Matt McIrvin's Freaky Alternate Reality

After the bookstore we wandered around for the other scenes in town. A couple of art galleries --- the peninsula is thick with art galleries --- and antique shops. Also the curious shuttered and abandoned building named The Pier Group Shops, according to a sign that looks like it was abandoned in place in 1982. It turns out the place was abandoned in place in 1982, the result of some impossible-to-follow argument among people with money in the thing. The building's shockingly dilapidated considering how much tourist money there is in town, and even the sign is growing so shabby as to be almost too affected. The 'E' in ``Pier Group'', for example, had two of its nails rust through, and so it dangles, almost upside-down, from the last, below the line of the text. Plans to do something with the property are allegedly under way, according to what is clearly not the same local news article that's run every sixteen months since 1983.

We went to the ice cream shop next to the water wheel restaurant. bunny_hugger had been in there way back in the day, before it was closed to all but private functions. We sat on the open porch and drinking coffee and tea and watching the small river and the wheel. It turns out the wheel was always an affectation, and never did any milling or other work. I seem to remember there also being some story about the wheel being built without construction permits, but that's been forgiven because now it's been around a long while and people take pictures of it and stuff. I may have the details wrong. It's in too damaged a shape to turn, which somehow puts it in that weird class of things that improve the look of the area by looking like ruins.

North of town is a mill pond and we went up there to look for wildlife, particularly fish. When we'd been there before we would look into the still water and consider how we didn't see any fish, and then we blinked and suddenly we saw them all. This time, despite being open to it, we never did see fish. Maybe we were too early in their life cycle; the 2013 visit was in early August, after all. We didn't see any fish to speak of. Just the occasional --- splash!

And then we did see something. A good-sized mammal, puttering its way across the pond. Then another going back the other way. We were too far away to get a good look at it, but I did my best to take photos and a movie and that ... doesn't quite clear up what we saw. A beaver seems like the obvious guess. Possibly an otter, although its head seems a bit stocky for that. Something that's able to dive under and stay a good while and will vanish into shore-side wood-lined burrows anyway.

After this crossing we waited a good long while hoping to see a return from these creatures. They never came back, and eventually we walked back to the main areas of town, along the way spotting a red squirrel with some harsh words for us.

Though we had been to the beach at Omena and at Suttons Bay we hadn't done much beach-walking this trip. And bunny_hugger wanted to find a fossil. So we went to the marina and wandered around the sand there, at least once a flotilla of geese finished their march through the lawn, beach, and water. While bunny_hugger looked I tromped along this wedge of grass that was on the verge of caving in to the waters beneath. (It would be a drop of like two feet, but you could photograph it to look dramatic.) She would have a magnificent find: a Petoskey stone. These are fossilized coral, named for the town of Petoskey in northern Michigan where they came to public attention, and who knew you could just grab one like that? She's got an eye for fossils that I just haven't.

We were going to meet bunny_hugger's father and brother for dinner. Her mother still wasn't up for going out anywhere. We got back to the house to find that they had gone already, to the restaurant, in Northport, where we had just come from. I concede we could have better organized this. The restaurant was the one that had the dog prints in the cement out front, which it turns out is just part of the chain's gimmick. The place has some decent 10-to-20-dollar dinners (bunny_hugger's father was particularly taken by the au jus sandwich, and insisted on going back the next day, when he did not get the au jus). And it has an arcade. It's not as frenetic a blend of restaurant and arcade as, say, a Dave and Busters, but it does give kids something to do besides trying to sit still and read the menu.

Among the things it gives: pinball. They had a Junkyard, a late-90s Williams table that's familiar enough from home, but still a pretty reliable game to play. We gave bunny_hugger's brother the quick explanation of what to shoot for (it's the wrecking-ball crane in the back of the playfield) and had a three-player game in which he beat bunny_hugger. We took another round and this time he beat me.

Still, it's an appealing combination of things. They also had a two- or three-lane bowling alley, bringing to us thoughts of how we like bowling, although not enough to actually bowl.

Back home we'd continue our progress through Mice and Mystics and after a couple handily successful rounds we started to believe we just might finish the last chapter while on this vacation, with bunny_hugger's brother composing the whole story about how the archer-mouse Lily would become the ultimate hero. It didn't happen that Thursday, but we'd have two more days to try.

Trivia: After the defeat of Western Union's Americal Speaking Telephone Company in patent suits in 1879, stock in the Bell Telephone Company rose from $50 a share to nearly $1,000. Source: Destiny of the Republic: A Tale Of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President, Candice Millard.

Currently Reading: The Greek War of Independence: Its Historical Setting, C M Woodhouse.

PS: OK, but what does Bronner's have in raccoons and guinea pigs? More than just this.

Animatronic raccoon drummer. This critter would keep swaying back and forth and hitting the marshmallow drums and if it doesn't make perfect sense what he's doing, so what?

A flock of guinea pig ornaments. More guinea pig ornaments than I imagined to exist, although they missed the Abyssinian breed, the one with the complicated sworls of fur that look all crazy. The guinea pigs shared space with hedgehogs.

Hiking and log cabin ornaments! And I know you're thinking to joke about that clearly being a German-made hiking raccoon, but we know better. Would he only have the one walking-stick if he were German? Yeah.

It should not surprise you to know that Wednesday started slow and late with a late-morning rising and a lot of time eating breakfast gradually and watching Columbo investigate the porch and the lawn. He was starting to appreciate the lawn's offer of things to eat, and I think it's done good things for him. He's been a bit more open-minded about eating things since then; at least, he's taken less time to try out novelties and has even done stuff like sniff into bunny_hugger's coffee cup. He wouldn't take any coffee, but he was much more open to the possibility than he had been before the trip north.

We went back to Sutton's Bay for the day. We had a good several hours on the beach the day before, but we hadn't really been in town, poking around the shops or anything like that. The most photogenic and spectacular of the places is I don't know the name of. But it's the garden shop with so many statues outside, including a row of stones carved into owls all staring ... out ... at people walking up to the place. And glass beads and a little artificial river with waterfalls and goldfish of the kind we'd have if we made a fortune and put it into expanding our yard. It's no less packed inside, although I have fewer photographs of that because I noticed the sign asking people not to take pictures. Which is disappointing because their wall of clocks alone deserves Internet immortalization. Some are simple cuckoo clocks; some are complicated clocks. Lighthouses, mermaids, bunnies, owls, everything you can imagine in there somewhere. Figures too, elaborate carved sculptures to match one we'd gotten a couple years ago, that of a piece of wood carved to look like a rabbit and painted as a carrot. Imagine a line of these, animal-food items. And now you know just what the shop is like.

We visited a number of other stores, mostly poking in, sometimes picking up a thing or two. Among the curiosities were a couple of fairy doors (not just an Ann Arbor thing anymore, apparently), and a shop with a book honoring Traverse Colantha Walker. She was a milk cow, serving the Northern Michigan Asylum near Traverse City. Over her lifetime she produced something like 200,114 pounds of milk and 7,525 pounds of butterfat and, apparently, she's buried somewhere on the grounds of the former asylum. She was, it transpires, a championship cow of the kind that that doesn't happen anymore, now that milk production has become big and bloodthirsty business.

The science/nature store and the educational toys and games store attached to it were a must-visit again. In the games shop was a guy who let's just go ahead and call ``Gamer Me'' enthusiastic about the way we were looking over the boxes of big board games and kits and happy to talk them up to us. Over in the science store the astronomy guy, a former professor at The Local College, was passing out --- once again --- his information sheets about what was in the sky and was delighted that bunny_hugger referred to the Big Dipper as an asterism rather than a constellation. They've had that conversation too, in the context of his showing off charts that depict how the Chippewa divided the sky. (I think they also have a warrior figure based around Orion, a neat point of coincidence.) He was also, I believe, once more delighted that we wouldn't speak of the ``dark side'' of the Moon.

We jested about whether the Science Guy and the Gamer Me Guy got along. My joke: they can't stand each other, because they're too similar personality types. There's not the slightest reason to believe that's true, but it's convenient to.

We got some ice cream and went to the water wheel park to eat it. That's the park just west of the main drag of town with exactly what it sounds like in it, a small, decorative water wheel at the end of a creek. It's also the park with that weird public art sculpture that looks like a blocky, UPA-cartoon robot. It's the creek where, on our 2013 visit, we saw a fish in the creek. Our question then, as now: how did a fish get into this tiny creek a couple inches wide? I started to follow the creek, looking for its source.

Well, it went up to the edge of the park, there to disappear into a corrugated-steel pipe. Taking my best guess to the pipe's direction I kept walking across the street and eventually found where it came from, a gulley running parallel to the street and underneath some people's driveways. It eventually broadened out into a long, skinny pool by the side of another T-intersection in the street that couldn't be the source. Following the faint trace of water motion I went across the street again, and found a short stream and the vast, slightly waving movement of a pond covered in forested plantlife. If that's not the source of the creek it's at least a major resting spot for it.

And what is this creek that winds through the Water Wheel Park? As best we can determine, it hasn't got one. Not even ``Water Wheel Park Creek'' or something. This seems like a geographic anomaly.

I think this was the day we stopped on the way back at the Hansen's supermarket to pick up supplies and dinner. It was the one the homeowner recommended as the place to pick up everything we might need. They had a complementary coffee bar, nothing like what they have at the Horrock's in Lansing; I learned later that bunny_hugger passed on it because she didn't notice the thermoses there.

We again played Mice and Mystics and I think we won at least one chapter handily, beating it in record time, to bunny_hugger's brother's delight. He was really getting into playing the mouse-archer Lily, and building a slightly epic story of how she was coming around to be the arch-hero of our little party. It's a shame that most of the Mice and Mystics chapters are explicitly four-character games, and also a shame that we'd only have these intermittent chances to play with him.

Trivia: By 1740 the typical English East India Company ship would be 490 tons. Were the ship 500 tons or more in capacity it would have had to include a chaplain. Source: The Honourable Company: A History of the English East India Company, John Keay.

Currently Reading: The Greek War of Independence: Its Historical Setting, C M Woodhouse. So it opens with ``One of the by-products of a good secondary education in England is the delusion that Greek history comes to a full stop at about the death of Alexander the Great.'' Good start!

PS: some last wandering around Cedar Point's Halloweekends last year.

Butterfly-woman detail on Cedar Point's Midway Carousel. The Daniel Muller Butterfly Lady at the Merry-Go-Round Museum is a replica of this, or at least one of its partners around the carousel.

Mean Streak's headstone at the rides graveyard. Mean Streak had an overblown reputation for being a rough ride. Cedar Point regulars don't know what a truly rough ride is.

Front gate of Cedar Point, after the park had closed, with the October cloudscape above it. How many people are taking pictures of the park's entrance gate, and how many are taking selfies of themselves outside the gate? Answer: all of them. Not depicted: the Tyrannosaurus Rex statue with sunglasses on, which is a shame.

PPS: Reading the Comics, October 14, 2017: Physics Equations Edition, some more comic strips with mathematics stuff.