We left Port Austin and arrived in Petoskey MI on Saturday. It was a beautiful day for a drive and the roads in MI are in really good condition. We’re getting used to route planning and figuring out gas stops, making sure there is enough room for us. Lots of stuff to get used to.

We arrived at Jellystone Park in Petoskey MI before dinner. The park was recently bought by Sun Outdoors and is on par with their other parks, really pretty nice. Since it’s the holiday weekend, we still had a couple days to explore before we had to jump into work. On Sunday , we ‘planned to take the e-bikes out on a trail called Little Traverse Wheelway. Unfortunately, we learned another lesson. Always take the batteries out of the bikes before travel. This prevents the bikes from accidentally turning on over bumps and draining the batteries. :(. So Jay’s bike was dead so we tried out Plan B instead.

Plan B was a great drive up through an area called the “Tunnel of Trees”. It’s a really winding narrow road through the woods along the water. I’m not sure how they come up with speed limits in MI but we definitely aren’t in CT anymore.

Because we still suck at taking pictures we didn’t take a lot of pictures on the drive. Also because we took the drive south to north so we were on the wrong side of the road for good pictures. We stopped in Cross Village on the north end and walked down the beach. It was a really windy day. The beaches around here are rocky. And a common pass time is fossil hunting. More specifically, Petoskey stone hunting. We looked for a bit but didn’t find any great ones. I wasn’t really prepared with the right shoes to look to closely though. We’ll try to do some more before we leave.

On our last day in Port Austin, we mentioned to a couple of people that we were headed to Petoskey next. They said, “oh, you should do to the Mackinac Bridge Walk on Monday”. So on Monday, we headed to Mackinaw City to walk the bridge. This bridge is an engineering marvel and pedestrians are only allowed on it on Labor day each year. It was a really cool experience and we are both really glad we did it. Apparently everyone does it! I even met Santa Claus!

After the walk, the plan was to take the ferry to Mackinaw Island. Apparently that was the plan for the 30000 other walkers on Monday. We decided to come back another day. Instead we grabbed some lunch and walked around the shops before we headed back to camp. But not before this live statue scared the shit out of Jay. LOL.

The topography on this side of the state is much different than Port Austin. It’s lots of rolling hills and beautiful trees, with still a lot of farms. At one point, I made Jay turn around so go back and check out the largest birds I think I’ve ever seen in my life. It turns out they are sand hill cranes, the largest bird in Michigan and the oldest living bird species. I’m turning into a birder!

We gave ourselves a second shot at tunnel of trees on our way home. This time we actually got pictures.