Friday, 12 July 2019
This campground has been so comfortable I hate to leave, but I'm sure with the usual weekend influx of campers it'll get much less comfortable and I've got a whole lot more of Michigan to see in a decreasing number of days.
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| today's route |
I ran into a problem right off the bat by entering the highway going northbound instead of southbound. Of course, that's because that entrance wasn't labeled northbound, it was labeled eastbound, and I knew Kalamazoo, while mostly southerly, is also east-ish of Zeeland, so that's which way I chose. Turned out the highway people meant "east" to Grand Rapids, so I had to turn around and backtrack. Which became a problem because when I took the next exit (which was already 6 miles up the wrong road), I found that the south/west-bound entrance was completely blocked by construction crews.
My first thought was that I'd need to get back on the highway north/east-bound and go to the next exit (5 miles still farther along) and turn around there. I pulled into the large, empty parking lot of a Quality Inn and went online for a map, and figured out how I could get back on the highway without doing all that.
As I went along my new route, I saw signs saying this was the detour route for the westbound highway, and why they didn't tell me that sooner I don't know. But I'm glad I went that way because I learned this area is heavily planted with corn. Huge fields full of what looked like very healthy corn.
I passed a small white church with a sign naming the 1869 Vriesland Reformed Church and a historical marker. When I looked up the marker, I learned that Dutch immigrants settled here in 1847, and that the building I saw is the 3rd iteration in that location, built in 1869. It hasn't been used since the 1970s, likely because if there was ever a town there, it isn't any more. I imagine there wasn't so much a town as a collection of local farmers who gathered there to worship. But if I hadn't gotten rerouted I'd have missed this bit of local history.
When I got back to where I was originally supposed to have entered (WHY would they say the road is going westbound when it's clearly going almost due south with a little eastward slant?) the sign says it's aiming for Benton Harbor, a town I've never heard of and still don't know where it is. Who does these signs here? No wonder I missed the right turn. My little detour added an extra half-hour onto what I knew was likely to be a long day. Oh well. It happens.
I passed more corn and was surprised to see it was of widely varying heights. Some seemed waist-high while others were barely 1' high.
I passed a large building labeled CHS - Farmer Owned with Global Connections. Not having run across this company before and liking the sound of "farmer owned," I looked it up and learned that it's the leading cooperative in the United States. It's 90 years old, headquartered in Minnesota, and is owned by farmers, ranchers and ag co-ops. The "global connections" bit apparently provides the local folks with greater access to markets. How about that?
I came to a town called Gobles, after the family that founded it in the late 1800s. It seems to be mostly a farming town, and just north of the main part of town the house addresses started with a 0. As in "0235 Main St." They actually have the zero on the signs. At first I thought it was just one oddball who put that on his mailbox, but I soon saw they were all that way.
I passed a business with a sign out front saying, "Candace Owens, Will You Marry Me?" (Awww.)
I passed blueberry farms and Christmas tree farms.
Kalamazoo
I've known the name Kalamazoo all my life because of a children's book I still have. It was about a big train, with a big engine and a big engineer and a big coal car and a big baggage car and a big dining car and a big sleeping car and a little caboose. And there was also a little train with a little engine and a little engineer and a little coal car and a little baggage car and a little dining car and a little sleeping car and a little caboose. And they all left the town of Kalamazoo, bound for Timbuktu, a long long way, a long long way, a long way down the track. Of course, all this is repeated several times throughout the book, which is why the name Kalamazoo got drummed into my head at a very early age. There was no way I was leaving Michigan without at least taking a look.
Kalamazoo is a decent-sized city with a large old-fashioned-looking City Hall (I didn't stop for photos) and newish City Auditorium. It has a pedestrian-friendly area of downtown and historic buildings. The intersection of several major streets was closed, and I'm guessing there'd be a fair or something this weekend because of the tents I could see being put together. I passed a medical school and the Saugatuck Brewing Co.
We stopped for a rest break and the dogs and I found ourselves walking along some sort of waterway. There were no signs anywhere that said what it was, and it was surrounded by concrete, but the water was definitely flowing and there were benches here and there along it, so I knew it was something. It took a while for me to find any kind of label for it, but Google maps finally produced the name Arcadia Creek, a very sweet name for this poor thing that's totally hemmed in with concrete.
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| First Congregational Church |
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| First Baptist Church |
We passed the First Congregational Church with a stunning tower. I got both these photos online; try to blow up that tower of the Congregational church and you'll see what I mean.
Battle Creek
Battle Creek, aka Cereal City, is where both Kellogg's and Post Cereals were founded and are still headquartered.
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| Mr. Post |
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| explains Mr. Post |
Also in the park is an oddball sort of stone wall that has Battle Creek Monument Park carved on it facing the main road. I saw no signs or labels of any kind that told me what the point of that wall is, and found out only afterwards that it, too, is a sort of memorial. It was built by a local person who traveled around the East Coast collecting rocks from important places, like Plymouth Rock; then he came home and cemented his collection into this big wall, called the Stone History Tower. I didn't bother to take a photo of it, not knowing it was supposed to be anything other than a not very attractive wall labeling the park.
In 1997, on the 200th anniversary of the birth of Sojourner Truth, the town decided to put up a statue in her memory. She lived the last 20 years or so of her life here in Battle Creek and is buried in the local cemetery, along with Mr. Post, the Kellogg brothers, and Ellen White who is considered a prophet by the Seventh-Day Adventists. (Popular place.)
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| some bio info |
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| more bio info |
The statue of Sojourner Truth is much larger than life, and she was 6' tall in life, so unusual for being born in 1797.
One plaque says her viewpoint of women's rights was, if Eve was supposed to have brought sin on the world, it's only right that women have a chance to fix that mess back up. An unusual point of view.
I haven't found anything that explains why she chose to live the last part of her life here, but she did.
This park is immediately across the street from the First Methodist Church, which is immediately across the street from the City Hall.
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| First Methodist Church |
This building fascinated me as looking completely unlike any Methodist church I've ever seen. It was built in 1907 in the Italian Renaissance style. The bell in the tower came from the previous 1841 church building and was used to toll the deaths of Presidents Lincoln and Garfield, the end of the Civil War and Spanish-American War, and (more prosaically) time for curfew for the city's residents under age 16. For more moderately interesting information about Battle Creek's first house of worship, you can check out this link. firstumcbc.org/history/
Two blocks farther down the street are, next to each other, the historic home of the Kellogg family (open to the public) and a monument to the Underground Railroad. It was the monument I was there to see.
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| Harriet Tubman, leading escapees |
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| a broader view of the Tubman side |
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| the Husseys hiding escapees |
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| a broader view of the Hussey side |
To my mind, this is an odd sort of monument to be in Battle Creek, because Harriet Tubman was never here. But apparently her side of the monument was to honor the Underground Railroad, and Battle Creek's specific connection is shown by Sarah and Erastus Hussey. It sounds as if they were as active as the Coffins in Indiana and, given the proximity to Canada, they probably had plenty of opportunities.
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| about Tubman and the Husseys |
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| a real ad for the Underground RR |
As part of the park, or maybe it's part of the Kellogg gardens, I walked through a small green space filled with the scent of hydrangeas. Honestly, I didn't know hydrangeas had such a fragrance, but it was wonderful. I said something about it to a man passing by and he said they were Annabelles, a variety I'd never heard of.
Maybe they have to be planted in huge masses like these for the fragrance to be clear, and this park had several of these beds full of them. It was wonderful. What I had really hoped to do here in Battle Creek was tour one of the cereal factories, but I learned a few days ago that those tours are no longer available. That's why I haven't bothered to find a campground and stay longer in this area than the drive-through I'm doing today. I've found many many places that once offered tours that do so no longer, making me think I've come too late to the party. Oh, well. The hydrangeas are here.
Back on the road toward Ann Arbor
Along I-94 I kept seeing acres of cornfields on both sides of the road. The owner of the last campground told me they tend to miss a lot of the bad weather the folks farther south experience, which may explain why the Michigan crops are so much farther along than those I saw in Indiana, where it rained so much these last few months. The owner said storms often dissipate over Lake Michigan, and then start to reform about halfway across Michigan. Mountain ranges in the west have a similar effect.
I crossed the Huron River a couple of times. This river is completely contained in the state of Michigan and empties, oddly enough, in Lake Erie instead of Lake Huron as you might expect. Well, I would anyway.
As I turned north from the Ann Arbor area the state route I was on had a provision for handling high traffic loads, allowing the left shoulder to be used as if it were a regular traffic lane when the automatic green arrow signs say it's okay. As it was when I was on it. A Friday afternoon, after all, leaving a major metropolitan area and heading toward the country.
I started seeing pull-outs every few miles, designated as Crash Investigation Sites. They were to allow disabled vehicles to get out of the roadway and wait for towing or for a crash investigator. Miscellaneous parking prohibited. There were a lot of them, making me wonder just how many accidents they have along this road.
I passed the Green Oak Free Methodist Church, a denomination I don't remember ever hearing about, so I looked them up. The sound pretty emphatic about that "free" part. en.wikipedia.org/Free_Methodist_Church
By the time we got to the campground, I was pretty pooped after driving across a good part of the state today. Of course, the dogs didn't think I'd walked them enough so I took them out before we got to our campsite, which I knew was semi-buried in the campground and I was afraid of taking them out in a new place when they were so in need of exercise. That bought me some breathing room before I braved taking them out in a new campground.
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