Michigan - Days 30 & 31

Hancock Recreation Area
Tuesday, 30 and Wednesday, 31 July 2019

On Tuesday I went into town for groceries and found my new favorite grocery store: Pat's IGA Foods.  Locally owned, with a great selection.

I also found many sorority and fraternity houses, though I don't know whether they're for Finlandia University or Michigan Technological University, both of which are in Houghton.  The frat houses were in Hancock, though, confirming to me that these act like the same city much of the time.

Almost all of these two days has been spent trying to catch up with my blog.  What's really been slowing me down, though, isn't me but the internet service.  I'd heard before I came to the UP that internet connections can be spotty, but the connection map my hot spot techs sent me (when I was in Maine having trouble connecting) shows the Hancock/Houghton area to be a really good spot, which is why I came here in the first place. 

Maybe so, but the connection operates as slowly as dial-up did, and if you remember how slow that was, you have a measure of the level of my frustration.  It takes a minimum of 6 minutes to download even one photo, which has been seriously slowing things up and giving me headaches.

I wanted very much to do some traveling around this area.  My friend Phil suggested I go up to Copper Harbor at the tip of the Keweenaw Peninsula, and also that the state campground at Gogebic Lake is very peaceful and relaxing.  Unfortunately, I couldn't find an available campsite at either place, plus I was worried about the internet connection I might get at either place.  It's bad enough here where it's supposed to be great, and the one thing I really wanted to do in these last few days is catch up on my blog.

So I ended up staying in this campground.  I had to change campsites, which is just as well as the first one I had had enough of a slope to make sleeping a real challenge.  The second one is much more level but the water connection, which I wanted because I've been draining my water tank, is too far away for my hose to stretch.

Fortunately, as I was trying to back in close enough to reach, my neighbors stopped walking their dogs and not only helped me back in, but also loaned me an extra water hose because even going in crooked didn't get me close enough for an ordinary hose length.  They said their site didn't have a water connection and, since I'm leaving before they are, I could borrow it no problem.

Nice folks.  Nancy and Mickey from Tallahassee, FL.  They're escaping the summer heat and doing a slow tour of the Lake Superior coast.  Mickey told me later that they've been camping for 60 years, first with a VW van that he converted into a camper, later with the VW pop-up camper, and they've evolved over the years to their current Class A.  They have 2 elderly dogs, Ginger and Lily who's nearly blind.  They've apparently been in this area before and knew that the local garage owner also owned an RV, so they got him to send out some help to figure out why first their DVD player and then their TV stopped working.  Apparently the kid, who was barely old enough to drive, who came out figured it out - kids seem to know all about electronics.

It's now way after my bedtime but I've finally gotten all the daily posts done for Michigan.  I still have the monthly summary to go, but I can do that later.  I'm sure I got behind because I allowed too little time for posting during my travels. 

One of the big lessons I've learned this month is that I have the stamina to travel day after day, but not to do that and write about it too.  Even with a good internet connection (so downloading photos isn't like a slow death), I can only do 2 or 3 postings in a day, and I need the best part of a day to figure out where I'm going next and where I'm going to stay and how I'm going to get there.  In other words, I need a minimum of two days in the campground for every two or three days I travel, and preferably a day in between each day of traveling. 

That would severely limit what I can see, but that's happened anyway with me having to miss this whole western part of the UP just so I can catch up.  Something to keep in mind for this next month and see how it works out.