I can remember when I was a kid and the I75 SUV Speedway hadn’t been built yet, at least not through the Great Lake State. When we “go to Detrite in the middle of the night” as my 3-year-old self thought of it, it meant we got up at something like 3:00 AM in Sault Ste. Siberia in order to catch the first(?) ferry across the Straits of Mackinac. I can remember my mom dressing me up in my little tartan plaid skirt for those trips to visit Grandaddy and Bolette and our MacMu aunts and uncles and cousins down in Detroit and other southern Great Lake State communities.

I remember being on those old ferries. My dad and I would walk on the deck and I would put my hands in my jacket pockets just like he did. It took us *forever* to travel down to Detroit on those old two lane roads. Once I remember having an absolute fit about having to P when we were only a couple of miles from my grandparents’ house in Detroit. My parents finally gave in to my fits and stopped at some crappy gas station with just about the fugliest terlet ever. I think that experience taught me to hold it, not to say that we don’t ever stop at gas stations with iffy restrooms even now, especially in Georgia… I guess picking an appropriate gas station for P-ing is a life-long learning curve…

The Mackinac Bridge replaced the ferry shortly after that memory but it was a few more years before the I75 SUV Speedway got built. One of the things I remember from traveling old US 27 (besides the Underground Forest) was getting stuck behind huge SLOW convoys of National Guard trucks transporting soldiers to or from Grayling. We could maybe manage to pass a truck or two at a time.

As we were driving up through Florida and Georgia and even Tennessee and Kentucky earlier this week, we encountered convoys of utility trucks. We were on the I75 Snowbird Geezerway the whole time so they didn’t slow us down. I’m sure you can guess where they were going.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 12th, 2018 at 8:18 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.