Driving and walking, rambling on my mind.

Aug 16, 2007 15:28

I drove for nine hours with about 10 minutes of breaks. When I arrived I check into my camp ground went for a three hour walk. Things I learned on my walk, when I walk for hours on barefoot on concrete I always get a blister on my heel. When signs on streets say “dead End” sometimes they actually do mean dead end and they aren’t kidding, all the interesting places have big locks, signs that say “keep out or all kinds of terrible things might happen to you personally”! Security personal in Marquette at the coal fired power plant have got to have the dullest job in town and it shows in their lack of diligence.
People travel in packs much more than they do anything else in groups. I pay more attention to other people when traveling alone at any vacation destination people are much more in groups than they are when going about their daily lives.. Probably related to the high cost of traveling alone and the fact that it’s dull.
I don’t even know what time zone I’m in… which is odd because it doesn’t actually matter. It gets late slightly later here in Marquette but it’s not much difference. Tomorrow I know I’ll drive into the central time zone so I’ll change before I arrive at my destination.
The longest perfectly straight stretch of road east of Mississippi river is on M28 which I drove. It might be my favorite stretch road because it has no features for about 30 miles! There are no hills, only trees of roughly the same mixture of trees and a train track without any trains on it. Sometimes it hard to tell your moving, you know you are because the trees are going past but you see no change except for the perfect straight road rolling under the wheels of the car.
The UP has better roads, every stretch of road I was on today was far better than almost any of the roads in Ann arbor the only economically successful part of the state! Maybe good roads ruin the ecomony because there is not enough work for the mechanics!
Marquette speaks of big and bolder times in the past, the enormous defunct iron ore loading dock in the harbor is the biggest hint since it’s huge (really really huge hard to describe it’s size there are two of them in two one is still in use and its even bigger), graded approach to get the train cars up on top of ore docks is about a mile long! But even in the woods there are foundations of buildings and a few rusting machines I don’t know the history of. The saddest reminder of past for the town that was maybe more glorious than the present tourist trap is the train station. The train station its self has been converted into a gift shop which is good idea and a nice way to preserve the station which is not needed any more. But, the train is still sitting on the tracks where they left it fifty years ago! About a hundred feet from the station nearly covered over by the trees and still sitting on the track was the rusted out remains of the train cars….. why do we in America build one colossal transportation system spanning the entire country and severing every small town in the eastern states and then abandon the entire thing in a very short period of time without even scrapping it?!?!! The freeway system is truly amazing and I appreciate the huge amount of work invested in it and it makes it possible for me to drive from Jackson to Marquette with only about four stops but…. Why didn’t we build on the success of the railroad to use that infrastructure instead of rebuilding nearly from scratch.
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