June 12
We got off to a late start, 'cause it was foggy outside. I had to wake Aric up so that I could get out and pee, and it was just barely light out and the fog was so thick I couldn't see the other end of our campsite.
He said he had to pee, too, and he put on his pants even though it was so foggy that nobody could have seen him if he hadn't, but he didn't put on shoes so he had to sit on the tailgate and brush the dirt off his feet when he got back to Winston.
Fog always feels weird, 'cause it's being in a cloud when your hooves are on the ground, and there hadn't been many fogs since I'd been on Earth, so I'd kind of lost familiarity with them. Since it was here, though, it was good practice to move it around, so I trotted around our campsite and managed to break off a big chunk of it and sort of compact it down into a little angry cloud that promptly rained out on the ground until it turned back into a little fogcloud.
Aric thought that was really amazing, but I hadn't accomplished anything: the rest of the fog just came back in, and in five minutes you couldn't even tell what I'd cleared. But he wanted me to do it again, so I did, and then he went over and poked at my little cloud and said that it was a lot colder and wetter than he'd expected it to be. And when he took his hand away, he was surprised at how wet it was, and wiped it off on his pants.
I told him that the ones up high were even colder, then I let my second cloud go and it rained out another wet spot on the ground and went back to being fog.
We got back up inside Winston, and he took off his pants and we both watched out the back, and we took our time with me on top for a while and then he was and he said that he'd never noticed before how he could tell by my ears whether I was paying attention to him or not, and he tried to balance himself on one hand and turn my ears back to him when I heard something crunching through the trees.
Then both of us stopped because there was a fat raccoon that came out of the fog and he sniffed around and got up on the picnic table and started to smell the beer bottles but he knocked them over and noise scared him enough that he bolted off into the fog even before Aric started laughing at him.
Even after we were done, we stayed curled up under the blankets until the fog started to thin a little bit, then Aric started a fire again and said that today we'd be eating camp food for breakfast, so while he was getting that ready, I sat at the picnic table and wrote in my journal which he said was really funny.
He had little packets of oatmeal, which had maple syrup and brown sugar in it and it was really good, and once I'd licked my cup clean (and he'd wiped some stray oatmeal off my muzzle) he refilled my cup with coffee crystals. It still tasted kind of bitter, but somehow it tasted better than it had at his house.
He said that everything tastes better when you're camping.
We sat around until the fire died down, and I played a little bit more with the thinning fog, then he put out the fire and I packed up the beer bottles and we got in Winston and went back on the road.
We didn't go too far to our first stop, which was the next park. It was called Sleeping Bear Dunes, and it was a really big sand dune. There was an observation balcony at the top, where we could look over the lake, and he said that when he was in Boy Scouts, they had gone there and all the younger kids had run down the dune to the water without realizing that it was easy to go down but not so easy to get back up. He had stayed at the top with the rest of the leaders, like a smart person.
I wanted to go down, and I didn't have to worry about how hard it was to trot in loose sand, so I glided off the balcony and all the way down to the bottom, then circled out over the lake to lose some of my momentum, and also to look around in the water. It was pretty clear and I could see some big fish swimming around but there weren't any people fishing who might want to know.
I dipped my hooves in the lake, and then made a couple of climbing circles until I was as high as the balcony, and took a good look around the lake. It was just like the ocean—even from my height, I couldn't see anything but water off in the distance (it was still kind of hazy, though, so maybe I could have seen the other side if it was clear).
There were more people crowding on the balcony, so when I was nearly back, Aric left his spot and started walking along the path and I landed next to him and nuzzled his hip.
We tried to keep along the lake as we kept going northeast, but it was pretty challenging, 'cause there were still a lot of roads that didn't go through, so Aric had to backtrack a couple of times, but that was all right. Some of the roads just had a barrier right at the very end to keep you from driving into the lake, and we'd stop there and get out and walk down the beach and look at the water. He said that he hoped we'd see a ship (and I did, too) but there didn't seem to be any. He said it was because ships stayed further out here.
Back in the old days, though, he said that the Great Lakes were very dangerous for ships, because they would stay close to shore so they could navigate, and if a storm came, their only hope for safety was to make a port—he said that they couldn't outrun a storm like they could at sea, because the land was too close, and he told me that the Great Lakes were littered with shipwrecks, and there was a shipwreck museum we could go to.
We stopped for lunch in Leland at a restaurant called The Village Cheese Shanty, because he said with a name like that it would be a crime not to stop there. They had really good sandwiches and he also bought some cheese to take with us. He said that once we got further north we'd have to have our own food with us, and that before we crossed the bridge he was going to fill the cooler he had in the back.
Once we were done eating, we walked around the harbor and looked at the boats there. There weren't that many because the harbor was pretty small and the river through town had a dam in it, so boats couldn't go very far upstream.
Aric also stopped to put more fuel in Winston, because he said that there wasn't going to be anyplace to stop as far as he could remember, and we also got some more beer so that we'd have it for tonight. Then we drove up the peninsula until M-22 ended and we had to get on another road called M-201 which he said went all the way to the tip of the Leelanau peninsula.
It was kind of weird driving along the road because there wasn't any traffic going the other way. Aric said that was because we were still early in the vacation season, and that meant that there probably wasn't going to be anybody at the park.
But he said it still felt kind of weird.
We got to the park and he drove around until he found a good campsite that was near the beach. Compared to the last two, it was pretty deserted—there were a couple of Arveys parked near the entrance but that was all.
Right down by the beach, there was a sign that pointed towards some islands out in the lake, and we could actually see one of them off in the distance. Aric said it was Beaver Island, and that the others were too low to see. He was pretty sure that there was a lighthouse on South Fox Island, and he said that maybe if we came here after dark, we'd be able to see its light.
Since we had some time before dark, I asked if he minded if I went flying, and he said he didn't mind at all, so we walked back to Winston and I put on my flight gear while he used his telephone to find out what I needed to set the radio to in order to talk to the nearby airport.
It took them a little while to give me clearance to fly, because they couldn't figure out what airport I was departing from and they had a very hard time understanding that I wasn't leaving from an airport at all but from the state park, and then a different person asked me what kind of aircraft I was and I said that I was an ornithopter and he asked if that was a kind of drone.
I finally had to tell them what my flight rules were before they decided that it was okay, and I was getting pretty frustrated by the time I was done, but it was important to make sure that everyone knew what kind of airspace I needed to be safe.
I went a little bit north over the lake, and it didn't take me too long before I was high enough to see the other islands that couldn't be seen from the ground. If I'd been by myself, I think it would have been fun to fly to them, but it would be rude to Aric to leave him behind for hours.
We were at the very end of a long peninsula that made a big bay, which was partially split in two by another short, thin peninsula. There were lots of boats in it, most of them down towards the bottom of the bay.
There were also some boats out in the lake, but not as many. I could see a really big boat off in the distance that must have been one of the ships that Aric was hoping we'd see. From where it was, though, I didn't think he'd be able to see it from the land, and it didn't look like it was going to get close enough unless it turned and went into the bay.
I also saw an orange and white helicopter off in the distance, and as I flew around it started to get closer, which made me a bit nervous. It seemed to be heading in my direction, and I didn't want to be too close to it, so once it was a couple of miles away, I dived down towards the water to get out of its way. It shouldn't have been there, unless the airplane directors misunderstood where I was flying, or I hadn't understood their directions.
I'd gotten my wings pretty well-stretched anyway, so I flew low over the water until I was back at the lighthouse, and then landed on the grass next to it and walked back to our camp. On the way back, I called the airplane directors and told them that I had landed and I thought about saying something about the helicopter but I didn't.
I could still hear it out there, though, flying around.
When I got back to the campsite, we had dinner, which was some of the cheese he'd bought from the Village Cheese Shanty and crackers that were called Triscuits. He also had a bag of sunflower seeds that he said he'd bought just for me.
We went down to the beach right by our campsite after we were done eating, and he had to pick his path pretty carefully because the ground was wet. I just happily splashed through the water, but I had to be really careful ‘cause of all the loose rocks that could make me slip and hurt a leg.
At the very edge of the water there were a lot of flat rocks that were all piled on top of each other, and Aric told me that the wave action stacked the rocks, and I thought that was really neat . . . until he started laughing and I realized that he was lying. But I did wonder why someone would have done that, and he said that he didn’t know.
We were on the wrong side of the peninsula to see the sunset, which was too bad.
Before it was all the way dark, we made our way back to more solid ground. I flew, while he took a careful route again, and then we sat on a bench that overlooked the water and watched the stars start to appear overhead, first one or two and then hundreds and then thousands and thousands of them, dotting the whole sky and it was the most I’d seen since I left Equestria.