2019 Road Trip – Day 8: Shawnee State Park, Hard Rock Café Pittsburgh, Cleveland

After a somewhat difficult night for me with very little sleep, I was not really looking forward to a full day in the car. Fortunately there was a Starbucks nearby and I felt at least mildly human after a little coffee.  The plan was to get to Cleveland by way of Pittsburgh. Since we didn’t make it all the way to Hershey last night, we had a little more than an hour of extra drive time today.

SHAWNEE STATE PARK

Our fist stop of the day was Shawnee State Park. The park boasts lots of areas for picnicking, canoeing, and general running around, but this was a leg stretch stop, so we didn’t have time for all that. We walked up the hill, spent time looking at the lake, and generally admired the view before the smells of everyone grilling made us realize we were desperately wanting lunch.

Fortunately we had passed a cute place a couple miles back and decided to give it a try. Turns out Jean Bonnet Tavern was a charming historic tavern and had amazing food. It is also a bed & breakfast, for anyone who might be looking for that sort of thing in the Bedford, PA area. Read a full review of our dining experience.

The drive through Pennsylvania is beautiful. You are almost always driving around the curve of a hill… that is, when you aren’t driving through a tunnel under a mountain. Driving through the gentle rolling hills started to make me sleepy after a while. Fortunately, we were almost to Pittsburgh when it got to that point and made it safely to our next stop.

HARD ROCK CAFE PITTSBURGH

Our last leg stretch of the day was at the Hard Rock Cafe in Pittsburgh. I say “in”, but it actually sits outside the city center and has a great view of the city across the river. We stopped long enough for me to have a couple caffeinated sodas, since my morning coffee completely wore off on those Pennsylvania hills. It was just the boost I needed to make it through that last stretch and safely into Cleveland for the night.

After we checked in at the Residence Inn by Mariott in Mentor (NE of Cleveland), we checked Google for local restaurant options and noticed there were some seafood restaurants “on the water”. We decided to check them out and ended up getting one more fantastic east-coast-style seafood dinner before we headed home. Check out my review of Brennan’s Fish House.

 

 

 

 

 

2019 Road Trip – Day 2: Lake Ontario, Montezuma National Wildlife Reserve, Dinosaur Footprints

We started out the day with our nice, strong coffee from the hotel and got on the road early again. It’s a total of 15 hours of driving from Michigan City, Indiana to Boston, Massachusetts, so even with two days to get there we’re still spending 7-1/2 hours in the car each day. If we get lazy around the hotel in the morning it makes for a very late evening. We usually like to make sure we roll into our destination by dinner time at the latest.

LAKE ONTARIO

We headed for Braddock Bay State Park outside Rochester, NY with the intention of sticking a toe in Lake Ontario. Turns out, there really wasn’t anywhere to actually access the lake in the park location. The park is for Braddock Bay, which is off of the lake. Well, I wasn’t going to get so close and fail, so we drove down a residential street along the lake shore until we found a nice man who gave us brief access to Lake Ontario through a private residential lot. We didn’t overstay our welcome, so our entire leg stretch lasted only about 5 minutes. We did get an opportunity to touch the lake, so now we’ve touched all the Great Lakes… a bucket list item finished!

MONTEZUMA NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE

There was nothing more here at Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge than an observation tower with a telescope (free) on top. It turned out to be a really fun stop though. We climbed the tower with binoculars in hand and between them and the telescope got to watch bald eagles, herons and a variety of other birds in their natural habitat. We lingered a bit longer than scheduled here just because it was such a cool spot, but eventually we got back on the road.

DINOSAUR FOOTPRINTS HOLYOKE

I have to admit that when I was planning, I thought this roadside attraction in Holyoke, MA would be a cheesy tourist trap designed to sell us plastic dinosaurs. I couldn’t have been farther off base. There is no gift shop in sight. There is barely even a sign alongside the road though, so be careful not to miss it! Instead, a short hike off the road takes you to a location where you can walk amongst fossilized dinosaur footprints. It’s a 5 minute walk down a modestly steep hill and would be a fairly easy trek for anyone without significant mobility issues.

Finally, we arrived at our hotel, centrally located in Danvers, MA to allow us easy access to all our planned activities in the Boston area. The Best Western was lovely, clean and a great place to spend a few nights. Our hotel recommended a great local seafood restaurant (because when you’re on the east coast seafood is mandatory) and we enjoyed a lovely, relaxing seafood dinner at Sylvan Street Grille before heading back to the hotel and falling asleep almost immediately.

2019 Road Trip – Day 1: Harrison Lake State Park, Presque Isle State Park, Niagara Falls State Park

It’s that time of year again when we hit the road on a new adventure. This year, we’re road tripping to Massachusetts. We’ll take two days to get there and three days to get back, leaving us with 4 full days in the Boston area.

HARRISON LAKE STATE PARK

We hit the road in Michigan City, IN early this morning, despite a short night sleep and needed a little extra caffeine boost to get us going. If you’ve followed my other road trips, you know that I prefer stretching my legs at points of interest rather than at roadside rest stops. Our first leg stretch of a long travel day was at Harrison Lake State Park, just off the turnpike in Ohio. All state parks in Ohio (and many throughout the US) are free to enter, so they make a great place to get out and take in some natural views while stretching those leg muscles. Harrison Lake SP was a perfect place for just that. We took a little walk, looked at the lake, and got back on the road within 30 minutes.

PRESQUE ISLE STATE PARK

By the time we hit our next leg stretch spot, we were out of Ohio and into Pennsylvania. Presque Isle State Park is it’s own island off the coast of Erie, PA and was an opportunity for us to get up close and personal with Lake Erie. During our 2018 Road Trip, we visited three of the five Great Lakes and we’ll get to the other two on this trip, starting today. Presque Isle SP is also free to enter, but would be quite a lovely place to rent a bike for an afternoon. It was a blustery and chilly day for August, so we drove around the whole park, but didn’t spend a lot of time actually on the beach. Just as well, because we only had 1/2 hour scheduled before we needed to get back on the road in order to stick to our schedule.

NIAGARA FALLS STATE PARK

Our final destination of the evening was Niagara Falls State Park in New York. This has been something I’ve always wanted to see, but my fiancé already saw it 20+ years ago, so I didn’t think it would make it on our agenda. Fortunately, it is almost exactly halfway between our home and Boston, so it was a logical place to spend our first night. We decided to make it just an hour visit this trip and come back for a more extended visit on the Canadian side at another time. The Falls are beautiful and we arrived about an hour before sunset, so the sky had that lovely afternoon glow… perfect for pictures! An hour was enough time to visit both falls and take, according to my fiancé, “a million pictures” at each. Make sure to accompany that previous sentence with an overly emphasized eye roll for the proper effect. Obviously we both enjoy different aspects of our journeys together and that is ok.

HARD ROCK CAFE NIAGARA FALLS

My fiancé collects Hard Rock shot glasses, as you may remember from an earlier post. He already has one from his last visit to Niagara Falls, but we visited the Hard Rock Cafe in Niagara Falls anyway because we were starving and he wasn’t in the mood for Indian food, which is in abundance around the Falls.

We finished off the night by finding a cheap Budget Inn outside Buffalo to crash at for the evening. It was cheap, clean and the staff was nice. It wasn’t somewhere I’d make a point to revisit, but it suited it’s purpose and I wouldn’t be sad to find myself spending a night there again on a future road trip.  They also had really strong coffee in the morning, which I greatly appreciate.

 

2018 Road Trip – Day 3: Fayette State Park, Bewabic State Park, Agate Falls, Bond Falls

After a lovely, and quiet, night in the field all by ourselves, we started the day touring the historic village at Fayette State Park.

The Johnson Iron Company was based in Fayette on the shore of Lake Michigan from 1867-1891 and the workers and their families created a town surrounding the company buildings, which is now Fayette Historic State Park. Many of the buildings are well restored and many are furnished, allowing visitors to experience another layer of the history of the region. There is a beautiful view from Slag Beach, which used to serve as a dumping ground for the waste (slag) produced by the company in the iron making process.

We only spent a few hours wandering the historic village, but it would have been easy and interesting to spend a whole day there. Unfortunately we had a long drive to get our next overnight camping spot, Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park and we didn’t have time linger.

Yesterday we found out that only AT&T phones work in the Upper Peninsula and both our phones quickly ran out of roaming minutes. Since we planned to use them for navigation. We headed into a larger nearby town, Esconaba, and had lunch at a place with Wi-Fi so we could write out all the directions. It was an excruciating process, but ultimately very useful. We also bought a pretty detailed road map in case we somehow got off track. As we travelled down the road, we stopped a few times at planned locations along the way to stretch our legs

Bewabic State Park wasn’t much more than a lake with a park on one side of it. It was a nice place to get out of the car for a few minutes and stretch our legs, but there really wasn’t much to see.

Another roadside stop for leg stretching was Agate Falls State Park. Sometimes what the DNR calls a state park is actually a just a quick roadside scenic site. That’s the case with Agate Falls. Just a quick 5 minute walk from the roadside parking lot and you’re at a lookout over the top of the falls. There weren’t really any good angles to get photos, but the sound of the water was awesome and could be herd right when you got out of the car.

 

Bond Falls Scenic Site was definitely a more substantial area. We spent over an hour traipsing around, up, in and alongside the beautiful falls and a lovely trail that ran next to the river. This was my favorite stop of the day. I absolutely love playing in waterfalls. I also got to play around with the long exposure feature on my iPhone, which is quite satisfying.

We continued driving and were about an hour from Porcupine Mountain Wilderness State Park when we decided we just didn’t want to drive any more today. We pulled over at a cheap, roadside motel and checked in for the night. We walked across the street and ate a restaurant supper at the only restaurant that was still open in the small “town” after 8pm and then went back to the motel room for hot showers and a good night sleep.

 

2018 Road Trip – Day 2: Petoskey State Park, Mackinac Bridge, Palms Book State Park, Fayette Historic State Park

We left the hotel well rested and continued our trek north. It wasn’t long before we arrived in Petoskey, Michigan.

Petoskey is a very busy town and Petoskey State Park is just outside of town, so it was pretty busy as well. Today was a Friday in July, which probably added to the number of people there. We spent a couple hours searching the beach for the infamous Petoskey Stones.

“A Petoskey stone is a rock and a fossil, often pebble-shaped, that is composed of a fossilized rugose coral, Hexagonaria percarinata. The stones were formed as a result of glaciation, in which sheets of ice plucked stones from the bedrock, grinding off their rough edges and depositing them in the northwestern (and some in the northeastern) portion of Michigan’s lower peninsula.” – Wikipedia

We learned while there that the Petoskey stones are more commonly found in the spring, just after the ice melts. We’ll have to make plans to head back during that time I guess, but we did find a few small ones, pictured above.

After leaving Petoskey, we stopped for some cherries to snack on, since we didn’t plan to have lunch until we crossed the Mackinac Bridge. We thought about stopping and seeing Mackinac Island, but figured since it was a Friday we would save it for after we finished our tour of the Upper Peninsula. It took us a while to make it across the bridge, due to wind and weekend traffic, but we did eventually get a quick roadside lunch before journeying on.

It was a bit of a haul to make it all the way to our first state park in the upper peninsula. We usually like to stop more frequently to stretch our legs and walk a bit, but the sights at Palms Book State Park were worth a bit of leg cramping. This was one of the most unique things I’ve seen in Michigan. The crystal clear water allowed an amazing view of an underwater spring (Kitchi-Iti-Kipi) and all the nature surrounding it.

There is a glass bottom boat that takes you across the spring so you can get the best views of the crystal clear underwater world. If you’re headed here, plan about 1-1.5 hours, depending on the lines for the boat. We were fortunate to get right on, but there were lines waiting when we got back.

You can’t stay overnight in Palms Book State Park, so we continued on to Fayette Historic State Park for the evening. Unfortunately, by the time we arrived at Fayette, all of their campsites were full. This is the price we pay for spontaneity. Fortunately, we were prepared to camp rustic (no electric, or even toilets nearby) and they let us camp in their auxiliary field for only $15. This field is usually used for larger groups. It didn’t have facilities, but it did have a fire ring and picnic table, so we had all we needed and we drove down to the bath house in the campground to use the toilets. It was actually quite nice because we had the whole field to ourselves. After setting up camp, we had a nice supper and settled in for a rainy night. We saved the historical village part of the park for tomorrow.

 

 

2018 Road Trip – Day 1: Ludington State Park

We had planned to leave the house before noon, but a combination of sleeping in and not packing ahead of time delayed our start by a few hours. Unfortunately it also made us a bit cranky for our first day… not a good way to start an extended camping trip. Our original plan for today was to drive north to Ludington State Park for a late lunch and then to head up to Petosky State Park to set up camp. Unfortunately, our plans were going to have to change due to our late start.

We sis make it to Ludington State Park. This is one of the sites that was high on my list. In my third year of architecture school, I did a project in which I used the beach house lodge at Ludington Sate Park for inspiration. I loved the detail work and the way the light played off the building as the sun moved around it. I’d never seen it in person though and photos can often be deceptive. I was very excited to see it in person and had hoped to spend a little time relaxing on the beach. The beach house was everything I’d expected and was designed to be quite useful. We didn’t have much time to spend, but since we both liked it, we decide to come back again for a weekend sometime.

After Ludington, we decided to call it a night and get a hotel. It was starting to get dark and we didn’t want to make ourselves any more frustrated than we already were by trying to make it further north and set up camp in the dark. We chose a hotel about an hours drive north, stopped on the way for dinner, and spent our first night “camping” in a nice, fluffy hotel bed. This is the great part about not having any reservations booked. We were completely flexible to alter plans as we saw fit along the way.

2017 Road Trip – Day 3: Elephant Rocks, Mill & Covered Bridge, Cape Girardeau

We woke up today with another long day of driving ahead… destination Memphis, Tennessee. We scheduled several stops along the way again to break up the monotony and give us a chance to get out and stretch a bit.

Our fist stop after leaving St. Louis was Elephant Rocks State Park in Arcadia Valley, Missouri. Arcadia Valley is located in the Mark Twain National Forest and Ozarks area and has enough nature and hiking that a week trip here would be perfectly reasonable… we had about an hour. Elephant Rocks State Park was a bit out of our way, but well worth the additional drive time. An accessible, 1-mile long path winds among giant granite boulders, which can be climbed on… great fun for kids and adults alike. Part of the area has been quarried and stone-smiths would carve their names in the rock when they received their master certification, giving the appearance of heavy graffiti throughout the site. There is an additional 1/2-mile extension for those who are looking for an extended experience, but we had a bit of a late start and opted to get back to the car instead.

The drive through this part of Missouri is beautiful. It was a beautiful, sunny day and a perfect time to put the convertible top down and enjoy the amazing vistas. Our next destination, although we were enjoying the scenery and not in a hurry to arrive, was Burfordville, Missouri. There is a mill and restored covered bridge there and it was another beautiful place to get out and walk around a bit.

It was a hop, skip and a jump (aka: a short distance) from the mill to Cape Girardeau, Missouri for supper. Before heading into town, we detoured across the cool bridge to Illinois and then right back again… ’cause bridges are fun and cool to look at! We were planning to arrive much earlier than we actually did, so we looked for somewhere to eat fairly quickly before continuing the 175 more miles of driving to Memphis.

After having a delicious and reasonable Cajun dinner at Broussard’s, we now hoped to arrive in Memphis around 9pm… significantly later than we hoped, but still in time to go check out Beale Street before hitting the hay. Unfortunately the universe had other plans for us. Just before leaving Missouri, we got stuck in stopped traffic in a single-lane construction zone. Traffic remained stopped for an hour, so we turned off the car. I had the joy of experiencing a construction port-a-potty for the first, and hopefully last, time during this extreme slow down. Once we were moving again, I was surprised to discover we were travelling through Arkansas (we’re playing this by ear remember, so I haven’t looked too closely at an overall map), and even more surprised when we drove through Memphis and into Southaven, Mississippi to find our hotel for the next 2 days. Turns out Southaven is only a 10-15 minute drive from Memphis and a convenient place to stay. We arrived at the hotel after 11pm, exhausted and thankful for somewhere to sleep, having forgotten all about our plans to see Beale street that evening. There’s always tomorrow….

 

 

2017 Road Trip – Day 1: Starved Rock, Springfield, Cahokia Mounds, St. Louis

The road trip was a lot of fun. I feel like we accomplished quite a bit in a very short amount of time. Here are the final stats:

• Elapsed time: 5 days, 4 nights
• States visited: 7 (Michigan, Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, Indiana)
• Major Cities visited: 2 (St. Louis, Memphis)
• Miles driven: 1430
• Steps taken: 34,438 (we did really well the first couple days, then fizzled out)
• Attractions/Sites visited: over 20
• UNESCO World Heritage Sites Visited: 1 (Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site)
• Hard Rock Shot Glasses added to collection: 2 (St. Louis & Memphis)

In addition, we stayed pretty close to our $1000 budget for the whole thing.

So you may be wondering what all we did. I’ll touch a little on the first leg, day one, here.

We left Michigan and travelled about 2 hours before getting out to stretch our legs at Starved Rock State Park in Utica, Illinois. We did a short (about an hour) hike to St. Louis Canyon. It was beautiful, even though they’ve had a bit of a dry spell and the water fountain was actually more of a trickle. Starved Rock is easily a day, weekend or even week-long trip on its own, but we have both been before and the purpose of our stop was just to stretch our legs a bit.

We continued on for about another 2 hours before stopping for lunch and a quick drive through Springfield, IL. It’s the capital of the state and worth a look if you’re driving nearby. We found the beautiful capital building… architecture geek moment.

About 45 minutes after leaving Springfield, we arrived at Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site. It’s the site of a native American city that was actually larger than London in the 1200’s and is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site in addition to a State Historic Site. Unfortunately the interpretive center had closed just before we arrived, so we didn’t get to learn as much about it as we’d hoped; but the park was still open and we were able to climb the insane amount of stairs up the top of 10-story tall Monk’s Mound.

It was from the top of this mound that we got our first glimpse of our destination for the day… St. Louis., Missouri. Even though it was pretty cloudy at this point, the skyline was definitely visible; we knew we were close.

Before we left the Cahokia Mounds, I hopped online quickly to book us a hotel. We only had about 15 minute left to drive, so the Cahokia site would be easily accessible to anyone on a visit to St. Louis. Our last minute hotel, Hotel Lumiere, turned out to be quite beautiful with a large indoor courtyard and attached to a casino.

We arrived in the city, checked into our hotel and walked out into the historic Laclede’s Landing neighborhood to find some supper. There aren’t a lot of options there right now (although there is a lot of construction), but Morgan Street Brewery turned out to be a good choice… lucky for us, because not much was open.

After a nice supper, we tucked in for the night, ready for a full day of sight-seeing in St. Louis the next day. We saw the Arch from a distance this evening, but in the morning we will be going up inside… stay tuned…