Alyson Gagne

A Tale In Three Acts

Prologue

If you’ve been following my blog at all you would have seen that while in Montana I decided to head home to New Hampshire for a bit and take a break from traveling for the end of the year. Being in Montana at the time of this decision meant that I was 2500 miles away from home, which would have been about five or six days of driving straight through. I wasn’t in a hurry, so I took my time meandering through the upper Midwest on my way.

Not including the drive through Montana and North Dakota, this part of my trip included three stops, each for only a week. Up until the end of August, almost all of my stops were for four full weeks in each place I stopped, so to spend three weeks in three places felt a little jarring and hectic. This was also after I finally realized how burnt out I was, and was on my way home. I did enjoy my time in these places, but it would not be accurate to say that I was as excited about them as I was about most of the other places I have been to this year.

The short stops meant that I didn’t get a ton of time to explore each place individually, but it was just enough time to get a brief taste.

My first stop was northern Minnesota.

Act I: Coming Full Circle in Minnesota

It took me two days of driving straight through the prairies of Montana and North Dakota on the interstate, which one stop at Theodore Roosevelt National Park and one visit to the “World’s Largest Buffalo” aside, was a pretty boring way to spend 14 hours in the car.

Once I passed Fargo, I left the interstate and took smaller highways winding through rural northern Minnesota, at which point the drive got much more scenic and pleasant.

Minnesota is very cute. All the towns have names that sound like the summer camp that the scrappy kids attend in an 80s teen movie. I got there just in time for peak fall foliage, which was surprisingly moving for me to see after four years in arid Southern California and a summer in arid-er southern Utah.

One of the little surprises of driving through this part of the world is that I got to visit Lake Itasca, the headwaters of the Mississippi River. It was a satisfying full circle experience to have crossed the Mississippi River at the end of the river at the start of my trip – and now, eight months later, to cross the start of the river at the end of my trip. I was moved to create the following underwhelming original meme!

In the picture on the left I am on the ferry in New Orleans crossing the Mississippi into the French Quarter on my first day of Mardi Gras. My hair is done, I’m wearing makeup and jewelry, and I’m going to meet my friends in the city without a care in the world. In the right photo I’m at the headwaters marker at Lake Itasca State Park. I haven’t done my hair or makeup in months, I am practically living in those leggings and flannel, and you can’t quite see it but I am holding my covid mask in my left hand. A lot changes in eight months!

The main thing that brought me to this part of Minnesota was Voyageurs National Park, my 13th national park on this trip, and one of the more remote and least visited in the national park system. This park is basically a big lake that straddles the international border between the US and Canada (I could see Canada from the window of my hotel room). It’s one of those national parks that is basically not worth visiting if you don’t have a boat. The park is mostly lake, and the parts that are land are mostly islands within the lake. I tried doing some hikes around the perimeter of the park, but without a boat the experience is not all that exciting.

That’s why the best thing I did in Voyageurs was go on a guided boat tour of Lake Kabetogama (pronounced KAH-buh-TOH-g’ma… see what I mean about it sounding like a summer camp?) . You can see more photos and details about this tour on my photos page. It was really fun, really educational, and is pretty much the thing that made my trip to Voyageurs worth it. It was also the most social thing I did in months; after spending eight months actively avoiding people, spending a whole day on a boat with 10 very friendly Midwesterners was almost more social interaction than I could handle. I didn’t realize that part of my brain could atrophy, but apparently it can.

When I left Minnesota, I took the scenic route down along the shores of Lake Superior and back up in the direction of my next stop in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I saw more lighthouses on that day than probably my whole life up to then combined (impressive considering I grew up in New England and my mother fuckin LOVES lighthouses).

If not for the covid situation, I would have loved to visit Isle Royale National Park, an even more remote and less visited park than Voyageurs. But alas, the ferry is not running because of the pandemic, and a private plane ride is about $350, so that visit will have to wait for a post-covid world. In the meantime, it was on to the UP.

Act II: Drama and Romance In Michigan

My second week in the Midwest brought me to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, or the UP. I, like anyone who has ever been friends or roommates with any Midwesterner, has heard about the UP and its status as magical summer vacation land. What I did not expect was for it to look like the set of a historical romance novel.

One of my favorite TV shows is the PBS series Poldark, about a brooding/sexy British soldier who returns home to Cornwall from fighting in the American Revolution to run his father’s copper mine and marry his sweetheart, only to find the mine in disrepair and the sweetheart married to his cousin – romance and more brooding ensue. The show features a lot of dramatic sweeping shots of the characters experiencing feelings on the Cornish seaside.

While in the UP all I could think about was how much the place has in common with the Cornwall of Poldark. I ate pasties and drank lots of brown beers, toured a defunct copper mine, and stood on a windswept cliff as I gazed mournfully at the waves crashing against the jagged rocks below. I expected a brooding/sexy hero to ride up on horseback at any moment. That part didn’t happen, unfortunately.

I chose a basecamp that was fairly central in the UP so I could see multiple parts somewhat easily. I visited the Pictured Rocks National Seashore, both taking day hikes on the shore and another guided boat trip (much like Voyageurs, most of the appeal of this park requires a boat to experience). I took a full day trip around the Keweenah Peninsula (pronounced KEE-when-aw, for God knows what reason). I brought my bike on the ferry to Grand Island in the Hiawatha National Forest. I ate from several delicious local restaurants and drank lots of good local beers.

The worst thing about my time in Michigan is that it rained the whole time I was there. But because I was only there for a week, I didn’t want the rain to be the reason I wasted my time there (if I’m going to waste my time I’d rather it be for a better reason than that) so I spent most of my week there somewhere between damp and soaked. The whole time I was there I barely saw the sun for more than a few minutes at a time. Which of course added to the brooding Poldark-y quality of the place. 10/10 would brood there again.

Act III: Golden Hour In Indiana

The last stop on my magical whirlwind tour of the upper Midwest was the Indiana Dunes. To get from the UP to my home to New Hampshire, the fastest route would actually take me through Ontario, but due to the covid situation the Canadian border is closed and I had to take the long way around the bottom of the Great Lakes. Given this was my last week before getting home, I was mostly just trying to find a stop that would be pleasant and kind of chill, but I wasn’t all that worried about it being a spectacular destination. The Indiana Dunes seemed like a good place to spend my last few days before getting home, and would be a nice way to add a 14th national park to my list for 2020.

Indiana Dunes National Park is beautiful and interesting, and also unexpected. Some of the dunes are as tall as a house, and made of white “singing” sand that squeaks beneath your feet or between your fingers. It looks like a Caribbean Island, except that the dunes are topped with the types of deciduous trees you’d expect to find next to a lake in Indiana, you can see the Chicago skyline across the water, and the water is obviously a lake.

There is something a little unsettling to me about the Great Lakes. They feel like the ocean – you’re usually on a beach, and when you look out over the lake you see water clear to the horizon. My brain wants it to be the ocean, except for one very subtle difference, that the water barely moves. There’s no tide, and almost no waves at all. Except for times when there is a literal storm blowing, the water in the Great Lakes is flat as glass.

It’s like looking at one of those 19th century portraits where you can’t figure out what is so unsettling about it until you realize the person in the photo is dead.

I don’t mean that to say that the Great Lakes are like a dead person – in fact I found them quite beautiful! It was just a strange experience for my brain to look out at the scenery and think that it’s ocean and to expect ocean things, and to have such a subtle and important thing be missing.

That’s what made the Indiana Dunes such a strange and interesting place. It was so familiar but also so strange.

The primary downside to my visit was my timing – being there in early October meant that the days were going to be short no matter what. But I forgot to account for the fact that this part of Indiana is one of the eastern-most places in the central time zone – in fact the time zone line literally wraps around this part of the state.

The sun set at about 6:30pm every day. That’s not terrible in general (now that I’m in New Hampshire it sets at 4:30), except that I was only there for five days, and I had to work until 5pm each day. That meant by the time I got to wherever I was going, I usually had less than an hour of daylight to do what I wanted to do there. There are lots of great little hikes around the Indiana Dunes, and tons of good birdwatching, but every time I went out, I ended up cutting my time short and walking back in the dark.

But it also meant that I got pretty spectacular lake sunsets almost every day that I was there. It was hard not to draw some sappy poetic symbolism in those dramatic sunsets. After eight straight months of travel, I was on my last stop before returning home, and all there was to do was sit in the sand and watch the sun go down.

The reality is not actually all that dramatic or all that deep. And as I mentioned in my Montana post, I am not done traveling, just taking a break. The sun isn’t setting on anything, unless you draw out this sad metaphor into a trite “the sun will rise again tomorrow” conclusion. So cringe.

But I will say that my few days in Indiana were a relaxing way to wrap up my 2020 travels, nauseating literary tropes aside. I did a lot of really great birdwatching, including seeing about 20 sandhill cranes stopping on their migratory journey for a drink in the lake. I enjoyed quite a few good local beers. I was now on my fourth straight week of staying in motels and was sick of trying to cook in hotel room microwaves anymore, so I ordered good food from local restaurants every day. I had a nice hotel room with a balcony that overlooked the woods, and I swam in the hotel’s nice indoor pool every night. This stop lacked the thrills of some of my other stops, but it was really what I needed at that point in my trip.

Like I said, I will get back out on the road in 2021. In the meantime here’s to good sunsets.