July 8
I felt like I'd been put in a barrel and rolled down a hill. Waking up wasn't fun at all, and getting out of the papasan wasn't fun either.
Meghan looked like she was a little stiff, too; when she got up she flexed her shoulders and then twisted around her back a couple of times, while I was stretching out my wings. And then we both looked at each other and shared a laugh.
My coat was all matted down from sleeping on it and my feathers were kind of a mess, too. There hadn't been enough room in the cab of Mel's truck to preen them right.
We decided that since I had to go to the train station and Meghan's house was halfway there anyways we'd use her shower, and after she put her pants on, she helped pack my saddlebags with stuff I might want for the weekend, which wasn't really all that much. Mostly my flight clothes and my camelback (which could be folded up pretty small when it was empty) and radios and some cans of anchovies just in case. And she also put her bra in my saddlebags 'cause she said there wasn't any point in putting it back on just to take it off again once she got home.
So we walked over to her apartment and that helped work out some of the stiffness in my legs and belly, although my wing muscles were still pretty achey.
It was strange how I'd only had my bathmat for a couple of days but I already missed it when my hooves were slipping on her shower floor.
The shower worked really well to relax my muscles the rest of the way, and Meghan straightened out my feathers some while we were in the shower still, and then after we'd finished and I'd brushed her hair she had me sit down on the bed next to her and worked on my wings, and we both kind of lost track of time until she heard her doorbell ring and then looked at her telephone and realized that her ride to work had arrived.
Since she still wasn’t wearing any clothes, she had me go down and explain that she was running a little bit late. And I had just started to go back to the house when she came rushing past me, carrying her purse in one hand and a silver package of Pop Tarts in the other.
Meghan told me to have fun in Bay City, and said that she wished she could be there, too, and reminded me to make sure the door was locked when I left, and then she got in the car and it hurried out of her driveway.
Since I had a few hours before the train arrived, I went back upstairs and finished preening my wings, and then I left a note for Meghan saying that I was sorry I'd made her late and then I had a bowl of Shredded Wheat (I didn't think she'd mind) and got my saddlebags and made sure that the apartment was locked.
Even though it was early, I went down to the train station and waited around and then I went to McDonalds which was right next door and got a cup of coffee to help wake me up and then I waited some more.
I knew that the train would arrive just before eleven, but I had a while before that happened. So I people-watched a bit and I wished I had a book of poetry or my Bible to read, and I listened to the airplane radio for a little bit and it was nice to hear Dori's voice on the radio even if I wasn't flying myself.
The lobby filled up with some people and then the westbound train arrived and most of them got on it and then it left.
That meant that my train was getting close. I could picture it in my mind, rushing past the fields near Lawton and the grass airport outside Mattawan and underneath the 94 Highway and then under the 131 Highway and alongside Stadium Drive and Western Michigan and Kalamazoo College and then it would be at the train station. But picturing it in my mind didn't make it arrive any faster, and I went outside and flew up a little bit but with the curves in the tracks I couldn't see all that far.
I stayed out on the platform and kept an ear cocked in that direction, and after a little while I heard the distant wail of a train horn, and then it was hardly any time at all before I heard the bells at the crossing start to ring, and then the train screeched into the station and as soon as the conductor put down his little yellow step, I flew aboard and found a seat next to the window.
The first part of the trip was pretty familiar territory. We crossed over the river and then through the railroad yard and then went through Comstock and Galesburg and made a turn before Augusta and all the while I was picturing where we were from where I'd flown. But my flights hadn't gone beyond Battle Creek yet, so once we got into the city there it was much less familiar.
Dozens of little towns passed by after we left Battle Creek, and lots and lots of fields. It still amazed me how many fields there were. I'd never seen so many one right after the other.
The train slowed down as it got to Lansing, and we went alongside a river for a little bit then past lots of houses and a strange park, and then it slowed down for the East Lansing station. It was kind of strange that each time I rode the train I saw different things, 'cause I knew more about Earth.
Aquamarine and Jenny were waiting on the platform for me, and as soon as I'd gotten off the train Aquamarine came up and nuzzled me and then when we broke apart she asked me how I was doing and what I'd thought about the storms that came through last night.
Well, I told her about them on the way to Jenny's car (which was called Malibu) and she said that she was glad that she could keep her hooves on the ground inside a good, strong building, rather than be up in the air like I was. But I thought I'd rather be up there where I could see it and feel it, instead of not being sure what it was going to do next.
Jenny said that we might as well go right to Bay City, unless there was something I really wanted to do in Lansing. She said that the ships would start arriving tonight, and that she already had a hotel room for tonight and tomorrow that was near the festival.
I couldn't think of anything I really wanted to do in Lansing, so she drove through town until she got to the 127 Highway and followed it to the 69 Highway.
We talked some, but mostly Aquamarine and I watched out the windows. Towns were marked with green signs and blue signs said what there was in that town. Those were things I hadn't known when I'd first gotten to Earth. And there were orange signs to warn where people were working on the road.
I felt like I'd learned a lot from taking trips in cars.
When we got to a city called Flint, we went to the 75 Highway, and that took us north. When we came upon a really big bridge, Jenny said that we were getting close—the bridge was called the Zilwaukee Bridge, and it went over the Saginaw river. She said it was really tall because ships had to fit under it, and I thought about how big the ones I'd seen on my trip up north were.
I wanted to know why they hadn't just put in a drawbridge instead, and Jenny said she didn't know but she thought that they couldn't put drawbridges on highways, because cars didn't expect to have to stop.
I wished that they hadn't put up concrete barriers on either side of the road, because we were high enough that we could have seen a lot on either side of us. Jenny said that they were there to keep cars from falling off the edge, which made sense, but they could have been long tubes like on the Mackinac Bridge. Those let you see out to the side.
It wasn't too long after that we left the highway and went into town. Jenny had a little moving map on her dashboard that told her where to go, and it led her right to a big park along the river. Men in bright vests like mine had little wands and waved them at her to give her directions, and they led her right to a spot where she could put her car.
We left my saddlebags in the car, and went to a booth where we paid to get in. The woman there was giving out bands that went around people's' wrists, and me and Aquamarine gave her some trouble as she tried to figure out where to put our bands. Finally she decided that they'd go around a foreleg well enough, and so we got banded and then went in.
There were a bunch of little shops that had food set up in a row, and Jenny said that when we wanted fair food we'd have to stop there. And she warned us that fair food was deep-fried and overpriced. And as we walked to the front she pointed out a stage and a beer tent and also little light blue boxes that she said were portable toilets.
Along the riverfront was where the ships would be, although there were only a couple and one of them was on the other side of the river. I'd kind of had an idea how much bigger they'd be from the ships I'd seen before and while they weren't anywhere close to that size, they were still a lot larger than any pony ship had ever been.
We went over to it and the crew was happy to show us around, plus they were really excited to see a pair of ponies who were interested in their ship. It was called the Denis Sullivan, and they said that it was the flagship of Wisconsin.
Jenny had never been on a ship like it before, so she was really excited, and Aquamarine hadn't either, although she was kinda familiar with some parts of it, 'cause she said that she'd read a few novels about ships back in Equestria.
Most of it looked pretty familiar to me, but I realized as we got led belowdecks that I didn't know the human names for all of the parts. So I paid real close attention, and repeated the names to myself so that I'd remember them.
She had three masts, which were a foremast, a mainmast, and a mizzenmast, and she had a deeper than normal hull because she wasn't an exact copy of historical ships, and we were told that there was more headroom belowdecks because of it. And she also had a diesel motor which the old schooners hadn't had.
I asked if I could fly up and take a closer look at the masts and rigging, and our guide had to ask her boss, but I finally got permission and so I flew off the deck and took a look around the topsides of the ship.
There were ropes everywhere, holding the masts up or holding the booms and sails in place, and it was kind of a nightmare to navigate, although I knew a few pegasuses who could do it in their sleep. Most of the ocean-going ships had one or two pegasuses on their crew for lookouts and minor weather control and emergency repairs. But it was hard to imagine what it would be like to be flying around the spiderweb of ropes with the ship pitching and rolling in a storm, trying to fix a sail that had gone wrong.
From where I was, I could see another set of sails downriver, so when I was done having a look around, I flew down and told everyone what I'd seen.
We went all the way to the poop deck which was the best place to watch from aside from being up a mast or flying, and pretty soon the drawbridge over the river went up and then we could see her clearly. She was slightly smaller and only had two masts, and I didn't really notice until she got close, but they were really raked back.
That was the Pride of Baltimore II, and she took her place across the river from us.
We spent the rest of the evening watching the ships come in, until both sides of the harbor were lines with sailing ships and I all of a sudden felt really homesick. Even though they were bigger than any of the ships I'd ever seen in Equestria, watching them come up the river and cast their lines ashore was just like being home again, and it didn't take much for my mind to see ponies loading and unloading cargo, or for the memory of the smell of sea air to come back to me.
Jenny was right about the food booths, but we had a snack at them anyways. And we both insisted on visiting the beer tent, and we got beers called Landshark which were pretty good.
When it started to get dark, we got back in her car and drove to a hotel called Euclid, which was like a long house instead of having lots of floors for rooms like the other hotels I'd stayed in.
We let her choose which bed she wanted, and then Aquamarine and I took the other one. I was still a bit tired from last night, so I sort of dozed against Aquamarine's side while she and Jenny talked, then finally Aquamarine shook me awake enough to lie down under the covers with her.
7548994 I hadn't thought of like that. But it does make sense.
Not to terribly long ago they had a sailing ship dock in my home town.
So, um, it's all bold. Like, all of it.
Happy 200th chapter, I think.
7550085
Bolding issue fixed.
For some reason, when I import it reverses the bold tag, and I forgot this time.
Michigan exists to me through art. This story, the Edmund Fitzgerald, and an album by Sufjian Stevens.
Have you heard Sufjian's album about Michigan? It makes me want to go there.
Liverpool pretty much has a permanent population of tall ships, mostly clustered around the Albert Dock that do adventure holidays and such.
Aquamarine: "Wake up, Silver Glow! Get under the covers and snuggle with me!"
As always, we need pictures.
Giggity-giggity. Awwww-right.
The next level in their relationship.
"Oh, Meghan is running a bit late; we lost track of time and she's still naked."
At least it wasn't called Hilbert, I hear it takes forever to get to your room there.
"Silver. Silver. Hey Silver, wake up. Snuggle time."
7550150
Don't get excited, Meghan didn't come along.
Always impressive to see the sailing ships, one of the strangest I saw near where my Dad lives was a newly restored sailing canal barge. I suspect they had lots of work with standard bridges and tunnels.
Pity about the Chinese Treasure fleet getting Junked.
There is an old country Western song about Saginaw Michigan by Lefty Frizzell.
I'm surprised that Silver is so wiped out by the storm. Didn't that used to be her job? Still, she is probably out of practice if she hasn't done it since leaving Equestria.
Its funny how Silver describes going over the Zilwaukee Bridge like it was her first time. I thought she had crossed it once before? I would have liked to see these ships. They seem like something not to be missed when coming into port.
Only in North-America, with some small differences depending of the country.
Made me think about how it could be fun to have her discover other cultures. Just the idea that there is more then one human culture seem to elude her for the moment.
I do wonder if Silver still has Meghan's bra in her bags.
It might be an interesting Equestrian way of telling ponies what someone else is like, rather than a photograph you give them something with their sent so they're recognise them in future... and in this case so they know her cup size.
7550711 Trip to Canada? Just different enough to really stand out, different money, French being all over, the metric system...
7550885 French all over?
Yeah rigth... Maybe in Quebec, but for the ROC, not so much...
Still, tsuch a trip would indeed show enough difference for a mild cultural shock.
7550934 yeah, the names are used pretty much interchangeably.
7550392 She's also part of a weather team in Equestria. She was running this storm solo!
7550934 Yep, it's a historical oddity that America and England used English measurements, and that after America's revolution we kept using that English system, while England itself had a change of management and converted to the Imperial system. What do?? We can't call it the English system any more! Much shenanigans!
If you feel that wristbands on pony forelegs are going to be too hard to see/check, you could always invest in some clip-on ear tags.
It is with some regret that I confess, there are not enough good things that I can say about this story.
Now that is a very nice vessel.
I got to go on board the viking ship when they stopped in Green Bay. I would've gone on the Spanish galleon too, but the line was just insane.
7550187
And that's nothing compared to the mess when the Hilbert bus arrives.
7552651
But… humans visiting Equestria do need to bring "science batteries" with them. They're called Double As. At least, I assume they do. Equestrian technology is kind of a mixed bag.
7552651
Yes and no.
They could need batteries that could qualify as science batteries: eletrical batteries. While said batteries could be reproduced in Equesria, or even a grid, really, an author could choose to make eletricity not used by ponies.
The fact that there isn't "enough magic" (whatever magic is) to make "spell casting" (in the broadest possible sense) possible on earth don't mean that science is fucked up in Equestria nor that pemanent(s) portal(s) would leak enough magic so that in time, earth would be a "magical" place too.
7552663
I apologise, I didn't explain properly, I was referring to the grammar of,
a dull olive paint what?
job?
scheme?
pattern?
Sorry.
7552725
I see, good to know. :3
7543089
Google street view makes stalkers of us all, we're probably on a list somewhere.
Apparently it's the red one.
7552735
A-10 used 30mm DPU shells! It's Super Effective!
AGM-65 mavericks are its standard air to ground payload, and they have a MUCH longer range than the BIG GUN, allowing attacks from a safer distance against A-A guarded targets; Sidewinders are carried for air-to-air self defense; Hydra-70 rocket pods likewise have a longer range with multiple fusing and warhead options; Cluster bombs are much better for wide area disruption such as cratering a runway; Laser guided bombs are optional, allowing for point target disruption of bunkers and hardened defenses; and for non-munitions payload, an ALQ-131 ECM pod is usually carried under one wing. :D
7552712
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/35/Ruppelsvulture.jpg
That's a Rueppel's Vulture, confirmed altitude 37000 feet. Maybe it can go higher, but that was the altitude where one collided with a commercial jet over Ivory Coast in 1973. Do pegasi have air sacks behind their lungs as well? Bird respiration is incredibly efficient (and kind of weird as well).
You make me do so much research on topics I wouldn't think of by myself. I approve.
7552855
It's the one next to the red one; the kind of off-white/brown one.
I think I said it was the red one last time, and I don't know why I said that. I can't imagine that the image somehow got mirrored on my computer, so I think that was just a moment of stupidity on my part.
IIRC from my college days it was Cretan Linear A & to that day nobody could read it.
As to "why don't Pegasuses already have camelbacks?'. IDK, people can just be stupid sometimes. Humans domesticated dogs 20-25 thousand years ago but it took Isaac Newton to invent doggy doors (read that somewhere IIRC). People have been using ballast as long as they've had ships but they didn't use water tanks as ballast until the 19th century (Mark Twain Innocents Abroad). I daresay Ponies can be just as slow to invent things that are blindingly obvious in retrospect.
7553031
I think you're talking about Linear A, from the Minoan civilization. The Mycaeneans used a variant known as Linear B, which was deciphered as a recognizable ancestor of Ancient Greek, but no one has managed to make sense of Minoan. No winged horses associated with the Minoans, though. That's minotaur country. Makes it hard to make linguistic jokes about minotars when we have no idea what Minoan sounded like. I defaulted to a blend of Coptic and classic Greek...
7552993
On drinking surface-water, from rivers, streams, lakes...
I've done some camping in the past, and my first thought was giardia. Wherever you find animals like muskrat or beaver, there's a chance of it. That probably explains the popularity of portable water filters and water-disinfection chemicals at camping supply stores. I did a little reading after I'd posted that, and found that horses don't generally suffer much when they pick up a giardia infection. They just have a little diarrhea and then get over it.
7553031
I know of one story with a premise like that, though it's sadly pretty short:
https://www.fimfiction.net/story/63740/riverdream-at-sunset-a-manuscript
Bird lungs are very efficient compared to mammals rather than the bags we have bird lungs are more like tubes. When you breath in and out must of the air in your lungs doesn't actually move that much so much of the air in your lung has less oxygen than outside but air travels all the way around a birds lung and out the other end so the air in their lungs contains more oxygen for them to absorbed. Its one of the adaptions that let them function at higher altitudes.
It certainly wouldn't be impossible for Pegasus to work that way but if the other tribes did them it would raise the question of whether the tree tribes are even really the same species, if they're effectively entirely different inside their skins and only look the same. The fact they can interbreed would be even stranger. Still there are species that are even more different at different points in their life cycles or are so extremely sexually dimorphic that you've never guess they were the same species.
7553031
I was trying to think of the Tree Of Myths and Hybrids, where the Sirens were sent back 1:1 in time at least by Starswirl, until canon states I would suggest several thousand years ago, or even he threw them further back with teh spells energy as the less travelers, the less their power. From that point, given their already age, psychology, powers etc, they decide to create followers of monsters to their own design. Or rather Aria mentions it sarcastically, Adagio thinks its her best idea, and Sonata gets used the first few dozen times or so as th experimental subject because she finds out its so enjoyable. To immortals with a power kick on making others do what they want.
Start off in the oceans, get the sea myths, then move onto land, Harpies from Eagles, Sphinx from Lions, Griffons the hybrid, etc?
Maybe call it Adagio sleeps around?
7552663 Good point, but I was thinking about the efficiency of it for pegasi. They would have to bleed all the kinetic energy and go into a hover to get water from a saddle bag. I think a sizeable proportion would not trade off the aerodynamics of the extra drag of saddlebags. They would have to bleed off all their potential energy and kinetic to go have a drink at a river.
For the grounded ponies, The camelbag would be convenience, since bottles could be had without too much problem. For the pegasi though, it would be a omg I can not live without it item.
7552680
Oh.
Oh.
I got it. I'll find that and fix it. (I think I was originally going to say 'a mottled green paint job,' then changed my mind.)
7552891
IIRC, Canada Geese can hit 30k as well, and I think a few other birds have been observed at nearly that altitude.
I don't know if pegasus lungs are substantially different than regular pony lungs, although that would be an interesting thing to explore in a story.
I've done a lot of research on stuff I never thought I would as well. It's kind of funny how that happens.
7552993
And then we have the american ethnocentrism, who said it has to be about United States? ( , just joking, don't take that seriously).
No, really, I wouldn't write something like that without doing a proper research, but still, that wouldn't be the main focus: I always had an idea about Twilight using a spell that transport her to the Earth but in random spots and for a relative brief amount of time, so she had to try to understand our world by those short random glances.
Like, a lot of times she would just appear in the middle of the ocean (Being our world mostly water :P) other times in places with human intervention but without actual people (like roads and so) and then in some actual populate places, including a small town under the Polisario Front control in the West Sahara, where she would've seen as a sign of god blessings to their cause.
After all, despite that we have a presence and effect in the whole world, the number of places in which humans actually live is a pretty small percentage of the surface of the entire planet.
It's a project too big for me to write now but that doesn't mean that I can't keep thinking about it.
Also, did you see the last episode "Fault on our Cutie Marks? That scene with Gabby sailing in a wooden ship? As soon I saw it I thought that that combination of a wooden ship with a plastic life jacket (The orange floating jacket, I can’t find the english word for it) shows perfectly the mixed level of technology of Equestria and also that matched totally Silver description of equestrian boats.
7553200
Well I believe I did say super adorable. Just regular adorable isn't enough.
7553599 You said "everything but super adorable". I do beleive it mean that in simply cannot be "super adorable", it can be anything else, but not that.
7553508 They have been kissing like that (in the lips) for a while now, even after her talk with Aric. They in fact never said else that they would start having a monogamic relationship. Neither with Aric nor with Meghan they talked about that, though it's obvious that, at least for now, Silver don't want to go more than just kissing with her.
I suppose Silver was lucky that their group of friends was open-minded enough to at least understand ponies costumes about relationship and affect. Though se could have been luckiest. In my "expanded" circle of friends and acquaintances, most people have different levels of serious (and not serious) open relationships, that surely would have fit much better with her.
7552712
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f5/GAU-8_meets_VW_Type_1.jpg
it's also so big that the front landing gear can't be conventionally mounted, it's mounted on the side. When you take the gun out, you have to jack up the tail so the plane doesn't tip over. Recoil is 10,000 lbf and is larger than the output of one of the engines. When it was initially built, the fumes would cause the engines to die and pilots often smell like gunpowder after firing.
static2.businessinsider.com/image/5527efcc6bb3f7374a28a779-776-388/warthog-aircraft-firing-gunjpg.jpg The gun is just ridiculous. It's also super durable. It's been known to fly without tails, missing parts of wings, and with one engine.
We never refer to it as standard as pretty much no one wants it to be the standard. We typically refer to it as imperial in more formal settings and u.s or english informally.
7552725
Well, I did a little nosing around on the web, and it seems that most planes will have two radios, and will use #2 to either continously monitor the GA frequency, or the emergency "Guard" channel on 121.5MHz.
Now, as to whether having two radios is mandatory, or just a Really Good Idea, I couldn't say.
Yep, it's inherent to the way FM radio works.
In an AM system, if you have two transmitters on the same frequency trying to transmit at the same time, the signals' amplitudes simply add on top of each other when they hit the receiving antenna, and the combined signal will be demodulated. Depending on the relative strength of the two signals when they arrive, you might be able to hear one somewhat clearly while the other is garbled or in the background, or you might just hear a garbled mishmash of both -- but the important thing is that you will hear both signals, so you will at least know that both sources tried to send at the same time and can ask them to repeat if needed.
With FM, unless both incoming signals are nearly equal in strength, the weaker signal is rejected in the receiver stage, and only the stronger signal will be passed through to the demodulator. (If you do have signals of near-equal strength, then you'll get an effect called "picket fencing" as the demodulator keeps flipping from one signal to the other due to an inability to firmly "lock" on to either one.) This is one of the reasons why things like cell phones and WiFi can service dozens, or even hundreds, of users in a given area even though everyone is using the same dozen-or-so channels within the same frequency band; since FM inherently discriminates in favor of the strongest signal arriving at the receiver, the only way they can get congested to the point of unusability is if there are so many transmitters trying to transmit all at once that nobody can find an open channel, and if all of those transmitters just happen to have all of their signals arriving at the receiver with near-equal signal strengths.
Well... "semi-national", maybe. They're concentrated mostly in the midwest and northeast. We have some here in Texas, but they're mostly confined to the Dallas/Ft.Worth and Houston metroplexes, with a scattering of locations in the eastern portion of the state. (Our major grocery retailer here is HEB, which is pretty much a Texas-only chain. And just to make things even more peculiar, HEB does not have any presence in the DFW metroplex, even though it's by far the most dominant grocery-store chain everywhere else in the state... )
Then again, the concept of "national chain" becomes a bit murky with grocery stores, because some chains are actually operated by the same company under different names. Here in Texas, for example, we have a chain called Randalls, which is actually operated by Safeway -- so technically, we have Safeways here, and you can even find Safeway's house-branded products on Randalls' shelves; they're just not called safeway here. Go figure.
7552993
Well, if it makes you happy, I'm still slowly working on the background details and the characters.
I wish I could write as quickly as you could.
7553365
I'd say most of the energy goes into regaining altitude, not speed. To do a quick calculation: Lifting a pony to 3km in 10N/kg gravity costs 30kilojoule per kilogram, which is equivalent to accelerating that pony to sqrt(30,000)m/s = just over Mach 0.5.
(Of course, ponies try to find thermals to do the work. If they're trying to fill up while flying long-distance, it might be important to find a source of water with a good thermal column nearby.)
7550064
I'm really sad that I missed the Bay City Tall Ships festival, but it was the same weekend as Trotcon.
7550094
Well, I suppose that's a good way for it to exist, although it's really cool IRL.
You should come visit!
I have not. I've never even heard of it, until now!
7550124
I'm kind of sad that we don't have more of them. Well, except for on the bottom of the lakes; we've got lots there.
7550125
derpicdn.net/img/2016/5/6/1147877/full.png
It's a snuggle pile.
7550150
I'm surprised they can keep road signs up, to be honest.
7550187
There's every chance that Silver Glow said exactly that.
So in this one story I read, there was a hotel with an infinite number of rooms and an infinite number of guests, and whenever someone new showed up, they'd just shift everyone down one room, and put the new arrival in Room 1 (which works, mathematically). All the guests at the hotel were getting pretty annoyed that they had to keep changing rooms.
It's the best thing to get woken up for.
Speaking of next levels in their relationship . . . . that's an advanced frienship lession.
7550214
I never really think of canal barges having sails, although I suppose a lot of them did. There was even a sail-powered railcar in the Netherlands.
(I hope it's a pun)
7550392
It's also mentioned in one of Simon and Garfunkle's songs, although the song isn't about it specifically.
She's out of practice, and she also had a pretty long flight in the morning. Plus, Earth's weather patterns are bigger and stronger than Equestria's.
7550422
I don't think she has; when she went up north with Aric, they went along the west side of the state. I was planning for him to come back along I-75, but then changed it to have them take the Badger.
Bay City's actually not the best port to see them in; I took some liberties with the decription, and they don't actually come up the Sagniaw River under sail.
Traverse City's really good, because they run almost the whole length of the Saginaw Bay under sail.
7550711
She is under the impression that humans are a little more homogenized than we really are. Unfortunately, she's not really going to get much of a chance to visit other countries, besides Canada; on the other hand, a few of my readers are considering writing similar stories set in different countries.
7550885
Plus they've got poutine, and spell a lot of English words differnetly.
7550930
Almost everywhere I've been in Canada recently has bilingual (English/French) everywhere. I've never heard anyone speaking French in Canada, though. That may be less common in less-touristy places, though.