June 13
It was chilly and overcast when I woke up, and I could feel the oncoming rain in the air. Aric was cuddled against me, and since he was naked and coatless he was probably pretty cold, so I stretched my wing out over him to help keep him warm.
One thing that Winston wasn't very good at was keeping the wind at bay, and even though there wasn't all that much, I could feel little gusts blowing through the edges of the tailgate and the rusty holes in the sides.
He shifted around in his sleep and tucked his head into my neck and I kissed him on the forehead and closed my eyes again and slept a bit longer, until I felt him shift around and try to pull me tighter against him, which didn't really work with my wing stretched out. And I woke him up when I tucked it back in, even though I didn't mean to.
It was a little bit strange to try and stay all the way under the covers, and he kept having to pull them up when I got too enthusiastic, but we made it work and afterwards he said it was good practice for when we were further up north, where it would be even colder even though it was almost summer.
He said that humans had had to adapt to cold climates and could have sex while mostly dressed. He said that was how humans has survived the last ice age.
I told him that I thought it made more sense to have a nice coat all the time, and get furrier in the winter to keep off the cold.
Aric got dressed while still under the covers and then opened the tailgate to let us out, then after he'd watered a tree he started to build a fire so that we could have breakfast, which was the same oatmeal and coffee as yesterday.
After he was satisfied that the fire was out, we got in the cab and continued our trip, which started with some backtracking, since we were as far north as we could get on this peninsula. Once we got to Northport, though, he took a different route that followed along the shore of the bay.
We drove through Traverse City, which he said was an important city up north, and was famous for its cherries. It was the biggest city we'd gone through since Holland, and it was kind of weird to be in that much traffic all of a sudden when there had been barely any before.
He stopped at the bottom of the bay, and we got out of Winston and he took me to a little park that had a miniature train that we could ride on. The man selling the tickets for it seemed confused that I wanted to ride on the train, too, but Aric convinced him that it was okay, and we got seats right in the front.
It was really fun to ride, and it smelled a lot nicer than the big trains that I'd been on, plus it had a proper steam whistle instead of an annoying horn. When I closed my eyes, it was just like riding a train back home, and I was glad that he'd thought to stop so that we could ride on it.
The train just went in a big loop, so when the trip was over, we were back where we'd started, so we walked back to Winston and continued on our journey.
Once we'd gone around the base of the bay and back up the other side, I saw a skyscratcher in the distance and asked Aric what it was. He said that it was the Turtle Creek Casino, which was a place where you could play card games and win or lose money.
I asked if we could go there, and he sighed and then said that if I just took my money and threw it on a fire it would at least keep me warm, but then he turned around in a parking lot and made me promise no matter what to not spend more than twenty dollars.
The inside was full of bright light and noises and it was kind of overwhelming, and I didn't know how any of the games worked. I had traded some money for plastic tokens that were used in the casino, and Aric said that the best way to spend it all was to try each game once and then move on.
So first I tried blackjack, and I lost, and then I tried craps and I lost that too, and then I tried a slot machine and it took my token and didn't give me anything. I went to another table and played a game of Texas hold-em, and I had to bet so many times that I was down to only one token.
He said that I should keep that as a souvenir, but I thought I might as well lose it on another game, so I went over to a roulette table, and Aric started to explain the rules to me, but before he could they called for bets, and I put the token down on my birthday.
The man spun the wheel and the little ball landed on my number and I got a big pile of tokens and I asked Aric what I should do now, and he told me to never play roulette again.
The man who spun the wheel was kind of sad to see me leave (Aric said that they were hoping I'd bet again and lose all the money I'd just won), and we went and changed all my tokens back into money except for the one I'd bet on the table because I thought he was right about keeping it. Maybe I could have a hole drilled in it and keep it as a necklace.
When we were out in the parking lot, Aric told me about the odds on the wheel, and how bad a single number bet was, and it made a lot of sense, even though he was wrong about the odds of winning—they were worse than he thought. But I didn't care; I'd come out of the casino with more money than I went in with, and from what he said that was a rarity.
We stopped for lunch at a restaurant called Torch Lake Cafe, and I had a cheese quesadilla and sweet potato wedges. Aric had a BLT, which is bacon lettuce and tomato, and he let me have a bite of his sandwich.
A little further north, he turned off into another park which was called Fisherman's Island State Park, and drove all the way to the very end of the road there and then parked Winston and we went for a walk on the beach.
There was a little piece of land he said was called Fisherman's Island, and depending on what the water level was, it was either an island or not.
The water was deep enough that it was an island, but only barely. He took off his shoes and rolled up the bottom of his pants, while I just splashed through the shallows, and we crossed onto the island. There was a lot of land back home that was underwater or not depending on the tides, but he said that on the Great Lakes there wasn't enough tide to make a difference, it was a matter of rainfall and summer temperatures and ice cover in the wintertime, and he told me that the lake levels were up because a couple winters back there had been almost complete ice coverage which made the water not evaporate.
I told him I was familiar with climate science.
Even if I hadn't been, it was obvious that this land had been above water recently, because there were bushes growing out of the shallow water, and they didn't look like they were too happy about being submerged. I suppose Aquamarine would have known better.
When we were at the very end of the island, Aric asked if I wanted to be bad, and I asked him what he meant, and he said that he'd always wanted to have sex outside in broad daylight somewhere and this was the perfect place to do it because there probably wasn't anybody else for miles around. Then he laughed when I looked up right after he said that, and said I must be the only pegasus in a hundred miles or more—he didn't think that Michigan was a destination for most ponies, and he was probably right, although I thought that they didn't know what they were missing.
We went back into the bushes a little bit and found a nice clear spot and even though it was his idea he was a bit reluctant to take off all his clothes, until I told him that if he really wanted to do it he had to do it all the way.
Afterwards, we lay on our backs and looked up at the clouds for a while and said what they looked like, and I bet him that he wouldn't stay naked until we'd gotten back to the mainland.
He did, but he cheated and led me around the other side of the island, and he had me fly ahead and make sure that there wasn't anyone on the beach.
I suppose that still counted, though.
I don't think he'd planned to spend so much time at Fisherman's Island. It was nearly dinnertime when we got back to Winston, and we didn't come across anyplace to eat until we got to Charlevoix. We stopped at Subway for food, which was like Jimmy John's, but not as good.
He told me when we were back in the truck that he'd planned to stay at Wilderness State Park for the night, but now he wasn't sure that we'd make it there unless we skipped the Tunnel of Trees and there was no sense in going up north without visiting that.
I said that I was sorry I'd wanted to stop at the casino, and he told me that I shouldn't be sorry; he'd never seen anyone win at roulette on a single-number bet or walk out with more than they went in with and that was totally worth it. He told me as long as I didn't go into another, I would have beat the system, and that was something to be proud of.
We did make it to the tunnel of trees while it was still light out, and I could see why it had been named that. The road went through trees that completely overhung it sometimes, and other times it was open and you could see Lake Michigan off to the left, and once the sun started to get low and paint the sky in reds and oranges it was even more beautiful and I could see why it was a place that we just had to visit.
He stopped at the very south end of Wilderness State Park so that we could watch the sunset, and then when we got back in Winston he apologized for having to use his telephone map to find the campground, but said that it was late and he didn't want to spend half the night blundering around in the dark. And even though I'd thought we were pretty close, since we'd already crossed into the park, it was quite a while before we got to the campground.
Like the Leelanau State Park, it was practically deserted, and we had our pick of spots. He found one that was pretty close to the lake, close enough that I could hear the waves crashing on the beach, and once Winston was settled for the night we went down to the water and he pointed out all the different lights in the lake. One of them was a freighter, and as we watched it slowly plodded its way east. There were also some red lights that he said were navigation buoys, and off in the distance a long string of light which he said were the Mackinac Bridge which we'd be driving over tomorrow.