The following was written by my late wife Elaine. She wrote a long book, a diary really, from which this is one passage:
The summer of 1954 we enjoyed our belated honeymoon in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. We have pictures of us holding fish we caught at Wolf Lake, somewhere near the Porcupine Mountains, and one shows me looking bedraggled, sitting on a log in the Porcupines after a 12-mile hike. All day we never saw a bear, but as we emerged from the end of the trail, we saw one eating tourists’ garbage from a roadside barrel. We should have just sat on the log ’til a bear came along instead of walk all day!
We camped in the Lower Peninsula on our way back to Lansing. This was a tent-camping trip, mostly, but we spent one rainy night with our sleeping bags in an empty building instead of in the tent. No thought of danger or trespassing ever entered our minds, only that we wanted to be dry.
We went to a motel on another rainy night, and I remember Mrs. F., the proprietor, came out and asked us to turn our car around so the front of it faced her new building. I thought it was to avoid exhaust fumes staining her wall; Dave thought it was so we couldn’t “make a quick getaway” without paying.
Sometime that night, through the paper-thin wall of our room, we heard some thumping around in the room on the other side of the wall, and a woman said, “Oh, Daddy-O! Oh, Daddy-O! Why isn’t it like this when we’re home?”
Vacation Adventures!!
To be continued…
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About the Author: RD Blakeslee is a nonagenarian in West Virginia who built his net worth by only investing in that which can be enjoyed during acquisition and throughout life, as opposed to papers in a drawer, like stocks and bonds. You can read more about him here.
Photos: Courtesy of the Blakeslee Family
rofl Thank you for this one. LOL I’m so glad you shared this one Mr. Dave.
I’ve heard stuff through hotel walls, and apartment walls too. Oh my. lol
Yep. I think we all have, Bill!
Say … you don’t happen to answer to “Daddy-O,” do you? 🤪
Only if they’re calling me to food. 🙂
As I remember Elaine and my trek through Michigan in those days, I am mindful of the profound changes that have taken place there.
It would not be safe to return to the street where I grew up in Detroit.
I compare that with the experience of my youngest son, now 53 years old and visiting us here on the family homeplace and hiking through the very same woods he reveled in as a child.
Mr. Dave, what kind of fish is that you’re holding in the photo?
You made two cashiers happy today. They have to put up with a lot of stuff. I told them about the motel experience. They both “LOL”.
That fish is a Northern pike.