I had the day off today, asked for it months ago in November, back before everything changed. Tomorrow would have been Mom’s 91st birthday, and the original idea was vaguely “go to Salt Lake for the long weekend and spend it with Mom,” since I missed part of her 90th birthday celebrations last year due to not asking for the Friday off of Labor Day weekend back in the November before that. Vacation days are hard to get around holiday weekend.

Well, we’re not in Salt Lake. But we’re gallivanting around.

We’re in St Joseph, MI, on the shores of Lake Michigan. After spending a leisurely morning farting around at home (my fault), we got on the road just in time to run into horrific construction traffic not long after getting on the 294. Didn’t matter, we had no place in particular in mind, just the vague idea of driving up the western shore of Michigan. We’ve got a book about driving along the back roads through the shore towns and beach communities, and an atlas, an onboard nav system, and a handheld
GPS. We’re fairly well covered in the “finding our way” department, and we’re just going to noodle along up northward, stopping when we feel like it. We’ll come back more quickly via a nearby highway.

We bumbled around looking for someplace to stay – erroneously thinking that there would be a lot of B and B’s to choose from, and settled at a Holiday Inn Express up on the bluff. There’s a pretty good restaurant next door, the Mansion Grill, with a great terrace, a decent menu, and slow but friendly service. The sunset view was very pretty from there.

St Joseph is a cute town – what we saw of Benton Harbor, the “twin city” on the other side of the river – left us deeply unimpressed, but we’ll probably be taking a different route tomorrow.

No idea where we’ll end up, either. Somewhere by the lake. Just not the great salty one.