Day 6: Slumberland Motel to St. Ignace

By a stroke of dumb luck, we picked the one night of torrential downpours to stay in a motel. It was still raining when we departed, but we at least got to start the day dry. (The rain gave up after several hours, and it eventually turned nice.)

This day had the most beautiful scenery of the whole trip. I'm not sure why we didn't stop to appreciate it more. US-2 runs right along the coast for quite a while as you near St. Ignace--absolutely perfect sand beaches that go on forever. But we just kept grinding past them, even though we had a reservation at the St. Ignace KOA, so we really didn't need to hurry. Maybe because it was still a bit chilly, we didn't feel like swimming or strolling the beach. Or maybe we had slipped into grind-out-the-miles mode. In any case, the beach would have a been a much nicer place to spend time than the mud-hole KOA that awaited us.

In defense of the St. Ignace KOA, it seems like a perfectly nice campground. But for our visit, it held two bad surprises: standing water in every tent site (and slurpy mud on the roads), and a full house of cig-smoking, tattooed monster truck and muscle car aficionados. It seems St Ignace hosts a big car show every year at this time. The town fills up with lovingly preserved and demuffled muscle cars from throughout history, and their jacked-up demuffled pickup truck cousins, all driven by tire screeching engine revving morons. It was like a mating call: all muscle cars must rev their engines and peel their tires in exactly the same way when entering the highway. All night long, we heard the same roaring sound of cars calling to each other.

One woman complained to the camp proprietor that they were thinking of not coming back next year, since the police were actually trying to prevent drag racing on the main highway. The nerve. No appreciation for historical reenactments, for verisimilitude.

As I do post-tour research, I find that the state park right on the water in St Ignace has 255 sites and doesn't take reservations. We might have been able to get a site there. Of course, it was Saturday night of the car show of the weekend before the 4th of July. Probably not.

[Author's note, years later: Michigan State Parks have an unwritten policy of never turning bike tourists away. They will always find an empty patch of ground for you to pitch a tent on. I wish we had known that.]

With my ear plugs I slept fine, so what did I care? We were long gone before the hung-over car buffs staggered out of their tents.