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Roadtrekingmike

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  1. Roadtrekingmike
    I always knew I was lucky to live in Michigan, the very heart of the Great Lakes. But until I started this drive along the shoreline of all five Great Lakes, I didn’t realize how fortunate I truly am to call this area home.
    I also didn’t realize how interconnected they are. From a hydrological standpoint, they are all intermingled and pretty much part of one system. The water that passes the rocky northern Superior shore in Minnesota eventually makes its way to the sandy bluffs of Lake Ontario in upstate New York.

    And until I started out in our Roadtrek Etrek motorhome moving west from near Cape Vincent, NY, I was unaware of the amazing diversity of the land, the history, culture, economic import, beauty and recreational opportunities that make the Great Lakes the largest system of fresh, surface water on Earth, containing 84% of the U.S. fresh water supply and 21% of the entire planet’s supply.
    Our first leg took us from the eastern end of Lake Ontario in New York, on to Lake Erie in Pennsylvania and Ohio, north into Michigan and the start of the lake on the shores of the Lake Erie Metro Park, at the mouth of the Detroit River. Total distance was 702 miles.
    We were plagued by cloudy skies and intermittent rain most of the way. I used my 4g LTE Verizon connection – something we had pretty much the whole route – to scout for nearby attractions.
    Our first discovery was in Le Roy, NY, a half-hour from our campsite at the Lakeview State Park on the shores of Lake Ontario. Why Le Roy? Because that is where we found the Jell-O Museum and Gallery, an absolutely fascinating place that chronicles and celebrates America’s most famous desert.
    In 1897, Pearle Wait, a carpenter in Le Roy, experimented and came up with a fruit flavored dessert which his wife, May, named Jell-O. He tried to market his product but he lacked the capital and the experience. In 1899 he sold his formula for the sum of $450.
    The Jell-O Museum and Galley documents how the Jell-O’s success is a tribute to marketing and advertising. In 1904, a three-inch ad costing $336 in the Ladies Home Journal launched the printed portion of the campaign, and the first of the Jell-O “best seller” recipes rolled off the presses. In some years, as many as 15 million booklets were distributed. Noted artists such as Rose O’Neill, Maxfield Parrish, Coles Phillips, Norman Rockwell, Linn Ball, and Angus MacDonald made Jell-O a household word with their colored illustrations.
    Salesmen, well-trained, well groomed, well versed in the art of selling went out in “spanking rigs, drawn by beautiful horses” into the roads, byroads, fairs, country gatherings, church socials, and parties to advertise their product. First came team-drawn wagons, to be followed by smart auto-cars. Pictures, posters, and billboards over the American landscape, as well as magazine, carried the Jell-O Girl and the then six delicious flavors into the American home.
    Eventually, Jell-O was bought by General Foods and moved away from Le Roy. But the museum, staffed by local folk, is a delightful place of Americana nostalgia.
    We moved from Lake Ontario to Lake Erie.
    In Erie, PA, we spend a drizzly afternoon touring the 11-mile long, 3,200-acre sandy Presque Isle State Park, located on a peninsula that arches into Lake Erie. Besides numerous beaches, picnic areas and bike trails, the park boasts the Perry Monument, a 101 foot structure located at the eastern end of Presque Isle dedicated to Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, who defeated the British fleet in the War of 1912.
    Standing next to Misery Bay – so named by the men of Perry’s naval squadron, who wintered here 1813-1814 after the crucial Battle of Lake Erie in September 1813 – the monument reminds us that if Perry hadn’t won, much of the Midwest would now likely be Canada.
    Further east into Ohio we overnighted on the shoreline at the Geneva State Park. In town, we visited the original old-fashioned soda fountain at the local drugstore where I had an early morning root beer float, the perfect way to start the day.
    We were headed back west when Jennifer did an Internet search (that 4g LTE Verizon network and our Mi-Fi card in the Roadtrek is better than a travel guide) where we discovered that the area has over 17 covered bridges and more than a dozen local wineries.
    The glaciated soil along the Grand River was laid there as the Great Lakes were being formed and is perfect for great grape production. At the Harpersfield Vineyard and Winery, we chatted up the winemaker himself and learned that the estate grown Pinot Noir and Chardonnay wines there are among the finest in North America.
    Then it was on to Vermilion, Ohio, where we attended the town’s annual Festival of the Fish, a weekend event boat parades, races, pageants, contests, food, entertainment, markets. We wanted to stick around for the fireworks but stiff winds blowing off the lake had postponed them for a day.
    While there, we met Christopher Gillcrist, executive director of the newly opened Great Lakes Historical Society Museum in Toledo. Gillcrest is a wealth of information about the Great Lakes and it’s importance.
    From there, it was back west and then, at the state border, up along the coast into Michigan, where the entire stretch of the lake from the Detroit River mouth south to Monroe and Toledo is one of the probably the most prolific walleye fisheries on the continent.
    Alas, the stiff winds following the storm front kept most boats in harbor during our visit.
    Standing on the shore, watching the Detroit River empty into the lake it formed so many eons ago, we realized all that water in front of us originated from the upper lakes.
    After a quick weekend home for Father’s Day, we looked forward to the next week 00when we would resume the shoreline tour – at the end of Lake Huron in Port Huron.
    Be sure and send along your tips on what we should see. You can Tweet me using the #VZGreatlakes, #Roadtreking and #PureMichigan hashtags.

    The native American’s who first lived on the shores of Lake Ontario in what is now upstate New York called it “the land of the shining water.”

    The Jello Museum and Gallery in Le Roy, N.Y.

    Our Lake Erie shoreline campsite at Geneva State Park in Ohio
  2. Roadtrekingmike
    Lots of people have asked how I’m filing my Great Lakes Shoreline Tour reports and what tech gear I have on our Roadtrek Etrek.
    It was raining yesterday and we were stuck in cam so I did a short little video to show some of the gear I'm using.

    I’ll do more and show the drone and some other gadgets and gizmos in future reports, but right now, here’s what was handy as I was shooting the report.
    The Wilson Sleek cell phone booster I use comes with a small magnetic mount antenna, a couple of inches long. I replaced it with a longer one I found on Amazon that I have up on the roof of our Roadtrek Etrek. See the picture below.
    By the way, all the gear you see here – with the exception of the MiFi card – is my own, purchased by me at full retail. Verizon, which is sponsoring the Great Lakes Shoreline tour and compensates me for reports that appear on their corporate blog, provided the Mifi card and covers my data fees.
    Good thing, too, because last month in Canada, I forgot to turn roaming data off and racked up $3,000 in wireless fees during a two-week stay. But that’s another story and a mistake I won’t make again.

    I replaced the Wilson Sleek cell phone antenna with a longer one, on the roof of the motorhome.
  3. Roadtrekingmike
    Michigan’s Sunrise Side is one of the best-kept secrets in the Great Lakes.
    The state’s west coast Lake Michigan PR machine has done a better job of promoting the beaches and trendy little communities there while the Lake Huron coast along the state’s east coast has stayed purposefully low-keyed.
    And that has been just fine with the locals and the sharp-eyed tourists who love the area. That means there are no traffic jams. Prices for food, lodging and the like are usually more affordable than the tourist-dense Michigan west coast. And for RVers, that means more places to camp with more space, better views and less competition for the best spots.
    But the reason we like the Sunrise Side so much is because of the sunrises.
    Check out the pictures below.
    Some sunrises are an explosion of pastels. Others bright gold and yellow.
    Every one is worth getting up for.
    We’re now over 1,500 miles into our Verizon Wireless Great Lakes Shoreline Tour of the U.S.-side of the Great Lakes. And this leg, called the Sunrise Side, follows us from the start of Lake Huron in Port Huron, MI to the very tip of the Lower Peninsula Mitt in Mackinaw City, MI
    In so doing, we found what just may be the prettiest two coastal roads in the region.
    Granted, there may be shorter roads elsewhere that are more spectacular. But mile for mile, you just can’t beat US-25 from Port Huron to Bay City, and US-23, from Bay City to Mackinaw City. Most people take the I-75 interstate up the middle of the state. But the shoreline roads are much more fun and relaxing.
    Both hug the Huron shoreline and offer numerous pull outs, roadside, county and state parks with lake views, stairs down to the wild shoreline and, often, camping.
    On our trip we stayed in two places, electing to do the drive in three days.
    Our first overnight was at the East Tawas State Park, located on the Tawas Bay Point. The Tawas Point is one of the best bird-watching spots in North America, smack dab on a migratory pathway. People from all over the world come here in late spring to birdwatch.
    Many of the birds had moved on during our visit, though I was able to see a nesting pair of piping plovers, an endangered species. You can see them in the video.
    We also overnighted in Alpena, MI, staying at the privately-owned Campers Cove RV Park located on the Thunder Bay River. The campground offers kayak rentals and shoreline fishing .
    The video shows why we stayed in Alpena, to take advantage of the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary off the coast of Alpena, , an underwater preserve because of all the shipwrecks there.
    The three days we allotted for this seemed a bit rushed. If I was doing it over – and I will when we’re not on deadline or heading elsewhere – I ‘d make it at least five days.
    I’d add a stop just north of Port Huron at the Lakeport State Park and another just north of Rogers City at the P.H. Hoeft State Park
    Both are right on Lake Huron.
    And both offer great sunrises.
    If getting up early isn’t for you, we’ll talk about the sunsets when we hit Lakes Superior and Michigan later in the tour.

    Lake Huron sunrise

    Sunrise at Tawas

    The Tawas Point Lighthouse

    The Lake Huron shoreline along M-25
  4. Roadtrekingmike
    Scratch another place off my bucket list: Bois Blanc Island, in the middle of Michigan’s Straits of Mackinac, half way between the Upper Peninsula and the Lower.

    As we were rounding the Lake Huron shoreline of the Michigan Mitt and driving through the northeastern town of Cheboygan on our Verizon Great Lakes Shoreline Tour, we saw a sign that directed us to the ferry dock.
    The Straits of Mackinac were right off our righthand side as we made our way north on US 23 but this ferry was not for Mackinac Island – Michigan’s most popular tourist destination – but for Bois Blanc Island, called by the locals “Bob lo.”
    It was calling to me big time. Now it was time to visit. After all, unlike Mackinac Island, motor vehicles are allowed on Bois Blanc. That meant it had shoreline to drive.
    So we made a spur of the moment decision: Let’s Go!
    We loaded our Roadtrek Etrek motorhome on the ferry operated by Plaunt Transportation. Round trip for two adults and the Roadtrek was about $96, cash only. Forty-five minutes later, we pulled off into a different world.
    With a fulltime population of about 60 and measuring roughly 12 miles long and six miles wide, the island has no paved roads, no traffic signals and few stop signs. Deer outnumber permanent residents by about 20 to one. We saw deeralmost everywhere we looked. People, not so much. That was just fine for us.
    Cottages and summer homes help push the summertime population to a couple of thousand. But during our visit, the only time we saw other people was when we passed the bar or visited Hawks Landing, the combination general store-restaurant- gas station and real estate office that serves as the island’s nerve center.
    It was at Hawks that we found a place to camp, owned by one of the locals and a few miles down the shoreline. They even had a 30 amp power hookup and water to boot. Truthfully, we probably could have stayed anywhere. There were numerous spots to pull off, right on the coast. On the northern end of the island there was another spot, without hookups, that we could have stayed for free. But it was surrounded by cedars and the mosquitos and tiny, biting black flies were congregated there out of the wind. We decided to go for the paid spot on the south side.
    Even there, we had mosquitoes trying to get inside. Check this video:

    Think they don’t do damage? Check this video. I shot this the next day when we returned to the mainland and I got a hotel room to get some relief from the insects.

    Truthfully, as beautiful as Bois Blanc was, the bugs in late June were so bad that we wished we hadn’t come.
    Later in the summer when they die down or, better yet in the fall when a killing frost puts them away for good, would be a better time to visit.
    There’s some disagreement over the name. Bois Blanc means “white wood” in French. The color of the prevalent birch tree bark and the basswood tree’s white under bark that was extensively used by Native Americans and the French-speaking fur traders who first came to the island to make canoes.
    Why, then, do the locals call it “Bob Lo?”
    They have as long as anyone can remember. The term is believed to be an English corruption of the French pronunciation of the name.
    The Great Lakes has several other islands called Bois Blanc, including one in the Detroit River that used to be the location of a popular amusement park. All those other Bois Blancs are also called Bob Lo by the locals.
    At any rate, except for the bugs, we found the place to be delightfully low-keyed and out of the way place. What it lacked in amenities, it more than made up for in tranquility, beauty and a jaw-dropping display of stars in a sky totally devoid of light pollution.
    If only the bugs had left us alone

    A roundtrip to Bois Blanc Island cost $96 for two adults and the Roadtrek.

    Tai loved being free on the deserted beaches.

    This is one camping spot on the north side. It’s a great boondocking place but the mosquitoes were so bad we moved to the south shore. They were bad there, too, just not as bad.
  5. Roadtrekingmike
    Summer travel and vacation is upon us and as many of us hit the road, we’re sharing our travel with friends and families. Many of you know I also am a techology correspondent for the 215 NBC-TV Newschannel affiliate stations across the country.
    I do a weekly “PC MIke” Tech feature for the network and, these days, I am usually doing it from the back of my Roadtrek Etrek as we travel the country.
    In this week’s report, I featured three apps and Internet services that can map and track your travel routes.
    In this digital age, instead of postcards, more and more of us are posting real-time maps, photos, video and travel reports.

    The video above is from this week’s PC Mike segment. It features three ways apps and the Internet can help you share your traveling adventures.
    For iPhone and iPad users, check out the free Track My Tour app and website. You start a route and through the app, add updates as you travel. It grabs your GPS location from your device and displays it, and your comments and the photos you take on an interactive map.
    I’m doing one right now as I tour of the Great Lakes region. The app is free, though there is an upgraded version that lets you have some extra features. If you want to follow along, .. Click here to TrackMyTour!
    Meanwhile, here are sme other similar tech tools you may want to try for your RV travels.
    Check My Tour is a similar app, geared towards cyclists and motorcycle trips, though it will also work with regular roadtrips. It is for Apple devices but also Android smartphones.
    Then there’s My Trip Journal. This allows you to set up your own travel blog website. It maps your routes and lets you write reports and updates and allows you to have a travel journal that can be viewed by whoever you share it with.
    By the way, I also am a big user of Twitter as we travel. I live tweet from the road as we travel. If you use Twitter, you can follow me @roadtreking or send me a tweet with the hashtag #roadtreking.
  6. Roadtrekingmike
    Oh, boy. There goes the schedule.
    With 10 segments due on our Verizon Wireless Tour of the Great Lakes shoreline across eight states, I have a pretty ambitious travel schedule.
    We were doing all right until we crossed over the Big Mac Bridge into Michigan’s Upper Peninsula following the Lake Huron shoreline. But then we were seduced by the wide open spaces, the sparkling blue water, the big freighters and clean, fresh lake air.
    Instead of sticking to the schedule, we tossed the planning aside and ended up staying over for a few extra and unscheduled days.
    Oh. One other thing. My estimate that the tour would cover about 3,500 miles when it was all done is way short of what it will actually be.
    It looks like our meanderings and following sometimes obscure shoreline roads will make this trip closer to 4,500 miles when we finish.
    But right now, who cares? This is one of the best trips we’ve ever taken in our Roadtrek Etrek and following a timetable with so many delightful surprises around every shoreline bend seems, well, almost sacrilegious.
    There’s a different feel to the Lake Huron shoreline as soon as you cross over the UP. It is quieter, more protected and it calls the visitor to sit and stay a little longer, just gazing out at its island-studded waters.
    Just check out this video above you’ll see what I mean.

    Those islands you see as soon as you start to round the shoreline in the Eastern Upper Peninsula on state highway 134 past St. Ignace are known as Les Cheneaux Islands.
    They consist of three dozen small islands located just offshore, islands perfect for fishing, and exploring, especially by kayak, where quiet coves and sheltered bays beckon the adventurer.
    They stretch through the waterfront communities of Hessel and Cedarville, almost to the far eastern end of the lake where it is fed by the St. Mary’s River in Detour Village.
    Jesse Hadley runs a small shop in Hessel that specializes in eco-tours of Les Cheneaux Islands. She’s passionate about sharing it…but also protecting it.
    “A lot of people don’t know about these islands,” she said. “Most of the people who live around here have families who have been here for generations. We’re all a little protective of them. They are so unique and beautiful and the water and sky are unlike no place else in the Great Lakes region.”
    In Detour Village, we stopped by the small museum in Detour, dedicated to the area’s rich history as the northern starting point of the big lake.
    And then we followed the river northwest to Saulte Ste. Marie, We camped right on the broad river bank, at the Soo Locks Campground. We planned on just a night. But we became so mesmerized at watching the huge lake freighters go by that we spent three nights.
    “It’s so relaxing up here,” said Linda Grant, of Lexington, KY, who with husband, Bill, has been coming to the Soo Locks Campground each summer for more than three decades. “Down in Kentucky it’s 92. Up here it’s very nice with the cool breeze off the water.”
    The Locks are where Lake Superior meets Lake Huron.
    It was there we said goodbye to Huron, whose Michigan shoreline had us travel more than 500 miles from Port Huron and get ready for our next Lake – Superior.
    Look for the first part of that trip in our next report from the Great Lakes Shoreline Tour.
    Meantime, if you’d like to follow the tour and keep up with our route, check out the embedded map on the right hand column of this page. If you click on the map it will open full screen. Then you can click the waypoints and see a photo and where we are and what we’re seeing.

    Jennifer and me and Tai watching freighters from our spot at the Soo Locks Campground in Saulte Ste Marie, Mich.

    Les Cheneaux Islands along Lake Huron’s northern shore in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan

    Those big freighters go by day and night.
  7. Roadtrekingmike
    Jennifer has one requirement as we travel: We find a place to work out.
    She’s a fitness instructor by occupation, though lately, because of our near-fulltime traveling schedule, she’s had to cut back on the classes she teaches.
    But that doesn’t mean she cuts back on her fitness goals.
    We're on a very hectic Great Lakes Shoreline Tour that we’re doing for Verizon Wireles, so finding time to pull over and find a gym hasn’t happened as much as she’d like. I can usually tell when I better get her to a gym because she starts to get a bit cranky.
    So, in answer to a reader’s question about where Jennifer finds places to work out, we put together this How We Roll in our RV video.

    Jennifer talks about the Silver Sneakers fitness program. Joining it gets you in at more than 11,000 locations, as we found with the Anytime Fitness chain we chose. Many health insurance plans also include Slver Sneaker benefits.
    Meantime, some of the national fitness places you can look into include:
    Snap Fitness
    Planet Fitness
    Fitness 19
    LA Fitness
    Curves (women only)
    Workout Anytime
    The video above was shot at the Anytime Fitness gym in Saulte Ste Marie, Mich.
  8. Roadtrekingmike
    There’s a reason it’s called Superior.
    There is no other lake like it in the world. It is truly immense, so big that it contains more water that all four of the other Great Lakes combined. You’d need two more Lake Eries to equal the water in Superior.
    Superior is so big we will need two reports to cover it all for our Verizon Great Lakes Roadtreking Tour.

    In the video above, we head out from Saulte Ste Marie, Mich., where Superior flows into the St Mary’s River and, eventually all of the other lakes, following the big lake west. We did our best to take highways and roads that would keep us as close to the shore as possible.
    Superior is so huge that to cover it, we would travel across three states and two time zones. We decided to make this first segment all Michigan, where Superior’s shore forms the northern boundary of the Upper Peninsula.
    At the Pointe Iroquois Lighthouse near the Michigan UP town of Bay Mills, Ron Gilmore – who everyone knows as “Gilly,” joked with us about life on the Superior’s Michigan coastline.
    “Up here, we have two seasons. One is shoveling and the other is swatting,” he says of the long winter and the UP’s notorious biting insects. “We have eight months of winter and four months of bad sledding.”
    Exaggeration. Yeah. We found that the usual spring bug invasion had died down, thanks to breezy, comfortably cool weather. We had our Roadtrek Etrek RV heater on for several nights.
    Further west and then south for a dozen miles past the town of Paradise, is Tahquamenon Falls, the largest waterfall east of the Mississippi. We had spotty phone service here and in several other areas of the UP. But I hooked up my Wilson Sleek cell phone booster and went from zero bars to three bars.
    In Munising we spent two days touring the pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, a 42-mile stretch of sandstone cliffs carved out by the mighty waves of the big lake. The best way to see it is on a boat, like the ones operated by the Pictured Rocks Cruise Line. It’s a three hour trip and gets you close enough to the formations to almost touch them.
    Another way to tour them is by kayak, though the chilly 44-degree water temperature kept me boat bound. Locals said the lake, always cold, is much colder than usual this year because of the severe winter. There were icebergs out in the lake until mid-June.
    These cliffs are up to 200 feet above lake level. They have been naturally sculptured into shallow caves, arches, formations that castles, battleships, event faces. Roads lead you to several overlooks, if you’d rather stay on land.
    Munising may be surrounded by wilderness, but it is a very connected town. Entrepreneur Tom Dolaskie IV runs a number of very high tech companies right on the main highway. His IT clients include hotels all over the world.
    He could live anywhere he wanted. But he lives on the Superior shore because of the beauty and the opportunity it gives him do photography and video.
    You can see his videos and photos at youtube.com/roamwherever
    Like me, he flies a personal drone and when I stopped by to visit, he and his team dropped everything for a chance to go outside and fly.
    We stayed at the Munising Tourist Park Campground, just a couple miles out of town on US-28. We were camped right on the lake and treated to gorgeous sunsets.
    All along Highway 28 west of Munising are roadside parking areas that provide great beach access. We walked empty beaches that we had all to ourselves. Tai gulped the fresh, cool superior water and romped in the sand. We think Tai likes sand so much because it feels like snow. He loves those beach walks and we’ve been able to find places on all the Great Lakes so far where he can play in the surf.
    We moved past the harbor town of Marquette. Up the Keewenaw Peninsula is Copper Harbor, the northernmost part of Michigan where the Superior shore is rugged and rough and stunningly beautiful.
    And then, there’s the far western end of the UP and the 60,000-acre Porcupine Mountains, one of the few remaining large wilderness areas in the Midwest, with towering virgin timber, secluded lakes, and miles of wild rivers and streams. Our favorite camping spot is the rustic Presque Isle campground at the western end. There’s no electricity, no water, no generators. We didn’t need any of it with our Etrek and we really like the wilderness quiet there.
    If you must have hookups, the Union Bay Campground at the eastern end of the park has them.
    In our next segment, we’ll follow Superior into Wisconsin and Minnesota.

    Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore

    Sunset over Lake Superior, near Munising

    Our spot at the Munising Tourist Park Campground

    Tai, chilling inside as the sun sets.
  9. Roadtrekingmike
    Of all the traveling we’ve done on this 4,000-mile Verizon Great Lakes Roadtreking Shoreline Tour, Lake Superior’s North Shore in Wisconsin and Minnesota has provided the most diverse scenery to date.
    Up there, as we rounded the US-side of the lake and started heading north to Canada, especially north of Duluth, we were overwhelmed by the sheer size of the Big Lake the Ojibwe call Gitchegume.
    It is so big it has tides.

    That was the first thing we learned as we moved from the Porcupine Mountains Wilderness Area at the far western end of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula into Wisconsin and Minnesota.
    At the Northern Great Lakes Visitors Center near Ashland, WI, a huge floor-mounted model of the big lake greets visitors just inside the lobby and National Park Service employees answer questions and provide orientation to the detailed displays about the Lake Superior Region.
    That’s where we learned about Superior’s tidal fluctuations – changes in water level caused by the gravitational forces of the sun and moon. To be sure, the changes are measured in inches, but the movement, sometimes aided by winds and snow melt and known as a seiche (pronounced “say-she”) is yet another Superior fact that helps us appreciate the big lake.
    The Ashland area is the gateway to yet another National Lakeshore on Lake Superior – the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, where 21 islands and 12 miles of mainland make for dazzling displays of windswept beaches and cliffs, much like the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore a few hundred miles east in Munising, MI.
    Ashland itself caught our eye. Beautiful murals depicting the city’s martitime history and it’s once boomtown days adorn the sides of many of the downtown buildings, The murals are huge, some two stories high, others covering almost an entire block. They are a tourist attraction in themselves.
    Wisconsin soon gave way to Duluth, MN, the port city where so many of the big iron ore and grain carrying freighters we have been seeing during our Great Lakes tour pick up their loads.
    But our first destination on the tour of Superior’s North Shore was Spirit Mountain, a ski area just outside of Duluth where we dropped in with a group of amateur radio operators to observe the old technology that led to today’s cell phone technology. Our Roadtreking Buddy Dave Miller, who we met last year while covering a dog sled race in the area, took us up to the area. We ended up spending the night there in our Roadtrek Etrek RV, boondocking in the parking lot.
    It was Field Day, an annual weekend event in which ham radio operators set up antennas and emergency-powered radio transmitter to practice their communication skills with Morse Code and single sideband voice transmission for community service deployment during times of emergency.
    “This is the technology that makes today’s smartphones possible,” said Dennis Anderson, one of the Minnesota radio volunteers. Several of the hams were using their smartphones right next to their radios, checking weather apps and checking in with social media.
    From Duluth, we headed north along the Superior shoreline. The lake is so cold that dense fog often forms as the warm air collides with the chilly temps off the lake. We’d be driving in perfect, 70-degree weather, only to turn a corner and come closer to the coastline and have the blue sky obliterated by thick fog that dropped the temperature almost 20 degrees. We’d round another bend and the fog would lift and it would be sunny and warm again.
    The North Shore is a stunning place of sandstone cliffs, rushing streams and cascading waterfalls. We hiked back to several and could have easily spend several days in the area.
    In the town of Grand Marais, 110 miles north of Duluth and not too far from the Canadian border, we found the North House Folk School where thousand of students from across the country come each year to learn how to do things long forgotten by most people, skills such as blacksmithing, basket weaving and wood carving.
    “In this low touch, high tech world, we teach high touch, low tech,” said Greg Wright, the executive director. “There’s a joy to working with your hands.”
    We watched a group of guys finish up a beautiful wooden canoe. Several days before, it was a pile of sticks. We met a couple from Northern Michigan who were building a yurt, to be used as a guest room for friends who visited them in the log cabin they have in the woods, a log cabin they learned how to build at the North House Folk School a few years ago. And in the kitchen, we watched as a group of women were cooking with local plants and fruits.
    We fell in love with Grand Marais, MN, especially the local restaurants.
    A place called The Angry Trout Cafe is a must try if you’re in the area. It’s a very unimposing place, located right on the water in a low slung, multi-roomed ramshackle building that was cobbled together out of an old commercial fishing shanty. But the food, especially the salmon, was the best we’ve every had. The menu is based on the bounty of Lake Superior and the surrounding region – locally-grown produce, hand-harvested wild rice, and of course, their specialty, fresh Lake Superior fish.
    For lunch the next day, a couple blocks up the main drag, another restaurant, the Crooked Spoon Cafe, also blew us away.
    The World’s Best Donuts is a tiny little bakery in Grand Marais that has people lined up and out the door every morning. Run by a fifth-generation donut making family, the donuts really may be the world’s best. I’ve never had anything like them.
    And down towards Twin Harbor, Betty’s Pies makes a raspberry-rhubarb pie to die for.
    For camping, there are several excellent Minnesota State Parks between Duluth and Grand Marais. Gooseberry Falls State Park and Tettegauche State Park were two of our favorites and are right near the lake and various streams and waterfalls. Split Rock Lighthouse State Park has a gorgeous lighthouse. In town, the Grand Marais city campground is huge, with 300 sites located on the harbor and lakeshore and within walking distance to town.
    There’s s saying about Minnesota that applies to the people born and raised in Minnesota, folks who are friendly, welcoming, courteous, reserved, and mild-mannered. “Minnesota nice,” is what they are. You can even buy T-shirts up there with that slogan.
    The state itself, though, especially that North Shore is…. well… Superior.
    Seriously fellow Roadtrekers, you owe it to yourselves to spend some time up there. Late summer or early fall would be the times I’d suggest. We sure won’t need much convincing to return.
  10. Roadtrekingmike
    If you like gambling, you’ll probably love Deadwood.
    If not, probably not so much.
    After years of passing by on the way to the Badlands or Yellowstone and seeing the signs, Jennifer and I made a recent RV sidetrip to this town on the edge of the Black Hills of South Dakota. The entire city is listed on the National Historic Register. The city aggressively promotes itself as having done a careful, accurate restoration of a historically significant western city so we figured it was worth checking out.
    The Victorian architecture is indeed attractive.
    And the turnaround of the town itself is a a great come back story.
    Deadwood was truly a wild west boom town, thanks to the God Rush of 1876 that brought the likes of Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane. Gambling places lined the main street. There were real gun battles and many of the west’s most colorful characters passed through.
    And then it was passed by and a long, slow decline took place. According to the town’s official website, by the mid-1980’s, many of the city’s historic buildings were dilapidated. In 1986, Deadwood citizens formed the “Deadwood U Bet” organization and advocated legalized limited stakes gaming to increase tourism and generate historic preservation funds. Legalized gaming in Deadwood began on November 1, 1989.
    Gaming over the past fifteen years has revitalized Deadwood’s tourism industry and provided lots of revenue for city government activities and historic preservation. Today Deadwood, with a year round population of about 1,300, is the largest historic restoration project in the United States.
    Which takes us back to gambling. I counted no less than 25 casinos and gambling halls, some open 24/7. We’re not talking Vegas glitz, we’re talking penny slots, $1,000 limits, lots of Blackjack and, on the sidewalks outside, lots of seniors puffing cigarettes.
    The town’s most famous resident, Wild Bill Hickok, was not a long-time Deadwood citizen. Just a few short weeks after arriving, he was gunned down while holding a poker hand of aces and eights – forever after known as the Dead Man’s Hand.. He is buried in Deadwood’s Mount Moriah Cemetery, along with such notables as Calamity Jane and Potato Creek Johnny, Seth Bullock and Al Swearengen. The cemetery offers a a self-guided tour.
    A couple of times a day, traffic is stopped and there are staged gunfights downtown, with a local actress dressed up like Calamity Jane entertaining the camera toting tourists before the bad guys and the Marshall take the streets.
    We spent a couple of hours walking around Deadwood.
    If we were gamblers, maybe we would have enjoyed it more.
    As it was, I think we can say we probably won’t be back.
    The town is very friendly to RVers. While there’s little or no parking along main street, parallel streets offer lots of lots where, for $5, you can park all day.

    Great Victorian restoration

    Deadwood had its share of “fancy ladies,” as they were called, and these mannequins along a downtown building depict.

    I counted 25 casinos and gambling halls.

    Calamity Jane entertains the tourists.

    The town Marshall deputizes the kids.

    Several times a day, staged gunfights depict the town's Wild West Days.
  11. Roadtrekingmike
    Michigan’s UP is hemmed in by three of the Great Lakes. Everyone knows about Superior and Huron but the lake on the UP’s southern border has some great camping and exploring opportunities, too.
    So. after three weeks of travel on our Verizon Great Lakes Roadtreking Shoreline Tour, we have now arrived at the fifth of the big lakes – Lake Michigan.
    Lake Michigan touches four states and is the only one of the Great Lakes that doesn’t share a coastline with Canada.

    We started out following it across the bottom of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula near the Wisconsin border and because it has so much shoreline, we’ll cover it in three segments.
    You can see the first of our Lake Michigan reports and the 7th in our series by clicking above.
    Our first destination was a 17 mile long appendage called the Garden Peninsula that juts out into the UP’s Big Bay de Noc. There, we toured a ghost town of sorts, the once thriving iron smelting town town of Fayette. The state has restored many of the mid-19th century buildings.
    Today, it’s a reminder that nothing lasts forever. There’s a nice campground there with electric hookups. But there are just vault toilets, no shower facilities and there is no dump facilities. Park officials say they are planning to upgrade the campground next year, pending budget approval. But you can walk through a narrow forest and get right to the rocky shoreline. Be sure and wear real shoes instead of flip flops if you plan to walk the stone beach.
    Further east and just yards off US 2, Lake Michigan offers swimming beaches that beckon a stop by the traveler. There are several state campgrounds along the lake, too. Our favorite is Hog Island Point, a niftly little hideaway campground, nestled into the cedars and hardwoods of a small peninsula that juts into a pretty little Lake Michigan bay just off US-2, about 35 miles west of the Mackinac Bridge. There are 59 rustic sites and because of the name, perhaps, and the lack of hookups, most are usually vacant.
    Then it was across the Mackinac Bridge and the Lower Peninsula and Michigan coastal highway 119 – known as the Tunnel of Trees, one of the most scenic roads in Michigan, running 20 miles from Cross Village to Harbor Springs.
    This is the heart of Michigan’s “Up North” vacation land, characterized by the sparkling water of Lake Michigan, gently rolling hills, lots of scenery and beautiful beaches in Petoskey and the Traverse City area. As you drive south along the shore, vast cherry orchards line both sides of US 31, thriving in the unique glacial soil and climate along the Lake Michigan coastline.
    At Empire, the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore is a true national treasure with miles of sugar sand beach, bluffs that tower 450 feet above the lake, lush forests, clear inland lakes and spectacular views that had this area named the “Most Beautiful Place in America” by the ABC Televisions Good Morning America show.
    You can even make your way down the dunes the water below… just remember, though, you’ll also have to climb back up.
    It’s also a place where the National park service is experimenting with an innovate high tech guide service that works with cellular phones at various spots along the lakeshore.
    Verizon’s robust 4g LTE network up here lets you dial in with your phone and hear interpretive descriptions of the exact location you are visiting, almost as if you had a park ranger at your side.
    This end of the tour ends at the port city of Ludington, about midway down the western shore of the Michigan Mitt.
    From there, we’ll temporarily leave Michigan and steam across the lake to Wisconsin on a 410-foot car ferry. Well tell you all about that in our next report.
  12. Roadtrekingmike
    Our Roadtrek Etrek now has its sea legs.
    Sometimes, to really appreciate something, you have to immerse yourself in it.
    So it was with Lake Michigan as we’ve been traveling around the Great Lakes Region these past several weeks on our Verizon Great Lakes Shoreline Roadtreking tour.
    No, we didn’t go swimming in it. The heavy ice up this past winter has left it and the other four Great lakes, abnormally cold. And normal is cold. This summer, it is really cold.
    So instead of getting wet in the lake, we crossed it.

    Bright and early on a recent Wednesday morning, our Roadtrek Etrek motorhome backed aboard the SS Badger, the largest car ferry steamship in the Great Lakes, measuring over 410 feet and able to hold 180 vehicles and 600 passengers.
    We took the 8:30 a.m. crossing, arriving the night before and boondocking in the Roadtrek in the carferry parking lot in Ludington.
    On the day we crossed, it was about half full. The ferryboat line suggests you call ahead to let them know you’re coming, especially if you are traveling in an RV. Size is not a problem. They seldom run out of room. They just like to know what to expect. On the day we crossed, there were Class A, Class C and Class B motorhomes aboard. There was even a huge truck semi-tractor trailer combo.
    We had Tai with us. Dogs are not allowed on the upper deck passenger areas. There are kennels for pets down in the vehicle parking area but most people chose to do what we did, crack a window and leave their pets in their vehicle. Tai slept soundly in the Roadtrek. There’s a fresh sea breeze down there so heat is not an issue.
    Our route traveled 60 miles in a straight line across Lake Michigan from Ludington, MI to Manitowoc, WI. Passengers sped their time doing all sorts of things. On nice days, they sun themselves on the forward deck. Inside, the ship offers bingo, movies, a arcade, TV and even satellite Internet Wi-Fi.
    Jennifer and I were given a bow to stern tour of the big ship – in consideration to be a National Historic Landmark.
    In the engine room, the massive steam engines run so smooth you can balance a nickel on them.
    To really appreciate the size of Lake Michigan, you need to be in the middle of it. It fills the horizon, as far as you can see in any direction, the only Great Lake entirely within the United States, touching the borders of four states.
    We even had a stateroom aboard the Badger. I grabbed an hour long nap as the big ship cut across two and three foot waves. I slept like a baby, rocked gently by the ship.
    The trip took four hours from shore to shore, four relaxing, stress-free, very enjoyable hours.
    How much does it cost to cross? Check out the schedules and fares page for the Badger. Our Roadtrek was considered a van. That’s $132 for a round trip. We elected for one-way as we did some exploring down the Wisconsin coast and hit Illinois and Indiana. The one-way cost is $66. Bigger Class C and Cass A RVs are usually priced by the foot, $5.95 per foot one way, $11.90 a foot round trip. That’s the same rate for passengers – $66 one-way. Seniors get a slight break at $62.
    There’s no charge for pets.
    The ship itself has a rich history.
    Today, it is the only coal-fired steamship in operation in the United States and has a unique propulsion system that has been designated as a national mechanical engineering landmark. It entered service in 1953, designed specifically to handle the rough conditions that it would likely encounter during year ’round sailing on Lake Michigan.
    Built primarily to transport railroad freight cars, but with lots of passenger accommodations, the Badger reigned as Queen of the Lakes during the car ferries’ Golden Era in the late Fifties, with Manitowoc, Milwaukee, and Kewaunee as her Wisconsin ports of call. By the Seventies, changing railroad economics were condemning other car ferries to mothballs or the scrap yard. With little railroad freight business left, and without ever tapping into the opportunity to serve the needs of the vacation traveler, the Badger sailed from Wisconsin to Ludington and tied up for the last time in November 1990 – signaling the end of the century-old tradition of car ferry service on Lake Michigan.
    The demise of the car ferries was devastating to the communities they had served. It seemed that the magic of these wonderful ships would only live in memory, never to be experienced by future generations. However, in 1991, an entrepreneur named Charles Conrad committed his own financial resources to reinvent the S.S. Badger to carry leisure passengers and their vehicles.
    Since then, this legend of the Great Lakes has delighted a whole new generation of people, allowing them to experience a bit of history that almost slipped away while cruising to fun destinations on both sides of Lake Michigan. The S.S. Badger now sails daily between Manitowoc, Wisconsin and Ludington, Michigan from mid-May through mid-October.

    The SS Badger is 412 feet long and can handle any sized RV.

  13. Roadtrekingmike
    The one thing we have learned on this Verizon Great Lakes Shoreline Roadtreking Tour is that very often, a surprise is literally around the next corner.
    So it was when we got off the car ferry in Manitowoc, WI, directly across Lake Michigan from Ludington, MI
    As we made a right turn out of the parking lot, we spotted a submarine. What on earth is a submarine doing in Manitowoc, WS? We had to find out. The sub is docked out front of the Wisconsin Maritime Museum, a fascinating place dedicated to the maritime history of Wisconsin and the Great Lakes region.
    It turns out that the city of Manitowoc, WI built 28 sumarines for service in World War II. In all, more than 7,000 men and women worked around the clock, 365 days a year to build some of the best submarines in the Navy. Of the 28 submarines, 25 were built in time to see action during the war. Together they sank 132 Japanese ships.
    Just up the shoreline in Two Rivers, WI, we found another place of great historical significance about something very near and dear to us. Twi Rivers is recognized by the Wisconsin State Historical Society as the REAL birthplace of the ice cream sundae.
    I stress REAL because lots of other communities around the country have tried to claim that title. But well-known American language authority, columnist and author H.L. Mencken identified Two Rivers as the birthplace of the sundae. The claim is also supported by a 1929 newspaper interview in which the inventor recalls how the sundae came about.
    For me, it was a chance to visit the Ice Cream Sundae Museum there and order one. It was a piece of art. Two scoops of vanilla ice cream with caramel and chocolate sauce, whipped cream and a maraschino cherry.
    I love my job.
    Heading south, we came to Wisconsin Cheese country. Called America’s dairy state, Wisconsin has a rich tradition of cheese making. In the crossroads town of Gibbsville, the VanTatenhove family has owned place and been making cheese for generations. I sampled the extra sharp cheddar.
    Have I told you I love my job?
    Here’s the video we put together for this:
    A lot of folks have emailed me asking how we find all the interesting spots we’ve been visiting. Many times, it’s just a roadside sign or an email suggestion from a reader or our curiosity. But I have some apps on my smartphone that we use. Thanks to the solid Verizon 4g LTE signal we’ve had for most of the tour, those apps have really helped.
    Here are the three apps I’ve used the most:
    Roadtrippers- Search along a route or plan a road trip with their online trip planner for free, then sync it with your smartphone for turn-by-turn navigation. Roadtrippers is a powerful route planner, perfect as a RV trip planner or family trip planner, listing all the cool, offbeat and major tourist events for you to visit on your roadtrip.
    Field Trip – This is a very handy and totally free app from Google for the iPhone and Android devices. The app bills itself as a tool to find cool, hidden, and unique things in the world around you. And that it does, Field Trip give you inside info on everything from local history to the latest and best places to shop, eat, and have fun. You select the local feeds you like and the information pops up on your phone automatically, as you walk or drive. When you get close to something interesting, it will notify you and if you have a headset or bluetooth connected, it can even read the info to you.
    Around Me App. It is all about providing local info. Whatever you’re looking for -grocery stores, banks, hospitals, gas stations, movie theatres. This is really handy when you travel, but surprisingly useful locally, where I always seem to find cool things nearby that I didn’t know about. It’s free for Apple, Android and Windows devices and smartphones.

    The city of Manitowoc, Wisc., built 28 submarines during World War II and has a great maritime museum.

    Lake Michigan shoreline
  14. Roadtrekingmike
    Of all the eight states that touch the Great Lakes , Michigan – with 2,147 miles – has the most coastline. So as we rounded the bottom of Lake Michigan from the Indiana border and made our way into Southwest Michigan on the last leg of out 10-segment adventure, there was a sense of déjà vu about it all.
    Around us were beautiful blue waters, sand dunes, lush green agricultural fields and even a wine trail, much like we have seen to different degrees on all of the lake shorelines we’ve visited over the past month on our Verizon Great Lakes Shoreline Roadtreking Tour.
    Here’s part 10 in our videos:

    And yet, there was an entirely different feel to this stretch of shoreline.
    Seemingly every few miles were broad, sugar sand swimming beaches that put anything in California to shame. A series of welcoming beach towns – Grand Haven, South Haven, Saugatuck – are right on the shore, with trendy shops and restaurants just a couple blocks east of the lake.
    Southwest Michigan and the lakeshore is also known for its vineyards. Acre after acre… so many, there’s even a shoreline wine trail that draws fans from across the country.
    But then, along I-94 we saw a billboard promoting a place called The Chocolate Garden, a place the Food Network has raved about, a place voted as the Number 1 chocolatier in America, located in the town of Coloma, a mile off the interstate.
    The best? How could that be, especially in a, well, an obscure place like Coloma.
    Turns out it is a technology story.
    Tina Buck, the owner, is a former advertising and marketing exec who started a small online business from her home making chocolate truffles. Not just any chocolate truffles, mind you. She has some secret ingredients and a way of cooking them that made her chocolates to die for.
    People slowly started ordering them off the Internet. Then the Food Network found out about them and, blown away by Tina’s chocolates, did a full blown story praising them. Then came the Best of America Award as the best chocolatier in America and the Chocolate Garden was on the map.
    People started showing up in Colima, looking for her. But she had no building. She handled it all in the kitchen of her home. Because of the demand, she built a small little store and that’s where we found her, selling the best chocolates I have ever sampled. We liked them so much we spent $130 and walked off with a shopping bag of them.
    “Technology has been crucial to our success, especially the Internet,” she said. “That’s what made all this possible. That’s how we got our start.”
    She relies on Verizons 4G LTE network and an Air Card to provide redundancy to her network. “It’s actually our most stable connection,” she said.
    The shoreline tour came to an end just south of Ludington MI. We had come down that far on an earlier leg, before crossing over to Wisconsin on a car ferry.
    In all, we drove the coastline of all five Great Lakes, traveled 4,062 miles and visited eight states across two time zones.
    I invite you to follow in our tire tracks.

    Southwest Michigan vineyards

    Tina Buck makes the best chocolate in America!
  15. Roadtrekingmike
    We’ve now officially begun our trip west, a journey that will follow parts of two historic routes: The Lewis and Clark Expedition and the Oregon Trail.
    It’s hard to over emphasize the importance of these two 19th century routes. Lewis and Clark discovered the overland route to the Pacific, thus opening up the nation to east-west travel in the days immediately after the Louisiana Purchase. It was a trip that in its day, was as monumental as the American landing on the moon is to ours.
    The 100,000 Oregon Trail pioneers came four decades or so later in their prairie schooners – so named because their wagons were covered with white canvas that made them resemble a ship at sea. Others took routes that sprang off the Oregon Trail on paths called the California Trail and the Mormon Trail as the headed to the Gold Rush and Sat lake City.

    Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery took a keelboat down the Missouri.
    Retracing those routes in our Roadtrek Etrek RV – the modern equivalent of a covered wagon – is a trip Jennifer and I have wanted to take for years. So from now till early September, we’ll be visiting places where the ruts of those wagons can still be found, seeing the places where history was made and learning about the vastness of our country and the amazing adventures caught up in that great western migration.

    Confluence Point – where the Missouri River (top) flows into the Mississippi in St. Louis.
    It all starts with the wide Missouri. At 2,341 miles, the Missouri River is the longest river in North America. It is impressive to behold. But what you see today is much less than 19th century explorers and pioneers encountered. We have messed it up through channelization and dam building, greatly changing the Missouri River. Today, 67 percent of the Missouri is either channelized for navigation (650) miles or impounded by dams (903 miles). Most of the remaining free-flowing portions of the river are near the headwaters in Montana. Channelization has resulted in the lower river being about 50 percent narrower.
    But like I said, it is still impressive. But realizing that it was bigger and wider and wilder 200 years ago makes you wonder how these early explorers did it.
    Nicknamed the “Big Muddy,” the Missouri River has long been one of North America’s most important travel routes. Every bend in the river is saturated in history. Her waters saw the canoes of many American Indian tribes, fur trappers, explorers and pioneers. The river served as the main route to the northwest for Lewis and Clark and later became the primary pathway for the nation’s western expansion. The Missouri has witnessed the rise and fall of the steamboat era and given birth to countless communities that settled near her banks.
    It has meandered all over the place Some parts of the river have moved as much as two miles from their course during the early part of the 19th century. It has a powerfully strong current that those heading west paddled and poled against. And it was always dangerous because of snags and floating debris and sandbars that stranded many a traveler.
    We started our tour in St. Louis, where the Missouri dumps into the Mississippi at a place called Confluence Point. Standing at the point where the nation’s mightiest two rivers merge, it’s hard not to think of all the dreams, all the hopes and aspirations that welled up in the hearts of those who came this way in the 1800′s. Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery took the Ohio River to the Mississippi, then the Mississippi to the Missouri, beginning their official expedition of the west from this very spot in May of 1804.
    A great book that we are reading as we head west is Robert Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage. It’s the definitive work on the expedition and fascinating reading. I wish we had an audio version so it could play as we are driving. But it was unavailable when we ordered so we sometimes take turns reading aloud from the big paperback to each other.
    A hundred miles west of St. Louis, we did our first overnight at a place called Arrow Rock, MO, a dozen or so miles north of I-70 near the Missouri River. At this quiet, peaceful park, there’s a monument overlooking a spot where, early on, Lewis and Clark faced their first of many dangers – huge floating trees that had toppled into the river when the Missori currents undercut the banks they were growing on and threatened to smash their keelboat to bits.

    Lewis and Clark almost lost the keelboat at a spot near Arrow Rock just three weeks after departing St. Louis.
    The Arrow Rock State Historic Site here has a restored village and great camping. The campground is small, only 47 sites and fills up most weekends. We had no trouble getting in midweek.
    The village of Arrow Rock was the traditional starting point for another historic trail – The Santa Fe Trail. In fact, as we move west, off the interstates and through the plains and into the Rockies, we’ll see several other trails all using parts of these same routes, the California Trial, the Mormon Trail and the Pony Express Trail.

    Missouri Highway 41 follows the Lewis and Clark trail.
    We found Arrow Rock a great place to read, research our route and, thanks to a great Visitor’s Center, immerse ourselves in what life was like when, in the early 1800s, this was the last city on the western frontier.

    The old Huston Inn at Arrow Rock is still open.
    Named because of a tall sandstone bluff on the Missouri that the Osage Indians used to chisel out flint for arrow heads, Arrow Rock once had 1,000 residents. Today, 56 live there. In the summer, there’s a professional theater – the Lyceum – that brings in tourists each day.We watched a production of Agatha Christie’s Witness for the Prosecution and noted, as we returned to camp late that night, that many of our neighbors ha also been at the play.
    And the historic Huston Tavern, established in 1834, is the oldest continually serving restaurant west of the Mississippi. We found excellent, family style food, especially the fried chicken, raspberry glazed ham, mashed potatoes, corn, biscuits and cobbers to die for..

    The Missouri River near Weston, Mo. The wilderness terrain is much the same today as then.
    We liked Arrow Rock so much we set three nights, soaking up the landscape, thinking about what it must have been like for those pioneers so long ago who set off from the very place we were parked beneath s cottonwood tree in our air conditioned Roadtrek.
    Not quite the same, to be sure.

    Made for a movie, this 55-foot replica of the Lewis and Clark keepboat invites exploration by today’s visitors to the Lewis and Clark Discovery Center in Nebraska City.
    We left Arrow Rock and continued west, past Kansas City, following the Missouri to the Weston Bend State Park near the town of Weston, once a thriving river town now – thanks to the river’s shifting banks – more of a trendy little place of antique shops and bed and breakfasts.
    We overnighted at the Weston Bend State Park and watched the sunset at a Missouri River overlook where the Corps of Discovery set shore for some exploring.

    Lewis’s branding iron at the Lewis and Clark Discovery Center in Nebraska City.
    The next day it was north and west to Nebraska City, NE and the Lewis and Clark Discovery Center on the river there. The center itself wasn’t much. Mostly some displays, including a branding iron owned by Lewis and used to emblazon trees along the route.
    The thing that most interested me was a full-sized replica of the 55 foot long keel boat used by the expedition to navigate the Missouri. Originally made for a movie, it sits out front of the center and allows visitors to come abroad. I grabbed one of the oars of the same type and size used by the crew and was amazed by how heavy it was and could only imagine what it would ave been like pulling it hour upon hour against the currents.

    The Missouri River is called Big Muddy” and even today, as seen from Nebraska City, it looks much like it did in Lewis and Clark’s time. Note the snags and driftwood on the opposite bank.
    There’s a shore trail that leads do yet another river overlook that made for a nice photo op. The river is still muddy and the current is obvious. The banks of the Missouri remain littered with snags and driftwood.
    From Nebraska City, we took NE-2 west through rolling cornfields, slowing moving past the Missouri and closer to the Oregon Trail, which we’ll be following over the next several days.
  16. Roadtrekingmike
    Sometimes, as we Roadtrek across North America in our RV, we run into stories that are so amazing that you don’t know how to categorize them. So it was with us in downtown Kansas City when we toured one of the most fascinating museums we have ever seen.
    It’s a museum devoted to the Steamboat Arabia, which sunk after running into a tree snag in the muddy Missouri River on September 5, 1856 as it was carrying 200 tons of supplies destined for a string of frontier towns to the west.
    But like the fabled King Tut’s Tomb, the recovery of the Arabia and the cargo it was carrying almost defies belief. The Arabia’s wreckage contained the largest single collection of pre-Civil War U.S. artifacts ever discovered – remarkably preserved clothing, tools, guns, dishware, window glass, candles, jewelry, wine and other everyday items that serve as a time capsule of life on the American frontier. There are even bottles of still pleasantry fragrant 19th century perfumes.
    But I don’t know if it’s the amazing items found in the wreckage or the actual discovery and retrieval of those artifacts that is the most interesting.
    Because the Arabia was discovered not at the bottom of the Missouri, where she sank, but 45 feet down in the idle of a Kansas cornfield a half mile from the current banks of the river.
    Over 400 steamboats have sunk in the Missouri over its 2,500 mile course. Most are undiscovered.
    The Arabia was a side-wheel steamer, carrying passengers and cargo on a regular route and schedule. At 171 feet long and capable of carrying 222 tons, she was a medium-sized boat. Her trade route took her well into present-day South Dakota. On September 5th, 1856, six days after departing St. Louis heavily loaded with freight and passengers, the Arabia reached Kansas City, Mo.
    Following a short stopover the side-wheeler was again underway to her intended destinations. A short distance upstream was the town of Parkville, Mo. But the Arabia would never arrive. During the night, the steamer struck a sunken snag, below the surface of the river. Within minutes much of the boat and virtually all 222 tons of precious frontier cargo lay at the bottom of the Missouri River.
    Although the Arabia went down in 15 feet of water, all of its 130 passengers reached shore on the ship’s skiff—the only fatality was a mule tied to the deck. The skeleton of that mule is on display in the museum.
    The river bottom was soft, and the boat and cargo sank quickly into the mud and silt. The boat held merchandise bound for frontier stores, and personal belongings of the passengers. Eventually, all evidence of the Arabia was erased from view. Seasonal flooding covered the site, and in its wake was deposited layer upon layer of rich, black topsoil.
    Bob Hawley is a local amateur treasure hunter who, with sons David and Greg, became obsessed with the story of the Arabia and its mystery cargo. It was rumored to have a huge cargo of Kentucky Bourbon and gold. Hawley knew that the Missouri had a shifting channel and that it had moved considerably east over the years and using a metal detector, weathered maps and old newspaper clippings, he persuaded a Kansas farmer to let them search the field. In 1987, his metal detector pinged off the big boilers of the Arabia and, in four months time, Hawley and the group of family members and several friends, excavated it.
    The mud remarkably preserved the wreck. There was, it turned out, no gold. And the bourbon was never found. Hawley suspects opportunists grabbed it from the decks the day after the Arabia sunk. But what was aboard has fascinated visitors and students of the American west for more than two decades now.
    I met Hawley the day I visited. He still hangs out at the museum. He said there have been many offers to sell the artifacts from private collectors over the years he believes they should be shared with the public.
    Jennifer and I spent half a day at the museum, marveling at the displays. Only about half of what was discovered is shown.
    The museum is still cleaning, cataloging and preserving the rest of the items. Visitors can actually observe the process, as its all done in the open.
    The museum is open seven days a week, Admission is $14.50 for adults and worth every sent. Seniors get a buck discount.
    There’s parking in the area in front of the museum suitable for a Class B RV. Anything bigger will have to park somewhere else in the congested downtown area. The address is 400 Grand Boulevard, Kansas City, MO 64106.
    Here are some photos of the artifacts:
  17. Roadtrekingmike
    Sometimes, as we Roadtrek across North America in our RV, we run into stories that are so amazing that you don’t know how to categorize them. So it was with us in downtown Kansas City when we toured one of the most fascinating museums we have ever seen.
    It’s a museum devoted to the Steamboat Arabia, which sunk after running into a tree snag in the muddy Missouri River on September 5, 1856 as it was carrying 200 tons of supplies destined for a string of frontier towns to the west.
    But like the fabled King Tut’s Tomb, the recovery of the Arabia and the cargo it was carrying almost defies belief. The Arabia’s wreckage contained the largest single collection of pre-Civil War U.S. artifacts ever discovered – remarkably preserved clothing, tools, guns, dishware, window glass, candles, jewelry, wine and other everyday items that serve as a time capsule of life on the American frontier. There are even bottles of still pleasantry fragrant 19th century perfumes.
    But I don’t know if it’s the amazing items found in the wreckage or the actual discovery and retrieval of those artifacts that is the most interesting.
    Because the Arabia was discovered not at the bottom of the Missouri, where she sank, but 45 feet down in the idle of a Kansas cornfield a half mile from the current banks of the river.

    I took this photo from a display at the museum showing the partial excavation.
    More than 400 steamboats have sunk in the Missouri over its 2,500 mile course. Most are undiscovered.
    The Arabia was a side-wheel steamer, carrying passengers and cargo on a regular route and schedule. At 171 feet long and capable of carrying 222 tons, she was a medium-sized boat. Her trade route took her well into present-day South Dakota. On September 5th, 1856, six days after departing St. Louis heavily loaded with freight and passengers, the Arabia reached Kansas City, Mo.

    Another excavation shot from the museum

    The only casualty was a mule. The passengers were all offloaded onto a skiff before the Arabia sunk.
    Following a short stopover the side-wheeler was again underway to her intended destinations. A short distance upstream was the town of Parkville, Mo. But the Arabia would never arrive. During the night, the steamer struck a sunken snag, below the surface of the river. Within minutes much of the boat and virtually all 222 tons of precious frontier cargo lay at the bottom of the Missouri River.
    Although the Arabia went down in 15 feet of water, all of its 130 passengers reached shore on the ship’s skiff—the only fatality was a mule tied to the deck. The skeleton of that mule is on display in the museum.
    The river bottom was soft, and the boat and cargo sank quickly into the mud and silt. The boat held merchandise bound for frontier stores, and personal belongings of the passengers. Eventually, all evidence of the Arabia was erased from view. Seasonal flooding covered the site, and in its wake was deposited layer upon layer of rich, black topsoil.
    Bob Hawley is a local amateur treasure hunter who, with sons David and Greg, became obsessed with the story of the Arabia and its mystery cargo. It was rumored to have a huge cargo of Kentucky Bourbon and gold. Hawley knew that the Missouri had a shifting channel and that it had moved considerably east over the years and using a metal detector, weathered maps and old newspaper clippings, he persuaded a Kansas farmer to let them search the field. In 1987, his metal detector pinged off the big boilers of the Arabia and, in four months time, Hawley and the group of family members and several friends, excavated it.

    Bob Hawley still hangs out at the museum, meeting visitors.
    The mud remarkably preserved the wreck. There was, it turned out, no gold. And the bourbon was never found. Hawley suspects opportunists grabbed it from the decks the day after the Arabia sunk. But what was aboard has fascinated visitors and students of the American west for more than two decades now.
    I met Hawley the day I visited. He still hangs out at the museum. He said there have been many offers to sell the artifacts from private collectors over the years he believes they should be shared with the public.
    Jennifer and I spent half a day at the museum, marveling at the displays. Only about half of what was discovered is shown.
    The museum is still cleaning, cataloging and preserving the rest of the items. Visitors can actually observe the process, as its all done in the open.
    The museum is open seven days a week, Admission is $14.50 for adults and worth every sent. Seniors get a buck discount.
    There’s parking in the area in front of the museum suitable for a Class B RV. Anything bigger will have to park somewhere else in the congested downtown area. The address is 400 Grand Boulevard, Kansas City, MO 64106.
    Here are some photos of the artifacts:

    Dishware from the Arabia was bound for frontier towns.

    Knives that would have been used on the frontier.

    Shoes and boots that never made the waiting frontier towns.
  18. Roadtrekingmike
    The Oregon Trail, and the ancillary trails that led from it, constituted the single greatest migration in America – as many as a half a million men, women and children who traveled by wagon and by foot west for two decades in the mid-19th Century.
    There are lots of books on the trail and lots of academic experts. But when it really comes to knowing the trail and experiencing it, there are few who can match Morris Carter.
    Morris Carter has not only built wagons that replicate those used by the pioneers, he’s actually made the 2,600-mile wagon train trip himself, from its start in Independence, Mo., to the final destination in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. That 1993 trip was followed by a similar trip in 1999 along the 2,500 miles of the California Trail.
    Others may have read the books and journals of those original pioneers, but Carter – who has also read them all – has done it. Really done it, in a wagon pulled by horse along the same routes used by those who settled the west.
    And today, from his home in Casper, Wyo., he leads modern-day wagon trail excursions whose route literally parallels the still-visible ruts left by those who traveled the Oregon Trail 150 years ago.
    His trips range from four hours to overnights and week long trips, with those who travel with him staying overnight in Tee Pees, fed Wyoming steak dinners around a campfire and regaled with Carter’s encyclopedic knowledge of what it was really like to make the trip, which typically took six more months.
    Here’ a video I did of the covered wagon trip.

    Jennifer and I tagged along on a tour. I hopped in and out of the wagon, taking photos and shooting video. Carter’s daughter, Oneida, who accompanied her father on the full-length Oregon Trail trip in 1999, expertly handled the two draft horses. The trip was booked by a family of four from Oklahoma, Mark and Nikki, their 16-year-old daughter Rebekah and seven year old son, Blaney.
    “There are a lot of misconceptions about the Oregon Trail,” Carter told me. “It wasn’t just one wagon most families took. It was two or three. They took everything they had to set up and furnish their new homes in the west. And the trail was usually crowded. The string of wagons often stretched out as far in front and in back as you could see. The wagons would be sometimes 10 across. They’d average two miles an hour when pulled by oxen, maybe four if by horses.”
    As I walked along taking photos, he repeatedly warned me to watch for rattlesnakes. I didn’t see any. Thankfully. “They’re all over out here,” he said. “Fortunately, they’re watching for you, too.”
    No wonder Jennifer decided to stay in the wagon.
    In the original migration, most people walked, Carter said, making it easier on the animals. “Some walked the entire way,” he said. “many were barefoot.”
    The biggest danger was accidents. Falls off wagons, under wagons, being tramped or kicked by a horse, snakebite. Disease was widespread, especially cholera. There was a saying the pioneers had about the thousands who died from the virulent intestinal disease: “Healthy at breakfast, in the grave by noon.” Indeed, as Jennifer and I have visited various spots along the Oregon Trail from Missouri westward, we have seen several grave sites of pioneers who died along the trail of the disease.
    There were also Indian attacks. One wagon train was wiped out just a couple of miles from the route we traveled. That same band of Indians also killed an entire cavalry platoon sent out to protect the ill fated wagon train.
    What amazed us as we rode the wagon across the countryside was how hilly it was. The tall prairie grass makes it look flat and smooth from a distance. Up close, it is a bone-jarring bumpy ride that constantly seems to be rising and falling.
    At camp, we joined the family for dinner, steaks grilled over a campfire, baked potatoes, rolls, green beans and bacon, and cherry cobber baked in a Dutch Oven. As they retreated to their Tee Pees after dark, we went to our Roadtrek Etrek, which we had driven out to the prairie campsite.
    In the morning, I took photos of the replica of the original two-horsepower covered wagon next to my modern covered wagon with diesel power.
    Over coffee that morning, before the guests left their sleeping bags in their Tee Pees, Carter told me he was looking for help in running his expeditions and though a workcamping RV couple would be perfect to help drive the wagons, care for the horses and prepare the meals. He has full hookups on his property. I promised to put the word out….. which I just did.
    The trip was one of the most interesting and enjoyable things we’ve ever done. The prairie is beautiful, even when dark clouds bearing lightning and a sudden downpour swept down over the mountains. It has a vastness about it, like the ocean, spreading out wide and full beneath a big sky that bottoms out against a range of low lying mountains. Antelope bound over the little grass hills, eagles float overhead.
    I’d highly recommend the experience though you need to be in half way decent shape without back or neck problems. Those wagons are pretty bouncy and riding a horse for extended periods of time does require a basic level of physical health.

    With daughter, Oneda, driving the wagon, Morris Carter (right) rides alongside. The wagon is on the original Oregon Trail, the ruts of which can still be seen on the Wyoming prairie.

    The Wyoming prairie is stunningly beautiful.

    Rain sweeps towards us from distant mountains as the sun still shines in the foreground.

    Morris Carter

    Jackie, who works with Carter, made a campfire steak dinner.
  19. Roadtrekingmike
    We’ve been in Redmond, Ore., most of the week attending the Family Motor Coach Association 90th Family Reunion and Motorhome Showcase (a rally). The aerial photo above, taken by the FMCA, shows the 1,500 coaches parked here at the Deschutes County Fair & Expo Center.
    There’s about 3,000 people here and, like all such big gatherings, there are lots of folks to visit with, motorhomes to tour, evening entertainment programs and vendors to haggle with.
    We spent a great night socializing with the Roadtrek International (RTI) FMCA chapter members, hanging out and sharing the fun things we do with our Roadtreks.I liked what John Macinnis from Ottawa, Ontario, Canada said: “We can do so many things and go so many places with our Roadtreks. This is all about sharing our travel experiences with the perfect touring vehicle.”
    So we did just that. It rained. So two Roadtreks parked side by side, front to back and extended their awnings. About 20 of us congregated under the rain protection, sharing the places we’ve been and the adventures we have had. And the adventures we plan to have.
    FMCA National President Charlie Adcock stopped by. He’s a huge supporter of RTI. “If it wasn’ t for Roadtrek International, the FMCA would not be what it is today,” he told me. The Roadtrek International chapter is the third largest chapter of the 80,000 member FMCA.

    FMCA National President Charlie Adcock says Roadtrek members constitute the third largest chapter of the 80,000 member group.
    My favorite vendor was Bike Friday, maker of the hand-built and customized folding bike you see me riding in the photo above. Bike Friday is an Oregon company and I was amazed at how well the small-wheeled bikes performed. They were fast, nimble and very comfortable. Both Jennifer and I bought one. From our Roadtrek Facebook Group, Jim Langely, a fellow Roadtrek owner and one of the top experts on cycling and all things that have to do with bicycles (see his books) gave me a thumbs up on the brand.
    I’ve been looking for a way to add more exercise to our traveling and these bikes, which fold up so compactly, will get me moving. I’ve been trying to figure out for some time how we could take our bikes and once I saw how these fit so well in our StowAway2 cargo box, it was a no-brainer.
    I rode it all around the campground last night. I can’t wait til I get it out in the boondocks.

    Jennifer and I each got a Bike Friday.

    My new Bike Friday

    Mine and Jennifer’s new Bike Fridays in our StowAway cargo box.
    The expo of RV related accessories, services and parts is always a big draw. I bought yet another supposedly kinkless water hose and some Velcro strips to keep it neatly and tightly wound. We’ll see. I am vowing to wind this new one correctly, the same way, every time.
    Roadtrek is here, showing off the entire line. The local dealer is Guaranty RV Supercenters from Junction City, OR and I got a chance to visit with Sales Rep Matt Elliott. He says the Pacific Northwest and the whole west coast is a strong area for Class Bs thanks to the abundance of awesome places to camp, from Pacific shorelines to mountain boondocking. Roadtrek’s sales manager and VP Paul Cassidy is also here, along with Dawn and Alex from the Kitchener team. They stopped by to chat with some of the Roadtrek owners after the motorhome showcase displays closed for the night.
    I looked but if there were other small motorhomes on display at the show here, they were hidden among the Class A skyscrapers.
    Besides the new motorhomes and the vendor display there are seminars throughout the day, dozens of them on every possible topic of interest to RVers, from traveling to Alaska, to how to do basic repairs ,to technology for travelers ,to the pros and cons of fulltiming. I taught two seminars this week, one on smartphone apps for the open road and and one on the history of the Oregon Trail.
    Jennifer and I met lots of folks interested in our Roadtreking experiences over the past couple of years. We did a lot of explaining how the two of us and our dog, Tai, manage to live in a 24 foot van.
    I like to send them to this story about our top 10 rules for getting along in a motothome.
    Rallies like this are a great time to connect with the larger RVing community, be they in Class A , C or B motorhomes. It reminds me if the pioneer mountain men who spent most of the year in the wilds, trapping and hunting and alone in the wilderness. Once a year, they’d gather for a reunion and gathering.
    While they preferred solitude and independence most of the time, connecting with their extended community from time to time was always a highlight of the year for them. So it is for Jennifer and I and the FMCA reunions like this one.
    We’re leaving here for Glacier National Park. Back to the wilds. But we’re refreshed and energized by the camaraderie we just experienced.
  20. Roadtrekingmike
    At FMCA's Family Reunion in Redmond last week, I presented a seminar called Apps for the Open Road in which I share some of my favorite apps and online resources for RVers.
    Now we RVers all have our favorite technology devices, with Android and Apple smartphones and tablets accounting for the vast majority. Most apps now come in versions for different platforms. Most, but not all.
    I am a pretty diehard Apple fan. Though I’ve used Android gizmos, I keep coming back to Apple, especially the iPhone. So, that said, let me share my list. If you are an Android or Windows or Blackberry user, these may or may not apply.
    These days, with solid Internet connectivity available almost everywhere, I admit almost with no shame that probably my best most used iPhone feature is Siri, Apple’s famous voice recognition tool that tells you pretty much what you want to know.
    In Redmond, for example, I can say “find me a Laudromat” and, in maybe two seconds, Siri says “I’ve found seven Laundromats” in my vicinity. We need to stock up on food so I say “find me a supermarket.” Siri returns two of them. It will even give me turn-by turn-voice directions to them via Google Maps, which shows my position and vectors me in to my destination perfectly.
    But I also use apps and online sources while traveling. Here are my favorites:

    We had a big crowd at the FMCA Family Reunion, with lots of questions.
    Aroundme.com – This app is all about providing local info. Whatever you’re looking for -grocery stores, banks, hospitals, gas stations, movie theaters. This is really handy when you travel, but surprisingly useful locally, where I always seem to find cool things nearby that I didn’t know about. It’s free for Apple, Android and Windows devices and smartphones.
    RoadNinja.com – Always on the interstate? Love road trips? This is the must-have app for you. You can discover new places, map out your trip, share your encounters, and save money along the way with special promotions. I use it to find diesel stations on the interstate.
    AllStays.com – The number one camping app for iPhone, iPods, iPads and Android. From resorts to hike-in spots. Amenities, maps, truck stops, rest areas, Wal-mart and casino parking, low clearance alerts, RV dealers, sporting goods stores and much more. Two modes: one uses GPS and maps that you can filter. One is an offline manual lookup mode for when you don’t have service.
    TripIt - The TripIt trip planner keeps all of your travel plans in one spot. Create a master travel itinerary, and access your itinerary planner online or on your mobile decice. Simply forward confirmation emails to TripIt and it will will automatically build an itinerary for your trip that you can access anytime, either online or from a mobile device.
    Evernote – The Evernote family of products help you remember and act upon ideas, projects and experiences across all the computers, phones and tablets you use. With Evernote, your notes, web clips, files, and images are available whenever you need them on every device and computer you use.
    Trip Journal – Trip Journal is the #1 Google Awarded Travel Application with the best trip tracking, recording, documenting and sharing features currently available for iPhone, Android, Symbian and Facebook. The app received a $100,000 prize from Google for innovative concept and design. Trip Journal allows you to document vacation experiences and share them with your friends and family. Impress everybody with real time updates from the visited destinations and let people see proof of your latest adventures, as your journey unfolds.
    Dropbox – Put your stuff in Dropbox and get to it from your computers, phones, or tablets. Edit docs, automatically add photos, and show off videos from anywhere. Share photos with friends. Work with your friends and family like you’re using a single computer. Everything’s automatically private, so you control who sees what.
    Field Trip – This is a guide to the cool, hidden, and unique things in the world around you is now on the iPhone. Field Trip runs in the background on your phone. When you get close to something interesting, it will notify you and if you have a headset or bluetooth connected, it can even read the info to you.
    Where To? – Where to? makes it incredibly easy to locate the closest steakhouse, bank branch, billiard club or anything else you may be looking for, at the drop of a hat! Finally you can find local businesses without any typing, using a slick, intuitive user experience.
    Roadside America – This iPhone app was created by America’s foremost experts in roadside attractions and oddities. It’s packed with easy-to-use, in-depth info and maps for the nation’s funniest and weirdest must-sees — over 9,500 eye-popping places when you unlock the entire USA and Canada. When you purchase the app for $2.99, the Roadside America App lets you choose one of seven US/Canada regions to unlock.
    Besides those 10, there are some other apps I use a lot.
    Jennifer and I really enjoy our national parks. The hands down best app for them come from a company called Chimani. They have awesome apps for all the National Parks Whether it’s backcountry hiking in the Grand Tetons, rock climbing in Yosemite, or bicycling the carriage roads of Acadia – these apps are made from personal experience.by seasoned travelers and explorers. They are like travel guides, but you’ll find a lot more than that. Information like sunrise/set data for a year, tidal data for a year, ranger-led events for the entire season, and much more. The apps also feature an audio tour and dozens of photos by professional photographers.
    Then there are weather apps. Everyone has their favorite and there are a gazillion to choose from. But we all are concerned about dangerous weather and apps can really help keep you informed, especially as you are on the move.
    First, you may not know it but most phones today automatically receive emergency weather alerts. Check your phone’s settings and notifications and you’ll see where to set them. It gets emergency alerts, but has to be turned on. Check with your carrier for specifics but when activated, you’ll get warnings automatically as the are issued. The system also sends out Amber alerts and, in dire emergencies, presidential warnings
    If you want more weather information besides alerts, think about an app. I really like the Tornado Warning App from the American Red Cross. It’s free, works on Apple and Android devices and tracks a tornado as it approaches with step-by-step advice about what to do before the storm hits. A siren warning is built into the app and goes off when officials issue a tornado warning in your area. There’s also a customizable notification system to let friends and family know when the user is safe via social media, text, and e-mail.
    My favorite weather app is My Radar. It’s a free app for all the major mobile platforms. It displays animated weather radar around your current location, allowing you to quickly see what weather is coming your way. For $3.99 you can include weather warnings and alerts, complete with push notifications, to warn you of severe weather in your area.
    Finally, many of you know that Jennifer and I love to boondock, away from commercial campgrounds. We love the website Boondockers Welcome. The site lets you connect with other RVers who have a location for you to dry camp for the night; it might be in their driveway or a field on their farm. The view may be of amber waves of grain or of the McDonald’s parking lot… but it will be a free place to park where you don’t have to worry about idling truck engines, security, or that dreaded knock on the window at 2 a.m.
    Through a special arrangement with the site, if you enter the special code ROADTREKINGDISC you will get 20% off the membership fee. Ths is a great deal and a great service that can save lots of money as you travel.
    So there you go. Those are some of the apps and websites we shared with the FMCA audience in Redmond.
    Feel free to add your favorite RV apps under comments.
  21. Roadtrekingmike
    Since I released the post on the 10 lessons we’ve learned in our 75,000 miles of RV travel, several readers have asked for another installment.
    So here it is. This one, though, has 12 things we’ve learned from the road.
    1) GPS units are all unreliable – If you rely totally on GPS to get you somewhere, sooner or later you’re going to miss your mark and be lost. In my role as a tech reporter for NBC affiliates, I’ve tried them all – Garmin, Magellan, TomTom, Rand McNally, the GPS apps, Google, Verizon, the GPS apps offered on Android and Apple devices and, of course, the built-in Clarion system that came with our Roadtrek Etrek. They all fail. They all are incomplete. Maps differ between them and there are GPS dead spots. A GPS transceiver needs at least four satellites to get any kind of a fix. Even on flat ground with a clear line of sight there can be dead spots. In order for your GPS transceiver to detect a satellite, the signal from the given satellite must be strong enough for the transceiver to pick it out of all the background noise. According to the website Richard’s Mobile Blog, the way the GPS transceiver detects a signal is by detecting phase shifts in the satellite signals. Too many satellite signals canceling out or distorting or too similar to each other will make it hard for the transceiver to know what satellite is what. So, the transceiver just gives up as if there were no satellites were there. The solution: Carry paper maps. We have a shoebox full of state maps. We now use them more and more.
    2) You really can overnight in a rest area – Well, at least you can if you don’t set up camp early in the afternoon, put out the lawn chairs and string those obnoxious twinkle lights that some RVers insist on using outside their rigs. Rest areas are to rest. Pulling in after dark and leaving in the morning after a night’s sleep is not going to get you in trouble, unless you make it look like you are spending the weekend. It helps being in a Class B.
    3) Stay away from trucks when overnighting – Whether a Wal-Mart or a rest area, steer clear of trucks. They run their engines all night long. They pollute everything around them. They are noisy. On a lonely stretch of US Route 212 in Montana, we looked in vain for a national or state campground one night this summer. There were none. Most of the area belonged to the Crow and then the Cheyenne Indian Reservations. Finally, about 11 PM near the town of Broadus, we found a state rest area and turned in. We even saw another Roadtrek parked there, along with a handful of trucks. We awoke at 1:30 AM to the sound of rumbling engines and the smell of diesel fumes. The place was bathed in light. Besides running their engines, many trucks keep their lights on. Every inch of space was taken up by trucks. There was no more sleep. We left and drove all the way through into South Dakota, finally finding a KOA near Spearfish a little after 3 AM. It was not a good night. We’ve had variations of that experience at many a Wal-Mart and now know… stay away from trucks.
    4) We do not need campground electricity – In fact, with our Roadtrek Etrek and those eight coach batteries, the 250-watt solar panels that keep them topped off and the 5,000-watt inverter, we actually have more power in the unit than we do from plugging into a campground’s 30-amp service. So unless I will be running the power-hungry air conditioner for 12 hours straight, we seldom plug in these days. There’s no need to.
    5) Campground Wi-Fi is a joke – Don’t even bother. Unless you are the only campers around. Otherwise, the guy three units down streaming Netflix videos has gobbled up all the bandwidth. Campground Wi-Fi is shared. That means s-l-o-w. We carry our own Verizon Mi-Fi data card to create our own network. But maybe I should quit talking about that. Because we noticed this year that in many a campground, so many other people are now doing the same thing, that often even the cell service is so maxed out it is almost as slow as campground Wi-Fi. See why we like boondocking?
    6) Fall is the best time to hit the road – The RV boom has its down side. This was a very busy summer. Crowds at campgrounds and national parks were overwhelming. The absolute best time to hit the road is mid-September. Just about everywhere has great weather this time of year. In the north, fall colors are starting. In the south, the sniffling heat of the summer months has eased and the snowbirds have yet to arrive. Nights are cool and comfortable. Next year, we will plan our long trip from September through November.
    7) Winter is also a great time to RV – I am always amazed at how many people reject winter camping. I’m not talking about heading to Florida or Arizona. I’m talking abut Northern Minnesota or Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Winter wonderland comping. We always do a winter trip. This year, it will be to Michigan’s UP and Tahquamenon Falls State Park, where the DNR always keeps a few spots plowed. The only thing different about winter camping s that you keep your heater running all the time and you flush the toilet with antifreeze. You take bottled water because the pipes in your RV are winterized. But the scenery is spectacular. If you dress warm, hiking or snow shoeing or cross country skiing are great. And sitting around a blazing fire with two feet of snow on the ground is awesome. Oh yeah, the stars are brighter in the winter, too.
    8) Pay your bills online – We have now enrolled for automatic and/or online bill paying for all our credit cards, our sticks and bricks house utilities and are able to handle our personal and household finances from the road as easily as when we were at home. We’ve learned that every bank will let you draw cash on a credit card. We use one designated credit card for all food, fuel, campgrounds and traveling expenses. This gives us a detailed record of our spending that we can use for budgeting and planning and we don’t have to worry about carrying lots of cash.
    9) Join a national health club chain – You need to work out. You really do. Walking around the campground is not working out. We picked a national chain – Anytime Fitness. We have found places all across the country and really love this chain because they have very nice, clean and private bathrooms and showers. We also belong to the YMCA, which has branches across the country. Every other day, we try to plan our overnight stops in cities that have places to work out. This is Jennifer’s hard and fast rule. She gets very cranky when she misses more than a couple days of working out and I have learned, well… happy wife, happy life.
    10) The RV lifestyle can be very unhealthy – Related to the above is something I hate to say but I think it needs saying. So I will. Food and drink consumption need to be controlled. We spent a week this past year on a very nice campground (I won’t say where) in which every day was themed to some event that involved alcohol. It started with Sippin’ Sunday, Margarita Mondays, Tipsy Tuesdays, Wild and Wet Wednesdays and so on and on. There were parties and happy hours every night and the place, made up mostly of seasonal RV residents, seemed to be stuck in the Sixties. The music around the pool played non-stop oldies and it was like these seniors were on perpetual spring breaks. It would have been amusing if it were not so sad. There were people whizzing by in golf carts that should have been pulled over for DUI. The only good thing was these were, after all, seniors, and by 9 PM, they had all gone to bed. We’ve seen this in different degrees at other places and have had other RVers tell us they have noticed the same thing, too. So there. I said it. Lets move on.
    11) Staying connected online with RVing friends – I am amazed at the friends we have made from the road and online and how easy it is to stay in touch with them and feel connected through our Facebook Roadtreking Group. Many of us have met in person across the country on various trips. We communicate daily through this group. We have planned our own very low-keyed rallies and have asked questions and received help and we kid each other, encourage each other and are inspired by each other – just as friends do. When we travel, we share photos and its like we’re all traveling together. W e are all very different people individually, but we’re bound together by our love of RV travel and have created a community that is simply amazing. Who’d think such friendships could develop online?
    12) Re-Read the RV manual – When we first got our RV, we devoured everything we could about it. I remember staying up all one night, like till 3:30 AM reading every manual back to back. Then I put them away. Early this summer, I sat around under the Etrek’s awning on glorious June day overlooking a Cape Cod beach and re-read the manual and learned stuff that either didn’t register the first time or that I totally missed. If your RV is a Roadtrek, you can download the latest manuals here. If it’s not, dig out whatever you got when you purchased it and keep it handy. I have downloaded our manual, printed it out and keep another copy electronically on my laptop. I may never be a mechanical expert like Campskunk but the manual at least gives me the confidence to know what I should be doing. If not, I can always ask Campskunk and other on the Facebook Group.
    Wow. That’s 12 more lessons. Added to the first 10, that’s 22 lessons.
    I think there’s still more I could do.
    Later. Maybe.
  22. Roadtrekingmike
    One question we get a lot when we talk about our love of being off the beaten path and away from everyone is, “Why? What do you do there.”
    This is as good a time as ever to try and answer that because, as I type, we are very deep in the woods, in the middle of the Pigeon River Country State Forest Area at the very top of the Michigan Lower Peninsula mitt, a 105,049-acre area so vast it rambles across Otsego, Cheboygan, and Montmorency Counties.
    This is one of our top five favorite places to get away from it all and while I can’t technically say we are boondocking – we are in the tiny 10-site Round Lake Campground – it’s pretty much the same thing as there are no hookups here. There is no one else here. Just us, in our Roadtrek Etrek.
    So what do we do here? Sit outside and listen to the sound of silence – Yes, silence has a sound. No motors, no highway noise. It’s the sound of wind sighing through 100 foot white pines. A string of 50 or so Canadian geese, far overhead, honking their way south as the great fall migration begins.
    Go hiking with a camera – There’s a great fern-lined hiking trail that makes its way around the tiny little lake, The only other tracks I see are from an elk that took the same route, not long ago judging by their impressions in the sand. I tread as quietly as I can, stopping often, hoping to see the elk. I never catch up with him. But around me, the oaks and birch leaves are just starting to turn red and yellow. The blue sky and big fluffy clouds reflect off the water. The air has a slight chill to it, and it deliciously smells of pine.
    We prepare dinner in the Roadtrek - There may be no electricity here but we have our own in the Etrek. Jennifer made a fresh salad and warmed up her world-famous crock pot turkey stew on the inductive stovetop. We butter some fresh bread we picked up at a bakery on the way up. For dessert, we had home grown Michigan watermelon. Then, as darkness came, she sits up front to read and I do some computer work in the back.
    There is no cell coverage here. But as I’m writing this post, my computer trills with a FaceTime call. The Wilson cell booster and the external antenna I have mounted on the roof has given me a great Internet connection. On the other end of the FaceTime call is my friend Chis Guld, of the Geeks on Tour team. With husband, Jim, she’s at the Roadtrek Rally in Pismo Beach California, teaching the 120 or so Roadtrekers at the rally their most excellent tech classes.
    Out in California where Chris is, it’s that golden time of day. As she walks around the campground with her smartphone, it’s clearly Happy Hour out there. Somebody puts a bottle of red California wine in front of the camera and offers me a virtual glass. I exchange greetings with many. John from Canada is there. Pat and Pat, a couple I met last summer in Nebraska, come over to say Hi. Roadtrek International President Sherry Targum tells me I’m missing a great rally.
    They see me, seated in the back of the Etrek, with pitch black outside my windows. I see them, with Palm trees and parked Roadtreks in the California sunset.
    Technology connects us. Them, at a close-together, very social and fun gathering, Jennifer and me boondocking alone in the peace and quiet of the Michigan woods. The best of both RV world camping styles, brought together. How cool is that?
    We will make the bed and turn in early. It’s hard to describe how restful it is sleeping when all about you is nothing but wilderness. Sometimes, late at night, we have awakened to hear deer moving past. At least I think it is deer. Besides elk, there are coyotes, black bear and, some say, wolves in this vast wilderness tract.
    Jen and I are missing Tai, our Norwegian Elkhound. He’s back home with a dogsitter. Tomorrow we head to Mackinac Island for a couple of days and, alas, dogs are not allowed at the place we are staying.
    We would have stayed with my daughter and her family. But our granddaughters recently got Guinea Pigs as pets and as far as Tai is concerned, they’re nothing but rodents. And he’s the exterminator. Last time we were there, we caught him standing on a sofa, wagging his tail in anticipation as he stared down into their cage. So this trip, he’s at the dogsitter.
    Tai loves the Roadtrek and eagerly jumped in this morning as I drove him to the dogsitter. I’m sure he thought it was another adventure, after traveling coast to coast with us this year for weeks on end. Words can’t describe the look of betrayal on his face as I dropped him off. I felt so guilty leaving him behind for this trip.
    He’ll be glad to see us when we pick us up Sunday night. Then, he’ll sulk for a couple of days.
    We’ll promise to take him on the next trip. Maybe back here in a couple of weeks, when the color peaks.
    So that’s why we like off-the-grid RVing. As I re-read this, I worry that it will sound boring to some. It doesn’t sound very exciting. Yet to us, it is. And it has become so much a part of our lifestyle now that we need regular doses of this special away-from-it-all time or we start to go a little stir-crazy.
    It’s not for everyone. But it sure is for us.

    Round Lake in northern Michigan’s Pigeon River Country Stare Forest.

    An elk went down this trail not long before I did.

    The leaves are just starting to turn their fall colors.

    The wind signs through these pines producing a delightfully soothing sound.

    Chris Guld at the Roadtrek rally in California FaceTime called me in the Michigan woods.
  23. Roadtrekingmike
    For the better part of four decades, there is one place that has lured Jennifer and me back again and again, multiple times each year: Mackinac Island, located in Lake Huron, at the eastern end of the Straits of Mackinac, between the state’s Upper and Lower Peninsulas.
    It’s a place where motor vehicles are prohibited and where RVs must be left on the mainland at the passenger ferry docks. On the island, the only transportation available is by walking, riding bicycles or by horse. Just 3.8 square miles in size, most of the place is a State Park and the hundreds of thousands of of tourists who visit each year come mostly during the summer, most visiting just for the day, although many others stay overnight at the island’s beautifully restored Victorian-styled hotels, luxury resorts and charming bed and breakfasts.
    Mackinac Island has the distinction of being the second officially protected park by the federal government. In 1872 the Congress designated Yellowstone America’s first national park. In 1875 portions of federal land on Mackinac Island were given similar protection. This ensured the preservation of most of the natural limestone formations such as Skull Cave, Arch Rock and Sugar Loaf. Twenty years later, when the last U.S. army soldiers left Fort Mackinac, all federal land, including the fort, became Michigan’s first state park. The newly appointed Park Commission limited all private development in the park and required leaseholders to maintain the distinctive Victorian architecture of their bluff cottages. In recent years the historical sites and fort buildings such as the Officers’ Stone Quarters have been restored to their original condition and brought to life through dioramas, period settings, guided tours and reenactments for the benefit of the thousands of summer visitors.
    We usually overnight. We love the Grand Hotel, at the start of the western bluff, dubbed “America’s Summer Place” and consistently voted one of the top resort hotels in the world. It’s a place where you still must dress up for dinner. There’s High Tea in the lobby most afternoons and the hotel’s massive front porch overlooking the Straits is one of the most pleasant places you’ll find anywhere.
    We also like Mission Point, a sprawling resort on the island’s eastern end.
    What do we do there? We bike and hike. If it rains, we hole up in our room and read and nap.
    It truly is a place to get away from it all.
    There are lots of places to camp in and around the gateway cities of Mackinaw City on the lower peninsula side, and St. Ignace on the UP side. Our favorite mainland overnight spots are both state parks: Wilderness State Park west of Mackinaw City, and Straits State Park in St. Ignace. There are three ferry boat lines serving the island. We like Star Lines because their boats make the eight mile crossing to Mackinac Island in about 18 minutes, much faster than the other lines.
    You can see from the photos why we like the place so much.
    Here’s some history and details from the Mackinac Island website:
    It was the Victorians who made Mackinac Island one of the nation’s most favored summer resorts. In the post-Civil War industrial age and before automobiles, vacationers traveled by large lake excursion boats from Buffalo, Cleveland, Chicago and Detroit to the cooler climes of Mackinac Island. They danced to Strauss’ waltzes, listened to Sousa’s stirring marches, dined on whitefish and strolled along the broad decks. To accommodate overnight guests boat and railroad companies built summer hotels, such as the Grand Hotel in the late 19th century. Victorians, like travelers everywhere, shopped for souvenirs, and Mackinac shops supplied them.
    In the 1890’s wealthy Midwestern industrialists who wanted to spent more than a few nights on Mackinac built their own summer cottages on the east and west bluffs. Soon a social life including tennis, hiking, bicycling, examining the local natural wonders, and at the turn of the century, golf at on the new Wawashkamo Golf Course.
    Location has determined much of Mackinac Island’s history. Eleven thousand years ago in prehistoric times, not long after the retreat of the last glacier, aboriginal natives stood on the mainland shore, looked out over the Straits between two newly formed great lakes and saw an island with unusually high bluffs. They thought it resembled a large reptile and called it mish-la-mack-in-naw or big turtle. When they explored it, they marveled at its unusual natural limestone formations and buried their dead in the Island’s caves.
    French-Canadian courieur de bois Jean Nicolet is believed to be the first white man to see Mackinac during his explorations on behalf of Samuel de Champlain, governor of Canada, in 1634.
    The Jesuit Jacques Marquette preached to the Straits Indians in 1671 and soon after the area became the most important French western fur trade site. After the British acquired the Straits following the French and Indian War, the English Major Patrick Sinclair chose those high bluffs for the site of his Fort Mackinac in 1780.
    The Americans never threatened the British fort during the American Revolution and following the revolution obtained the Straits area by treaty. However, problems with the British in nearby Canada led to the War of 1812. In July of 1812 a British force landed secretly on the far north end of Mackinac Island and forced the United States to surrender Fort Mackinac in the first engagement of that conflict. There were no casualties.
    In 1814 the Americans attempted to regain the Island by also approaching from the north, but failed to defeat the British who in the meantime had fortified the high ground behind Fort Mackinac. The British and Americans fought the battle in the vicinity of the present day site of the Wawashkamo Golf Course. The British fortification was renamed Fort Holmes in honor of Major Andrew Hunter Holmes, a young American officer who died in the conflict. In 1815 the Island was restored once again to the Americans by treaty.
    After the War of 1812 Mackinac Island became the center of John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company. For the next thirty years the German immigrant provided beaver pelts for the beaver hats so favored by contemporary Jane Austen’s dashing young men.
    In 1822 Fort Mackinac’s post surgeon William Beaumont saved the life of Alexis St. Martin after an accidental shotgun blast tore a hole in the young voyageur’s stomach. When the hole never completely healed, the physician observed first hand what happens when food is digested in the stomach. His published experiments made medical history.
    In the 1860s Mackinac Island processed barrels of whitefish and lake trout destined for eastern markets. Each spring local Irish fishermen, coopers, net makers and dray men cleaned, salted, dried and packed the succulent fish which were carried on lake boats to Canadian and New York markets. This thriving industry replaced Astor’s diminishing fur trade which had now moved to the northwest states.
    Is romance in your soul? Welcome to Mackinac Island. It was inevitable that 19th century writers would discover the Island’s charm, but even before the written word, Indian legends were part of its history. For many native Americans Arch Rock was created when a beautiful Indian maiden’s tears washed away the limestone bluff as she waited in vain for her lover to return.
    In the 1820s a young army lieutenant on a tour of duty at Fort Mackinac sat on the porch of the Officers’ Stone Quarters and composed beautiful letters to his wife revealing his loneliness and love for her. During the Civil War, John C. Pemberton, now a general, commanded a Confederate army in Tennessee and had the dubious distinction of surrendering Vicksburg to U.S. Grant.
    New England poet Henry Longfellow based his long narrative poem, in part, on written accounts of Henry R. Schoolcraft, an Indian agent who recorded information on Indian legends and culture while residing at Mackinac’s Indian Dormitory during the 1830s.
    Edward Everett Hale wrote his”Man Without a Country” while sitting on the porch of the Mission House.
    In the late 1880s Constance Fenimore Woolson, a popular novelist and close friend of Henry James, wrote her best-known book, Anne, which is the story of a young girl and her exciting adventures on Mackinac Island. Anne’s Tablet on the Fort bluff commemorates Woolson, as does nearby Anne Cottage.
    Mark Twain, on an international tour to recoup his fortunes, visited Mackinac during July 1895 and lectured at Grand Hotel. According to his memoirs, Twain was paid $345 for this speaking engagement.
    In 1946 after World War II MGM filmed a romantic tale of lost and found love called, This Time for Keeps starring the famous swimmer Esther Williams and Jimmy Durante.
    In 1979 the Grand was again the setting for a romantic fantasy called Somewhere in Time, starring Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour. Each fall the hotel hosts a reunion of fans enchanted by the movie. But love is celebrated by ordinary folks, too. Each Saturday from June to September the island hosts several weddings.
    Though most resorts and hotels shut down during the winter, there is always at least one hotel open. The Arnold Line ferry only runs from St. Ignace during the beginning of the winter season. They run a daily schedule to the island until the Straits freeze over. Flights to the island from the Mackinac County Airport in St. Ignace are available through Great Lakes Air for $21 one way per person.
    If it’s a really cold winter and the straits are frozen over, brave locals mark an “ice bridge” with Christmas trees from St. Ignace to the island and traverse it all winter long by snowmobiles.
  24. Roadtrekingmike
    I love getting reader mail and I do my best to answer them. But lately, as the fall RV RV shows start getting underway and lots of people are thinking about purchasing a motorhome and more new people are discovering this blog, the questions are somewhat the same. So I thought I’d share here the answer to the one question we get asked the most.
    Q: WHAT WOULD YOU AND YOUR WIFE DO DIFFERENTLY IN BUYING AN RV NOW THAT YOU’VE BEEN DOING THIS FOR A WHILE?
    A: The short answer is…nothing. We now have about 75,000 miles of Roadtreking travel under our tires since March of 2012. We’ve traveled in two Roadtreks, Our first was a 2006 RS Adventurous. The one we currently drive is a 2013 Roadtrek eTrek.
    We did a lot of checking around about what vehicle we wanted and settling on a Roadtrek was very easy. It’s the best-selling Type B in North America. Has been for many years. It has the largest dealer network of Type Bs. It’s resale value is tremendous. It’s quality reputation is stellar. So we knew right away that Roadtrek would be our choice. The rest was easy, too. We wanted a tall interior so we could easily walk around inside and settled on the Sprinter.
    When a used one was about to become available at a local dealer, we put money down sight unseen to have first refusal. We didn’t refuse.
    That said, I do have one regret. I wish we had bought months before. I spent too much time wondering if I could afford it. The truth is, as my friend Yan Seiner says when he faced the same issue, I could not afford to do it. The clock is ticking. I want every moment of the time have left to count.
    Jim Hammill, the Roadtrek President, has a very powerful illustration that brings this home. He says take out a tape measure. Ask yourself how long you think you will live. Say it’s 90. Then ask, how many years will you be healthy enough to enjoy RV traveling. Say the answer to that is 85. Put your finger on the 85 inch mark. Now put another finger on your current age. The length of time between those numbers is how much time you have left. Look at those numbers from one to your current age. They went by pretty fast, didn’t they? Now look at the numbers between 85 and your current age.
    There really is no time to waste.
    We all have a bucket list. Jennifer and I are filling ours. We just wish we had started earlier, because now that we’re Roadtreking, we keep adding to it as we see what an incredible world is out there just waiting to be explored.
  25. Roadtrekingmike
    There’s never enough room. That’s the first thing about RVing we all think when we start RVing, isn’t it?
    But there really is.
    No matter what size RV we have, we all want to bring too much stuff.
    Once we discover that, it’s a little easier to pack the essentials. Still, some times, you need a little more storage space. That’s why we recently replaced one of the two back seats with a custom sized armoire. It is a perfect match with the rest of the wooden cabinets inside our Roadtrek eTrek. And it even comes with a pull out table that lets us replace the front table that attaches to a pole that fits into a hole in the floor.
    Jennifer shows it off in this week’s edition of “How We Roll” as I show how I pack the “basement.”
    Here’s our video:

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