Stretch run...

Stretch run…

We are outstanding at getting out of the tent.  We can feed the dogs (priority #1), roll everything up and stack it in the Forester (what a car!), break down the tent, brush out teeth, and load up in about a half an hour.  Depending where we are, we can be at breakfast a short time later.

As much as we were excited about getting to the house, we tried to be cool.  Get a good breakfast, look at the route (straight shot today, who are we kidding?!?!?!) and get moving.  I could barely contain my excitement. I’m not sure, but Carol looked a little giddy herself.

The contractor had been trying to nail down our arrival, first to the day and now to the hour.  We told them we would shoot for 1PM.  When I asked why they needed to know, we found out that there would be a ribbon cutting ceremony!  How cool is that?  The speedometer crept up with me keeping it at about 10% above the speed limit as we moved toward our final destination.  Highway 2 takes you through lots of little towns an amazing amount of forest land, both pine and hardwood.  The gold, orange, and reds of the changing trees nestled among the evergreens brought back clear memories of living in the Midwest.  The old buildings made of limestone blocks surrounding city squares were in some strange way comforting.  I have to admit that the further east I travelled the level of ease I felt was surprising.  As much as Alaska had been home for thirty-seven years, the long views, the lakes, the trees were like seeing an old friend after a long hiatus. 

We entered Ishpeming, the first of the towns nearly connected to Marquette and though I wanted to continue speed through town, I dialed it back.  I could just hear the officer now, “So are you making good time now?” as I sat on the side of the road awaiting my speeding ticket.  Next was Negaunee, the home of our contractor, Michael’s Homes.  They are located across from a beautiful small lake that was surrounded by flaming maple trees.  Then we entered Marquette.  The roll into town affords an amazing view of the community itself set in front of the majesty of Lake Superior.  It is breathtaking… it is also just past the Best Buy store, but before the Lowes and the Target.  Hard on the right was WallMart, then Starbucks… but there was no stopping.  We hurried through town, past the new hospital and downtown proper.  I did actually begin speeding as we heading toward the M-28 intersection and the last ten miles.

We took a hard left and passed the University golf course, then the Ojibway Casino: a mile and a half to go.  Finally, we zoomed past the scenic turn-out where the speed limit increases to 65 with a mile to go.  Our driveway is a tough one to spot and I took it a little hot.  As we rolled down the newly placed gravel I saw… the green portapotty that would reside in the front yard for another week.  But past it was our new home: dark stained twelve inch logs with a forty foot front porch, beautiful windows, a few workers and kids running around, all placed upon a vast stretch of sugar sand.  It was hot and sunny and wonderful.

The ribbon cutting was captured by the contractor’s wife and will appear in the book that they will present us of the process.  It was also videoed on my phone.  We walked to the door and walked into what we would call our ‘wooden castle’.  The tour revealed a breathtaking house: a place we could call home.  This even though the only furniture we had were two blow-up mattresses that we had been sleeping on for nearly a month.  The dogs sniffed, we wandered.

Eventually we were left alone.  We took the ninety-second walk down to the lake.  The blue of the cold, deep lake was eclipsed only by the blue of the endless sky above it.  Saying hi to a small group of the few people on the miles long sand and remarking that I could not imagine a more beautiful first day in town, it elicited the question of where we were coming from.  Much to our surprise, the first family we met had only recently moved here from Alaska as well.  The next day, same beach, I met a woman who had gone to the same church I had in the 60s and 70s back in the Detroit area.  What the heck?!?!

I’d have ten days in Marquette before I had to return to Alaska to complete my term on the Assembly.  We would have to begin filling the house with furniture and hopefully collect our ‘pods’ before I left.  But the sun set in a blaze of orange over the Gitchi-Gumee.  Hours later we would collapse on our blow-mattresses, listening to water caress the sand, putting us to sleep for the first night in our home.

Nearing home

Nearing “home”…

As much as my youngest would like it to be called ‘Ra-jee-na’ it is called ‘Re-jie-na’ and it is one of the most beautiful towns on the plains of Canada.  Royally inspired, it has great old architecture and a bridge that would be at home in one of the most sophisticated and historic cities of Europe.  The stately homes give respite to wide-open prairies where conversations swings from, “Is that a hawk or a raven?” to “Can we start looking for a bathroom?”  Unlike the magnificent Yukon, central Canada rarely varies, seldom changes, and to my untrained eye, never surprises.

To be honest, we were getting ready to be done with the travels and were looking to get on with the relocation.  We brightened when we hit border at International Falls, Minnesota, USA, which is one of the places that they generally mentioned as the coldest in the country: along with Marquette.  Northern Minnesota increased my comfort level.  In fact, the further east I went, the more relaxed I became.  It was probably a combination of the pressure cooker the Sitka Assembly presented to me the last few months and just that sired song of the Great Lakes.  I was moving away from one and toward the other.

The lake country presented a nice combination of hardwood trees and pines and added the rolling hills of iron country.  We hit a tipping point of where we could actually drive right through and wake up in Marquette.  But that would have been a long-tough day and I was actually planning on calling into an Assembly meeting that night, starting at 9pm local time.  We decided, as we passed a Pure Michigan sign at the border to spend one more night in the tent before getting to our new home.  Iron Mountain, Michigan was not only a few hours drive from Marquette, but it also has a campground in the middle of town with full services for $10!  The only catch was that there was a weather front moving in and high winds were expected.  We staked the tent down with special care.

Starting a meeting at 9 O’clock is  challenging and knowing that there is a good chance that it will run four hours makes it even tougher.  I settled into the front seat of the Subaru as Carol settled into her sleeping bag in the tent.  The wind soon started to blow and then howl.  Mocha grew nervous inside and Carol brought her out and put her in the front seat next to me.  She was no more inspired by the conversation about the city self-funding its debt than I was.  Getting out of the car to stretch my legs, I was immediately chastised by the Mayor, because apparently the wind was raising havoc with the speaker system by in Sitka.  I was not particularly good at figuring out the mute and unmute buttons.  Eventually I had to move the car right next to the tent to block it from the gale.  After a lengthy and needlessly repetitive meeting, I moved into the tent to anchor the other half and try to get some sleep before the next day.

It was a fitful night and the walls of the tent were battered by storm.  We found large branches around the tent that had somehow managed to miss us as they were torn from the trees.  Over and over I awoke to competing questions: “What the heck were we doing?” and “What the heck is the house going to be like?”

Now it’s just putting in the miles…

Dawson Creek, Yukon Territory has some redeeming characteristics.  There are some museums, both art, historic, and geologic.  It seems to retain a small-town character.  Mostly, it has some of the great views that I described of the northern part of the Yukon.  Since we got to drive through it twice, once without keys to the car top carrier and once with, we learned a little bit more about it.  What sneaks onto the scene in Dawson Creek is the petroleum industry.  It is perched on the edge of the vast shale and sand oil fields of Canada and it appears that its economy is also on the periphery of it as well.

Not so Fort Nelson.  I could not drive through it fast enough once we were tempted to camp there.  Fort Nelson is BIG TRUCK land where testosterone and gas fumes feed the populace.  Large loud pick-ups were everywhere and most sported crude copies of male anatomy on their tow hitches if they were not actually towing four-wheelers or motorcycles.  A Ford F-150 would be considered an economy car in Fort Nelson.  There were refineries, oil trucks, logging trucks, a casino with a campground, (considered and immediately rejected) and pretty much everything that we did not see in the northern part of the province.  Unfortunately, after another long day of driving, there did not appear to be any campgrounds nearby to the south, so we had to reluctantly return to find another pet friendly hotel.  We departed quickly after a good breakfast and in short order entered the plains toward Edmonton.

There is little to break up the view as you enter the plains.  “Is that a hawk or a vulture?” was pretty much the conversation starters that we saw.  There were quite a few trains, lots of signs for golf courses, on the very green landscape.  The corn and wheat fields had been harvested so there were many Canadian geese gleaning those fields.  Many of hours of sameness. We headed to a campground we had visited some twenty years before. 

The Vermillion campground had always held a special place in my memory: a kind of oasis in the plains.  It was pretty OK.  Off the highway and through a town, its most remarkable component was another well-dressed Canadian officer of the law; I’ll call him Ranger Richard (Ree-Shard) complete with a fast car, bubble gum machine red and blue lights, and a 70s porn mustache.  He sat in the check in office and observed our entrance to the park without incident.  But the 80+ year old lady, sporting the ‘RevWho’ license plates, with the cat on a leash in the rear windown went the wrong way on a road in the nearly empty campground he appeared behind her with lights flashing!  Upon setting her straight, he spun gravels chasing another vehicle out of the campground for another serious offense.

The 80+ year old woman was in fact, the Rev who her plate referred to.  She was moving cross country with her cat and her pup-tent.  Mocha, the chocolate lab, eyed the cat with more than curiosity.  Later she would insist I take her out in the middle of the night to investigate something, a camping cat perhaps?  Though cold we wandered around to try to get her to calm down.  Upon switching off my flashlight, I was struck by a sky lit by as many stars as I have seen in decades.  What the Great Plains lack by day, their 180 degree view of the night sky more than makes up for it.  A skyway if you will, of white split the darkness, the Milky Way, flanked by constellations as fully formed as I’d ever seen.  There were so many stars that it was difficult to pick out the groupings as I had learned them.  This is another reason that it was time move.  I am literally thrilled by the night sky and though the northern lights occasionally would show up in Sitka, there were not enough nights where I could be entertained by the stars.  Surprisingly, Sitka, on an island on the edge of the Pacific Ocean has a good portion of ambient light that can ruin a good heavenly gaze.  But here at the Vermillion campground, it was on display at the highest level.  Getting chilled, I let Mocha gaze off into the dark one last time before dragging her back into the tent.  I slept in, not even hearing Carol get up with the dogs.

Time to move...but what about the dogs?

It's time to move... but what about the dogs?

We are dog people.  Carol is a cat person, too, but due to allergy considerations of some of our beloved friends, once we lost our cat of eighteen years, "Bucky", we never replaced him.  So we have had a string of great dogs that out of necessity, have had to be good at traveling.  Unfortunately, the smallest of our dogs, Maggie, (curly black hair like former Tiger star Magglio Ordonez) is old and diabetic.  How do you travel with a dog whose eating and insulin shot schedule dominate how we plan our day?

The first leg was the real problem as we had to travel by ferry either north or south in order to hook up with a road system to drive to Marquette.  Carol advocated for a northern route to Haines, which was fine with me as we had not taken the Alaska Highway in many years.  It took me a while to figure out that her decision was based on Maggie having the shortest period of time locked in the car on a ferry.  The 'fast ferry' would get us to Juneau in about five hours and the short run up Lynn Canal to Haines would take about four and half.  Both of these were deemed doable for Maggie.

Originally I envisioned shipping our worldly possessions via barge to Haines and off-loading onto a 20 foot UHaul.  We would then put the Subaru on a trailer and make our way to Marquette camping and occasionally hoteling along the way.  It was that, about $5000 all told, or $15,000 to have someone else move us.  Truth be told, neither sounded so great, but for $10,000 savings, I'm in.

We were let in on another option, however:  UPack pods!  For about $3200 per 8X8X8 foot cube was made available for us to pack (UPack, get it?) and then they would ship it to your destination where we could unpack it.  Cool!  Easier drive, a little more cost.  Fair trade.  The catch?  The closest they could ship was Green Bay, WI, about three hours away from Marquette.  We got two pods and filled them to the brim with totes of stuff, our bed, artwork, a couch, bikes and various and sundry other things.  They were to be picked up on August 31.  They needed to be packed by the 24th.  Two blow up beds were substituted for every other piece of furniture in our house.  We would sleep on them for the next month.

Hotels are remarkably pet friendly nowadays.  For example in Juneau we stayed at a place that allowed our dogs, OK we cheated on the 35 pound dog limit, for only $225!  What a deal!  After all we did get to stay there for about 8 hours before we had to line up for our second ferry trip.  You might wonder if we had any particular emotions about getting on the ferry.  I didn't, mostly because our Sitka family and other close friends were there until the last minute when we loaded.  Truth be told, it  had been such an ordeal to get packed, it was a real relief to finally get going.

We exited the ferry at Haines and hit the road north toward Canada.  The scenery as we climbed toward Whitehorse, Yukon Territory was amazing and big, like most of the scenery in Alaska.  We followed a large river almost to the border.  The crossing was not busy and we were approached by a spiffily dressed young man with a great mustache.  Canadian border guards are generally mellow.

This guy was really by the book.  Where are we going?  What are we doing?  Moving? 

"If you are moving all the way to Michigan, where is the rest of your possessions?"  I was a little blindsided and I said something brilliant like, "Huh?"

"Your household goods?  Your furniture?  Your stuff?"

"Oh!  It's all in pods heading to Green Bay."

"I thought you were moving to Marquette?"

"Well, we are, but they wouldn't ship it there... kind of a long story:

I was pretty sure that I was about to get cavity searched, but he just took our passports, brought them back and sent us on our way.  Whew.

It was a fairly long drive to the Tahini Hot Springs campground for our first night of tenting.  It had been a few years since we had set up the world's tallest tent, but we figured it out pretty quickly.  As I went out to find us food for dinner, Carol took the dogs for a walk around the campground, running into the local spectral fox along the outskirts of the area.  She even took a cool photo,

It was a cool, but very nice night to snuggle in our bags and let the dogs get used to being in a tent.  I got up earlier as we had to get Maggie fed then wait an hour for her insulin shot.  As I emerged, I say that Mocha's food bowl was on top of the Subaru and leading up to it over the hood onto the roof were little fox foot prints.  Carol had inadvertently left the dog food on the roof and our feral fox friend had not only eaten all of the food, but had pooped in the bowl, much to Mocha's chagrin.  Apparently, it takes a while for smell o' fox to get washed from the food bowl.

Our next stop was Watson Lake or a little further.  Canada is great for having campgrounds all over the place and quite a few rest areas as well.  That is unless it is time to find a campground or Carol really needs a rest room.  But we found a very nice campground near a lake with loons flying above and calling throughout the night.  Being the Yukon Territory in September, however, we found that the temperature plunged after sunset.  Like into the low 20s.  Maggie climbed into Carol's bag and burrowed all the way down to her feet.  I awoke and walked and fed the dogs, but as we got to taking down the tent, I realized that I could not feel my fingers!  Looking at the weather, we saw that snow was going to be following us for the next few days.  Seemed like a bad idea to continue on south through the Canadian Rockies, so we opted for the plains and Edmonton.  But Canada is really big and we had to traverse more of the Yukon and British Columbia before making it to Alberta and the plains,

I have to say that the northern part of the Yukon is incredibly beautiful as the road winds through mountain ranges with forests covering them as far as the eye can see.  Occasionally I got to see my favorite view: emerging from a high mountain pass and seeing the topography spread out below.  Incredible.  As we headed for Dawson Creek, the origin of the Alaska Highway, we stopped and used the woods to pee and let the dogs exercise.  One time as Carol was emerging from the edge of the trees, a small plane appeared out of nowhere to land on the small clearing we had chosen to take a break,

At another, we stopped where a bunch of horse trailers were parked in the hopes of finding an outhouse,  We did not find one, but Maggie found some horse poop to eat.  As we rushed to get her away from it we swatted it away from her mouth.  Three hours later, after an arduous descent and deciding on driving a few hours past Dawson City, we discovered, also along the side of the road, that we no longer had the keys to the car top carried.  We searched everywhere until we realized that we saw them last when Maggie was eating horse poop, about 150-200 miles back.  We had no choice but to retrace our route.  As the sun was setting, we arrived at the same pull out we had been at six hours before and there along the side of the road were the critical set of keys.  After another 90 miles of driving we found a nice little hotel in Dawson City.  Yes, it was dog friendly.  We were still 2400 miles away from Marquette,

Not so sexy...

Of course there are a couple of things involved in moving that are not so sexy and fun.  First and foremost is selling the home you are in and if you do, what do you do with all of the things that you have accumulated while in that home, in your married life together, and perhaps things you have from growing up.  Don't forget that your kids have accumulated things as well and may not have anywhere to store them.

The selling was pretty easy, once we made the decision to actually build a new home in Marquette.  I woke up in the middle of the night in April in a panic, realizing if we were going to do this, we needed to get going.  Homes don't sell as well in the fall and winter as they do in the spring and summer.  April is already spring.  Panic. 

We have dear friends who sold their house on their own without a realtor, but I just could not see us doing that.  Carol was teaching full time and I was retired from the classroom, but still coaching softball.  Besides being busy, selling a home was not exactly a skill set that we felt we had.  Even though it would cost us 6%, we went ahead with the agency and managed to get the same person who sold us the house thirty years before.

We got the house ready for our meeting with her and since we had done quite a few improvements and additions since we bought it, she was pleased.  Since we had a fire two years earlier, the kitchen was significantly upgraded and modernized.  We also had what few homes have in Sitka: a large, 1/2 acre lot.  In discussing asking price, the realtor suggested nearly 50% more that we ever envisioned getting and in exactly five days from the first meeting we had, we had gotten an offer of 90% of that asking price: insane.  So for us, the realtor, even at the price we paid, was well worth it.

Getting the house 'ready' required an inspection and work to be done... pretty easy.  But to actually reduce all of our stuff to an amount that would fit in our soon to be small, three bedroom duplex (plus a heated, though leaky storage unit.  What do you keep?  What do you toss?  We followed a variation on "If it gives you joy, keep it."  Well, if you really follow that philosophy, it is surprising how little you will keep.  But in our case, it was still surprising how much we kept.

It was certainly motivational to get rid of everything from clothing to artwork to furniture.  Everything had to be looked at critically and had to meet some criteria for keeping and moving.  It turned out that we threw away nearly 3,000 pounds of items collected within our house.  After the second cut, a year later, another 1,000 pounds were thrown away and nearly 6,000 pounds of things were packed into 'cubes' for shipping.  The math tells me that we had 10,000 pounds or five tons of stuff.  That is a little crazy.  I would bet that we were on the low side of stuff that is owned. 

One thing that helped with 'old stuff' was the ability to take a digital photo of it and then chuck it. However, the leather jacket that I bought at a huge sale at the Michigan State Fair grounds in 1976 for $140.  That bad boy is still mint and I could not part with it.  It still fits!  It is double breasted!  It's a beauty!  It is in a tote, waiting to be sent somehow to Michigan.  The league championship jacket from the basketball team that I was the assistant coach for in 1988 is also still in my possession, but it made it into the original shipment and is already in Michigan.  All of Carol's spare cloth for quilting also made it.  It may have been the heaviest tote we had.  She claims it will save us money in the long run.  I wish I could say the same about my badass leather jacket.

Decisions, decisions

Decisions, decisions

Really there was no decision to make for if we were going to move, it was a matter of timing.  But Sitka through a big wrench into that clock.  A career, a family, those kids growing up and needing a home base, and Matt Hunter all had a hand in Sitka being our home for thirty years.

I won’t dwell on those these, but I have to say that it was a great place to raise children, my co-workers became my Alaska family, and former student Matt Hunter asked if I would consider running for the City Assembly.  The timing was just right though as Mik needed somewhere to stay while he finished his work on his Masters in the Art of Teaching last year.  Stefania having a nice job with Allen Marine also complicated things, but she has been very supportive of our chasing our dream to move to the shores of Lake Superior.

So really the timing was great to look at summer/fall of 2018, finishing my Assembly term, for our relocation.  What needed to be done was decide what our new home would look like, outside and in.  We had always wanted a log home and it just a matter of figuring out how to make that happen.  The internet was a great way to start.

We found that there are a lot of companies that create log homes across the country.  There was one that stood out as it was near our property and it used local trees from the Hiawatha National Forest of the Upper Peninsula: Hiawatha Log Homes.  An email got me a hard copy of their stock designs, I guess in late 2015.  There was also an ecopy that we could access whenever.  None of the stock designs quite made it.  But some were close.  We actually started with a stock design and then made some major changes to it in number of bedrooms and the creation of a great room.  This turned out to be a great decision.  It was a really long, collaborative process between us and was mostly fun, but occasionally frustrating, I am sure for both of us.  

What was particularly interesting is how the work together, discussions, agreements and disagreements really brought us closer together.  It injected new vitality into virtually every aspect of our lives.  Had the thought of living on an island with 14 miles of road perhaps affected us in ways we had not noticed?  Did we, in our late 50s ‘need’ a change, in this case a significant one?  As they say in Marquette, “You betcha, Honey!” 

That design we put together had to get translated to a price, taking into consideration the size of logs; we decided on the largest available, twelve-inch.  Again, a good decision for both appearance and for r-value, as log homes do not have insulation besides the logs.  Spendy… but only about 20% of the eventual total cost.  Yeesh.  But it is really kind of cool to get exactly what we want.