Day 74: A quick peek of Lake Erie and onwards to Ohio.

After 5 nights in Brighton, today is our day to pack up and leave this beautiful campground. It also happens to be our last morning in Michigan and we are sad to be leaving but glad to have spent nearly 2 weeks here.

The tree that is in the middle of the photo above has shed all of its leaves. Most of it happened while we were here. As we travel south, we will regain some of the autumn that is quickly fading away. In a couple of weeks, most if not all of the trees here will look just like that. By then, we will be in the south and hopefully continue to enjoy the changing of the leaves at lower latitudes.

Aside for being the last day for us in Michigan, we also have another deadline we had to make before the day is over. That of course is getting our taxes filed for 2011. Yes, we are slackers. We had a lot of stuff going on in this last year. About 11 months ago, we decided to put our house on the market. Since then, lots of things have happened and we have used every last minute we have to file our personal taxes.

Of course since we are still CA residents, we also have state income taxes to file. Ouch.

During our lunch yesterday, we asked our friends Ted and Brenda where to go if we wanted to visit Lake Erie. When we were in Minnesota, we had no idea that we would be spending this much time in the midwest. If we did, we would have made an effort to go see Lake Superior. Lake Erie will be our consolation price. It will be the last of the Great Lakes for us to see before heading south into Ohio and eventually into the south.

Ted and Brenda recommended for us to stop at a little town called Luna Pier. It was cold and hardly anyone was out at this little lakeside town.

Across the lake from this perspective, you can see Ohio in the distance. And from the other side, you can just about make out Canada.

In the summer months, Luna Pier is a weekend destination for locals to visit. It has all of the quaint small town things everyone would hope for. The crescent shaped pier is what gives this town its name. It wasn’t established until the 1900s and incorporate in 1963.

Like a little outdoor Beach Cafe for a cup of coffee or a burger for lunch.

And the little post office that sorts and delivers mail for all 1400 people that live here.

At just 6 miles from the Ohio border, when we left Luna Pier to head south, we crossed the state line into greater Toledo in no time at all. Instead of staying around to visit Toledo, we need to continue south towards Jackson Center where we have a service appointment on Wednesday. There was hardly any traffic through Toledo and being that it is a Monday, we were pretty lucky to make it out of the southern end into Perrysburg, Ohio.

After 74 days on the road, we surprisingly have not eaten at a Cracker Barrel. If you read more than a few of our posts, you know that we often prefer to eat out rather than doing dishes in the Airstream.

It has been made a little trickier with Luka’s allergies. Everything Marlene wants to order at Cracker Barrel has something that will probably bother Luka’s digestive system. As we start heading south, it will only get worse.

We settled for the night in Findlay, Ohio. Tomorrow we will head into the Terraport at the Airstream factory in Jackson Center for Mali Mish’s first ever homecoming.

over and out,
dan