T&C's Adventures in the T42

What exactly is a "dell"?  Other than the fact that a childhood song told us that it's something that a farmer can apparently be in, we had no idea either.  The dictionary defines a dell as "a secluded hollow or small valley, usually covered with trees or turf."  Wikipedia describes the Wisconsin Dells in particular as "a 5-mile gorge on the Wisconsin River...noted for its scenery, in particular for its Cambrian sandstone rock formations and tributary canyons."

Saturday was a day of mini-adventures, as we headed east across Wisconsin.

Today we finished our journey down the St. Croix river, bouncing back and forth between two states, ending at what was once a Little House in the Big Woods.

For the next couple of days, we'll be traveling along the Minnesota / Wisconsin border, bouncing back and forth between the two states to see various sights on both sides.

Voyageurs National Park is the second national park that we visited by boat, since most of the really interesting parts of the park are only accessible by water.

Here's the twelfth in our series of "where we really are now" (or "where we've been more recently") trailers (posted Feb 12).  In late January, our son flew out to join us in the T42 (making it a T43) for a week at the Disney (Animal Kingdom, Hollywood Studios, EPCOT, and Magic Kingdom) and Universal (Studios and Islands of Adventure) theme parks. (P.S. As with the past few trailers, we're working around Blogger's 100 MB file upload limit by linking to a larger video uploaded to YouTube instead.  For the highest quality video viewing experience, you'll probably want to click the little gear icon under the video once it starts playing, and make sure that "Quality" is set to "1080p".)

At Temperance River State Park, we learned that "potholes" aren't just in roads.

We spent Sunday exploring some of the sites around the Grand Portage area.

Today we'd be making what is probably our shortest visit to a National Park ever:  a trip to Isle Royale National Park.  As the name implies, Isle Royale is an island out in Lake Superior just south of the Canadian border and can only be reached by boat.  The only non-overnight boat available only provides 3.5 hours on the island (with a 3 hour round trip to get there and back) so we didn't have time to do very much while there.

We continued our Minnesota adventures with a visit to Tettegouche State Park, on the shores of Lake Superior.

Thursday was a pretty full day, with almost four hours of driving to get to our next stopping place and shopping and sight seeing planned on the way.

Our first, quick foray into Wisconsin was for a visit to Copper Falls State Park.

Our last "stop" on our way out of Michigan was at Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park, to do some hiking and waterfall-peeping.

We had to do a little vehicle maintenance on the T42 before continuing on with our sightseeing in Munising.

Here's the eleventh in our series of "where we really are now" (or "where we've been more recently") trailers (posted Dec 9). (P.S. As with the past few trailers, we're working around Blogger's 100 MB file upload limit by linking to a larger video uploaded to YouTube instead.  For the highest quality video viewing experience, you'll probably want to click the little gear icon under the video once it starts playing, and make sure that "Quality" is set to "1080p".)

This blog post continues the story of our (very full) first day in the Pictured Rocks National Seashore area.

Here's the tenth in our series of "where we really are now" (or "where we've been more recently") trailers (posted Nov 30). (P.S. As with the past few trailers, we're working around Blogger's 100 MB file upload limit by linking to a larger video uploaded to YouTube instead.  For the highest quality video viewing experience, you'll probably want to click the little gear icon under the video once it starts playing, and make sure that "Quality" is set to "1080p".)

Our travels would have us spending a couple of days in and around the Pictured Rocks National Seashore.  Our first day there was pretty full, so we'll be dividing it up into two separate blog posts - with this first one covering our time in the Grand Sable area.

Well, it seems we've fallen behind on even putting out the "where we really are now" trailers in a timely fashion.  But recent events have inspired us to at least push out a "Special Edition" update today, Nov. 23, from the camp store in Great Smoky Mountains National Park (which happens to be one of two places in the park with WiFi).  Enjoy!

Here's the ninth in our series of "where we really are now" (or "where we've been more recently") trailers (posted Nov 16).

Today we visited Michigan's largest waterfall.  Tahquamenon Falls actually has a distinct Upper and Lower falls, with the Upper being the one with the "largest" designation.  There's technically a 4.5-ish mile path that runs along the Tahquamenon River between the two so you could park at one and walk to the other, but most people opt to skip the 9 mile round-trip hike and drive to each of the falls instead - which is what we decided to do as well.

We spent our first full day in the Tahquamenon Falls area visiting the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum, and the Seney National Wildlife Refuge next to it.

Here's the eighth in our series of "where we really are now" trailers (posted Nov. 3 - so these are beginning to become more like "where we were recently" trailers 😉).

We continued our journey into the Upper Peninsula of Michigan with a visit to the city of Sault Ste. Marie, on the St. Marys River that connects Lake Huron with Lake Superior.

To Tom, the words "Mackinac Island" were always followed by the word "Fudge", since his only exposure to the name was from the perennial fudge stand at the Sonoma County Fair in his younger days; he never realized that Mackinac Island was even an actual place, figuring it was akin to "the valley of the Jolly Green Giant" .  (He also has always pronounced it "Mack-i-nack" too.)  Christine, on the other hand, had a father who was from Michigan so knew that Mackinac Island not only existed, but that it was pronounced "Mack-i-naw" and was famous for fudge.  Of course, we had to visit there on our way through Michigan!

Here's the seventh in our series of "where we really are now" trailers (posted Oct. 17).

The next stop on our trip was based on a recommendation from Aunt Johanna, who asked if we were planning to see the Mushroom Houses in Charlevoix.  We had never heard of them before, but it turned out that Charlevoix had several points of interest.

Although we only spent a little over a day at the Sleeping Bear Dunes, we crammed quite a bit into our visit:  a scenic drive, a walk through a historic village, and a dune hike.

Here's the sixth in our series of "where we really are now" trailers (posted Oct. 5). (P.S. As with the past few trailers, we're working around Blogger's 100 MB file upload limit by linking to a larger video uploaded to YouTube instead.  For the highest quality video viewing experience, you'll probably want to click the little gear icon under the video once it starts playing, and make sure that "Quality" is set to "1080p".)

As we left Indiana and headed into Michigan we got brief respite from "life on the road" for a couple of days, getting to spend some time in an actual house without wheels! 

We continued our adventures in Indiana Dunes National Park, spending time on some actual dunes.

Since we embarked on our Trek on April 3rd, our time in Indiana crossed over the two month mark.  We thought you might enjoy some facts and figures from our second month on the road. States traversed: 8.5 (we passed through a portion of Montana, but didn't stay the night or do anything there).

We spent most of the time on our first pass through Indiana exploring Indiana Dunes National Park.  The park is somewhat different than most we've visited up until now, in that it's not in some secluded out of the way place.  It occupies a discontinuous strip of land on the well-populated south shore of Lake Michigan, and is broken into fragments and odd shaped pieces by both public and private beach communities, as well as the Indiana Dunes State Park (which the national park completely surrounds).  It would take several days to "fully explore", and we did our best to hit the highlights.

Continuing our adventures in the Starved Rock State Park area...