi, and this was told to me with a subtle "fuck off" in the shrug of apathy. Any other question I asked was received similarly, and as I mentioned it offhandedly to Todd on my way out he claimed it was actually due to Michigan and not isolated to just that store. This was not to be held up to me as the day would have it.
Unsatisfied with our lack of success we called around to find some other camp stores in the area. Ann Arbor is a good sized college town with a "green" ecology vibe to it, so we figured there'd be something good. We were proven to be correct when we were pointed to a place called Bivouac centered in downtown across from the college. I dropped Todd off in front of it while I sought out a parking spot for the car.
I made my way up to the bivies and backpacks section upstairs figuring I'd easily find Todd there. He was a minute behind me, as he'd been detoured downstairs to the sale section stumbling across the same make and model of his pack last year for 40% off. That had given me just enough time to ask the woman there about their bivies with a brief explanation of what we were up to. This made us fast friends.
Pam is a managerial someone at the store, but more accurately an avid explorer herself who seems to travel mostly by motor bike and bivys. Through her admission and most of her stories she announced herself as one of the old school of thinking in that you take care of those you travel with and stick together as a group. I forget how that conversation came up, but it seemed to extend to the wandering rovers of the world. She had a great gruff exterior, and claimed to be hated by most, but to me she seemed like one of those people I love to work for who doesn't want any crap and just wants the job done right. If that's done then she'll take great care of you in return. We spent probably half an hour to forty five minutes just going over gear and travel stories at length, and she seemed quite stoked about us keeping a travel log such as this one. Its always good to find another no bullshit person in the world.
By the time we were done with everything we'd come to do REI unspokenly vanished from our heads as a viable place to do business in anymore, and Bivouacs became our new preferred place. They didn't have the Aurora for me either, but Todd was able to pick up an Alpine like mine for about $20 less then what I got it for on sale at REI, and we were starting to become a bit too reliant on that return policy. We gave Pam a card and were off.
We took the long way home through the town of Jackson where Todd had contacted his friend Todd from his high school days. The two Todd's remet at a little coffee shop downtown and caught up with each other that lead into a possible fishing/camping trip the following week. Jackson Todd and I ended up finding a connection as well, as he was a vending cart enthusiast as I am, so I told him the tale of the Ice Cream Truck Debacle of '01.
Still meandering back toward Delta we veared further off to the west for the main orientation tour for me. Hillsdale, Michigan, Todd's home town of his youth. It began with a tour of Mosherville which consists of three north/south streets and three east/west streets, we drove all of them while Todd pointed out historic spots. Then over to Jonesville and the land he grew up on and the ruins of his childhood home. We toured this one a bit as I had toured mine in Longmeadow, but the sentiment was quite different. Where mine had been improved on and rebuilt, his was quickly approvable to be condemned at a glance. The roof had collapsed, we were a bit frightened of crossing the floors at the same time, and the porch had fallen over. Nature had reclaimed the entirity of the land to the point where Todd had a little trouble recognizing somethings. I was intrigued by the whole collapse, but tried to be sensitive to the notion that this was probably quite depressing for Todd to see his childhood under trash and watermarks.
From there we drove through Hillsdale proper but were in high gear now to make it back to Shelly on time. She'd be finished with work at 5pm and we'd make it there just on time. Swooping her up we returned home for a dinner of cheese burgers and chips. We ate again on the back patio, then retired into the house after dark to play with the cats around the couch. She had recently found a little kitten, Timber, who was at that clumsy energetic stage of attacking anything that moved which kept us entertained most of the time. The other two, Shadow and Baz were a bit more refined than that; Shadow sticking to just that, the shadows, and Baz over seeing regally that the antics of Timber didn't get out of hand. Shelly retired a little earlier that night and we stayed up to watch Conan's first night on the Late Show.
Tuesday was a condensed version of Monday. We woke with Shelly and returned her to work, had breakfast at the little diner, then made our way back to Ann Arbor and Bivouacs. Todd picked up his backpack there, having waited to hear about a replacement belt that Pam got back to him impressively fast on. She had also signed our guestbook Monday night so we thanked her for that and found out she might be out west when we are so we told her to definitely look us up.
Following Ann Arbor we made our way home much quicker this time. There was no draw to explore spots of nostalgia that day, and, since we were heading out that night, both felt a need to get our things in order for departure. Todd had contacted his friends Brian and Joey in Kalamazoo who were going to pick us up in Coldwater that evening. I got my stuff in order then watched Red Dawn for the afternoon while Todd worked on sorting out his. By 5 we were picking Shelly back up again and heading into Michigan again directly.
We were a little ahead of schedule so Shelly swung us through the town of Quincy, where she had grown up. Stopping in at her mother's house on a lake, we spent half an hour reclining on her back deck and looking over the lake before getting back in the car again. It was nice getting one more piece of the family puzzle fitted, especially since we caught her mom returning home just as we were leaving. She joined us for the jaunt into Coldwater a few minutes away and the four of us ended up sitting for dinner together at Big Boys in town.
Brian and Joey were heading down from Kalamazoo and had talked of dinner as well but were an hour away. Todd and I had coffee while visiting with Shelly and her mom until Brian and Joey joined us there for about fifteen minutes. Shelly's mom treated us to the coffee and soon we had swapped cars with our packs and were on our way to our next visit in Kalamazoo.
Click here for Todd's perspective.
No comments:
Post a Comment