We had kind of a rough day on Tuesday. I believe the looks on Jack's face and mine (while in the car) says it all. (For some reason Kate likes to take pictures of me driving while we are on vacation.)
Kate and I are a unique combination when it comes to directions. She can't read maps, and I have a poor sense of direction and get turned around easily. You would think that our combined directional skills would equal a competent, destination-bound vehicle. Nope. We also have a tendency to just wing our vacation activities once we arrive. I'm sure some people would find this annoying, but we rather enjoy spur of the moment adventures. So, yeah, we are really good at getting lost. Usually this is not a problem and we have a good laugh about it. But we have never been on vacation with a toddler before.
We knew that we were going to spend the day at Sleeping Bear Dunes and have a lovely picnic lunch. Well, okay, we knew this Monday night (the night before) when we decided it during dinner. So we glanced quickly at a map before we left and decided that it did not look that hard to get there. Actually, it was ridiculously easy to get there. Or should have been. We kept driving, looking for the turn to the highway that would take us to the village of Empire. We never saw it. But as Kate said, as long as we headed west, we would eventually run into Lake Michigan, right, which is were the dunes are, right? It never happened. We finally had to turn around when we came to the "Pavement Ends" sign. Dirt roads do not bother me, but this one was basically a lane that descended into a dark and forbidding forest. You know, the type where the sun does not reach the ground through the trees and you can see malevolent eyes shining off the path. (Read enough Tolkien and you will understand.) It's too bad that we didn't think about taking a picture until we were back in Traverse City. And I really did not want to drive all the way back for just a picture of a sign.
It was at this point that Kate rummaged through her purse--a good Mommy purse that makes a diaper bag look like a change purse--and exclaims happily that she found a map. It was on the back of a brochure to a fudge shop. Leave it to Kate to have a map in her purse that leads to chocolate. No, the map was not helpful at all. Actually, I kind of felt like Homer Simpson when he goes camping with Bart and Flanders and they get lost, and all he has is a Krusty Burger map. Anyway, we backtracked (ended up back near the fudge shop on the map, actually) and finally found our way to the Dunes.
Of course, by the time we got there Jack was starting to get a bit squirrelly from having been in the car for a while. And us being the smart parents we are decided to go for the scenic driving tour through the park and along the dunes. Of course, when stopped for our picnic on Picnic Mountain (I kid you not, that is its name) he was so wound up from being cooped in the car that all he wanted to do was run around and not eat. And even if it was not a real mountain, there were still some precarious drop off points nearby that he really wanted to explore. And every time I stopped him from going near one, he started screaming and screeching. This pretty much became the theme for the rest of the drive. We would stop at a scenic spot to oooh and awww, and he would throw a huge tantrum when we would not let him go running down the 400 foot dune. (See pictures in next post.)
By the time we exited the scenic drive--once in, you're stuck until the end--all three of us were in a foul mood. We decided to cut the day short and make just one more stop at Cherry Republic, which is a "destination" store that sells cherry everything. (It was actually a disappointment as they had a store in Traverse City that had the same stuff.) To make sure that we did not get lost on our way back, Kate made sure and studied a map, on the back of a brochure of course, that she picked up at the Sleeping Bear Dunes Visitors' Center.
We got lost.
Did I mention that Kate can't read a map, and my sense of direction is bad enough that I usually don't notice we are going the wrong way until it is too late?
Okay, so we did not get lost exactly. We knew where we were since Glen Lake was on the left side of us as we managed to circle the entire thing. And we ended up back at Cherry Republic. But we found the right road and got back to our hotel. Luckily, Jack had fallen asleep as soon as we had left the store and did not wake up until we pulled into our hotel parking lot.
I'll pick up the story in the next post. Don't worry, it will not be so long.
At least at the end of the day, Jack did get into a better mood.
2 comments:
If it makes you feel any better, A) I have a master's degree in geography and absolutely NO sense of direction, and B) if Colin didn't come along on our family reunion trips in my family, we would probably still be wandering Minneapolis/St. Paul, trying to find the Mall of America.
Cherry Republic?! Oy, they stop at nothing up there to get in the cherries. Did you have any cherry wine at those wineries? (Or did they only make the "real" stuff?)
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