~Thursday, July 22, 2021~
Day 403 (Travel Day)
It was so sweet of Marge (the resort owner), to stop by to ask if I received my Amazon package yesterday. And of course along with her stop, Sadie scored with more dog treats. She just loves dogs!! We will definitely be back to this resort, perhaps to stay at one of their lakefront cabins. As we were leaving, a new neighbor showed up from Florida. They’re doing the exact same route as ours, but clockwise. Too bad our paths didn’t cross earlier since they would have been fun to hang out with.
Still exploring the heavily forested U.P., we are continuing further west to the Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park at a campground called Presque Isle Campground. What’s funny is that with 6 hours of driving today, we’re still seeing the same lake…..Lake Superior. It’s that big. Can’t say that’s ever happened before.
Along the way, about 30 minutes into our drive, our TPM (Tire Pressure Monitor) alarm went off. Luckily, we had a rest stop in close proximity…..talk about convenience! One of our trailer tires had dropped to 61 PSI (we like to keep it at around 69). We are so happy we purchased that thing. If you want happy driving and prefer warding off disaster, it’s worth the investment. And it helps that we have an air compressor with us at all times, to add air to anything, anywhere.
Since we knew our next destination would be quite remote, we took advantage of some grocery shopping in the large town of Marquette. One of our go-to’s on this side of the U.S. is a chain of stores called Mejher (similar to Wal-Mart). And yes, there are still Wal-Mart’s in nearly every town. Thank goodness as this is our main source for RV toilet paper!
As we got closer to our destination, there was a little bit of confusion as to which road to turn down to get to our specific campground, Presque. When you’re towing, you really want to be clear as to where you’re going. So immediately, we were quite frustrated that the directions were not guiding us correctly, which sometimes happens with GPS. Really all we had to go by was a sign for Porcupine Mountain Park Headquarters/Campground, so we turned down that. Not far down, we saw one campground, but not the one we were looking for. After 8 miles of driving with no one in sight, we came to the conclusion that we were going down the wrong road. Fortunately, we found a large sign on the side of the road, with a map. After studying the map, we determined that the one area designated a “modern campground” with a trailer symbol, must be where we wanted to be. So turn around we did, and eventually ended up back on the main road that got us here in the first place. We turned into the “modern campground” called Union Bay, thinking WE’RE HERE!! Jeff stayed in the car while I went to the kiosk. Shockingly, a park attendant, Dave, was still there, even at 8:00 p.m. My heart kind of sank when his response was, “I don’t have anything under that name, you must be at the other campground, 25 miles away”. The turnaround road was actually the right one, after all. Thank goodness we had someone to set the record straight. If it's any consolation, he did say, we were staying at the nicer of the two campgrounds. I suppose it did make me feel a little bit better. When I came back to the car to tell Jeff the bad news, he had struck up a conversation with a couple from Grand Rapids, MI (he looked like Kenny Chesney). Apparently he gets that comment all the time. It was getting late, and we’d driven about 6 hours. All we wanted to do was just get to our campsite. But first, per Dave’s suggestion, we filled up our freshwater at his location since Presque has only old fashioned hand pumps. Then back on Boundary Road we went. This road reminded us of the forests we saw in the Great Smoky Mountains. Gorgeous! Finally, we arrived! Wow…..beautiful and right on Lake Superior which we can see from our vantage point, about 3 rows in. And the sites are HUGE! Plenty of space to get in, space between neighbors, trees all around (hope we’ll be o.k. with getting enough solar), it’s awesome! No hookups but we’re only here for 3 days, so it’s all good. Most of the visitors here seem to be tent campers with just a handful of RVer’s and ours appears to be the biggest, which is a rarity. Normally we look shrimpy next to all those Class A’s. One of the nice things about being this far north in the summer, is you don’t have to worry about arriving at your campsite too late, because you’ll still have light for set up. So for that, we were grateful.
Setting up took a while since I still had a lot of groceries to put away. I don’t think we completely finished until around 11:00, or was it 10:00? We found out that half the park is in the Central Time Zone, and the other Eastern. I think being more west of the state park, we are in Central. But in the end, does it really matter? We decided it was too late for a campfire, so just hung outside watching the moon come up between the trees and enjoying rehashing our day. And it’s refreshing not having any cell reception. We could use the break. And the lack of it reflects on our fellow campers enjoying each other's company. So rare to see people device free...right? Mosquitos are back folks…..😳🦟so bring on the repellant!