Summer Family Vacation – Part 2 (Ontario)

Mom had some events she wanted to attend back at home, so she drove home while my brother and I continued north into Ontario for the next couple of days.

I absolutely love Canada and try to get there at least once every year.  The scenery, “the similar yet different feel” to their daily life, and most of all to the friendliness and civility of the Canadian people.  Perhaps it’s naive, but I always feel safer traveling in Canada than I ever do in the U.S.—not quite sure why—is it the lack of handguns? less population density? less division between rich and poor? Not sure, but I love it.

My brother had never been to Canada before, so I knew exactly where I wanted to take him first—to the “British Columbia of the Midwest”, the Algoma region of Ontario along the northern shore of Lake Superior.

It was about a 4 hour drive to get there from Traverse City, and the highlight of the trip was crossing the Mackinac Bridge (a suspension bridge nearly as big as the Golden Gate that crosses the straight between Lake Michigan and Lake Huron).

We stopped in Mackinaw City for lunch and photos in front of the bridge before crossing it.  Only a $9.00 toll for the RV (sigh), but still worth the experience.

Our next event was the border crossing from Sault Ste Marie Michigan to Sault Ste Marie Ontario and over the Soo Locks where large tanker ships pass through to get to Lake Superior.  I still can’t figure out how they get such giant tankers through such tiny locks, but they do!

     

As we drove north on our way to Lake Superior Provincial Park, we made a few photo stops—one at the Chippewa River Falls, and another along a rocky shore of Lake Superior.   I decided to take the boring, distant, tourist shots while my brother hiked to get photos “from the edge”--

We arrived to our campsite at Agawa Bay around dinnertime, or as Millie would call it “swimming time”.  Even though chilly winds were blowing in off Lake Superior and waves were 2-3 feet high, Millie thought she could still go swimming….that is, until she got slammed and engulfed by one of those waves!  She then learned better not to chase any sticks my brother was trying to make her go fetch in those high seas!

We returned to camp to rest for the evening and watch a gorgeous sunset off of Agawa Rock.

Summer Family Vacation – Part 1 (Michigan)

My brother is in town from Colorado for a few months this summer to help do some household projects for my mom.  It’s been years since all 3 of us have taken a vacation together, so we decided to take the View and go somewhere.  But where?  I wanted to relax paddling at some quiet lake in the north woods, my brother wanted to do some single-track mountain biking, mom wanted to shop, and Millie, of course, just wanted to swim.   Where could we possibly go to do all of that? We decided on the Traverse Bay region in northwest lower Michigan.

We set up base camp at the Traverse City State Park located right in the heart of Traverse City just across from a nice beach along Traverse Bay (unfortunately for Millie, not a dog beach).  “Grandma” and Millie posed for a first night shot behind our Fire Dancer portable LP campfire (if you’re like me and can’t light a real wood fire worth a darn, or don’t like getting your clothes full of smoke, it’s a great fast alternative).

The State Park is adjacent to a great regional bike trail called the TART.  So the next morning, I rode the TART into downtown Traverse City to explore, while my brother road it the other direction out to find the Vasa moutain bike trail system.  A few shots from my ride:

The next day, we took a trip over to the Leelanau peninsula (that separates Traverse Bay from Lake Michigan) and Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore (along the western shore of Lake Michigan).

This whole area of Michigan with it’s rolling hills, cool climate, and large bodies of water, is the prime location in the Midwest for fruit-growers and vineyards.  One of my brother’s friends from Colorado runs a family cherry and honey farm on the Leelanau peninsula, so we decided to pay him a visit and see the farm.

The cherries weren’t ripe just yet, so we couldn’t help out with that harvest, but they showed us their honey-processing barn and some of their bee hives (for which I, unfortunately, didn’t yet have my camera with me). But I got a few other shots, and we got some delicious “melt-in-your-mouth” strawberries!

After spending the morning in the backseat of the car, Millie was quite bored with bees and cherries, and she now demanded to get her to the beaches at Sleeping Bear pronto!  On our way into Traverse City, we had stopped at one of the beaches south of Empire which was gorgeous, clean,  and huge (with large mountainous sand dunes behind it).  A number of the National Lakeshore beaches allow dogs, so Millie was thrilled.  Today’s beach was north of Empire at the town of Glen Arbor.  This beach was a bit smaller, but still had crystal clear water and got the Millie “seal of approval”!

 

On our final day in Michigan, it rained, so we took a driving and shopping trip up to Charlevoix and Petoskey.  We also explored the neat little Victorian community just north of Petoskey called Bay View.

Great Bong Trip!

It had been a month since my last little trip to work from the road, so I decided to spend a few days at a park I’d never been to less than 2 hours from home—Bong State Recreational Area near Burlington, Wisconsin, about halfway between Milwaukee and Chicago.

Now before you start thinking why on earth the State of Wisconsin would name a state park after a piece of marijuana paraphernalia..they didn’t!  The park was named after Richard Bong, a notable World War II pilot who grew up in the area.

Since it’s a Rec Area rather than a State Park, I had previously avoided it thinking that it’d just be filled with a bunch of loud, smelly ATV’ers.  Fortunately, the park is huge and has plenty of room for the ATV and Motorcycle crowd, the horseback riders, the fishing and paddling folks, and the birder/nature-lovers…oh, and also the dog swimmers!

All of our local dog swimming holes seem closed this year or just too polluted to take a chance on, so I’ve had to take Millie out of town to do her favorite summer pastime.  I also had just got a new inflatable canoe that I wanted to test out, so Bong looked like the destination.

We had a great time!  The campground mid-week was empty and quiet, yet being so near the Milwaukee/Chicago metro areas, we had excellent cellular and digital TV signals.  So tech-wise, it was a great spot to work from.

The lake was a 1 1/2 mile hike from the campground through a nicely restored prairie with tons of wildflowers, birds, and a few small ponds along the way

Once we got down to the lake, it was time for some dog swimming!  I think the pictures show just how much Millie enjoyed it!

New Addition to my Mobile Productivity Arsenal – the Apple iPad

I told myself I’d show constraint and not pre-order an iPad before the official launch date—they might be buggy, there might be hardware or battery issues, the price might come down.  I kept repeating that to myself.  

One April afternoon, a week after the official release, I thought I’d take a drive to the local Apple store to see and touch one in-person.  First impression – “Wow, this is cool”!   When I heard the salesman tell me he thought they might still have one single 16GB model left in stock, my self-restraint fell by the wayside as I quickly pulled out my credit card!

I left it “naked” for the first few weeks trying to figure out what kind of case and accessories I really wanted.  I finally decided on an hp Netbook neoprene case (it’s small enough to slide in along side my laptop in my laptop bag, and flexible enough to fold in half and use as a prop-up pad to rest the iPad on my lap at a good reading angle.  It also fits the iPad absolutely perfectly!).

I also decided on this minimal, but very effective, silicone cover that provides more “grip” when holding it (the aluminum back is just too slippery itself)—the iFrogz Soft Gloss Clear Case 

My absolute favorite accessory so far, though, is the Camera Connection Kit – a set of 2 small 30-pin connectors, one that has a USB slot, and the other that has an SD Card slot. 

This is absolutely the best $29 I’ve ever spent!  As a photographer, I always lugged my laptop around and downloaded CF and SD cards at night to see the photos I had taken that day and keep a backup copy of the files.  Now that I have a heavy 16” laptop, it was becoming quite a pain.  But no more!  Now, I can plug my CF card reader (or SLR itself) into the USB connector and the iPad will import my Canon RAW files directly.  It also imports both JPG and Video files off my Point-and-Shoot camera’s SD card and gives me a great, immediate way to view images and videos.   As a bonus, the USB connector also accepts any USB computer keyboard or headset—great for typing long email messages, novels, long Skype conference calls, etc!

Only downside, is now I wish I would have bought the larger capacity iPad!  I originally thought 16GB would be plenty as I keep my music on my iPhone and most everything else online in the cloud.  But now that I see this can be used as a photo/video backup storage/viewing device, I wish I had more than the current 5 GBs of remaining space I have available…oh well, it’ll be a reason to upgrade next year when the video camera-version comes out :-)

Week in Wisconsin

After being home for a month, with no business travel on the immediate horizon, I was getting antsy to get out and go somewhere anyway.  So, when weather looked promising up in Wisconsin, I loaded up the View for a week to work from the road.

I wanted to explore Vernon County in west-central Wisconsin, as I thought I might try to paddle the Kickapoo River on my day off.   So, I began checking online for potential RV parks with cell phone/data coverage to ensure that I could work from the area as well.

Of course AT&T’s coverage map looked like crap :-)
But, in this occasion, Verizon’s didn’t look a whole lot better.  It did look like coverage for both was pretty strong around the town of Viroqua, and there was a county park just outside of town that appeared to have coverage as well, so that was my target destination.

I arrived in Viroqua around 9:00pm on Sunday night and after confirming good cell reception along main street, I headed to the county park to be sure I’d have it there as well from my Monday work day.  After bumbling around dark country roads looking for the park, I finally found it, only to discover….the darn cell coverage maps lied!!!  No AT&T, No Verizon, nappa, zip, zilch!  Fortunately, there was a Wal-Mart back in town, so I ended up there for the night and it was actually quite peaceful.

The next morning, as I began to haul out my laptop and cell phone, the nice healthy 4 bars of AT&T coverage on the iPhone that were there last night from this spot, were now non-existent (curse that damn AT&T, curse them!!!).  Thankfully, I use Verizon for my cellular data service for this very reason.  I fired up my MiFi card (that provides Wifi to both my laptop and iPhone) and launched my Skype iPhone app to do my morning conference calls.  Once Monday work was done, it was now off to find an RV park with cell coverage.

Turns out, Vernon county has lots of steep, taller hills than most of the rest of Wisconsin, and it also has a large Amish population.  So that explains why cell coverage in this part of the state is not very abundant!  So, I decided to drive over to Goose Island County Park just south of La Crosse on the Mississippi river.  I knew I’d have good coverage there, and I did.

Goose Island had some great sunset views of the river:

 
Cell coverage was stronger on the north end of the island (in the picnic area) rather than at my campsite on the south end, so I decided to just park up there during the daytime….that’s a nice thing about working from an RV rather than a trailer—you can easily move it to where cell coverage is best during the daytime, and then head to a site best for camping during the evening!

On my day off, I drove back over to Vernon County to explore.  A storm was moving in, so I didn’t have time to canoe the Kickapoo, but it’s now certainly on my list to get back to (the Kickapoo valley was incredibly beautiful and should be spectacular this fall).  The area is mostly Amish, and respecting their “no photograph” desires, I refrained from taking pictures, but won’t soon forget the images of Amish school kids out playing on a hillside next to their one-room schoolhouse, or the group of 10 black horse buggies parked at one farm where a group of families had assembled for a volleyball game in the front yard (in Amish dresses and suit coats no less!), or the many Amish farmers out plowing their fields with horse-drawn plows.  No iPhones or high-tech needed in this little area of the world!