Thursday Travels

We traveled seven hours, well, six hours actually moving and nearly an hour in the grocery store in Manistique looking for fried onions in a can and then getting stuck in the checkout line behind someone whose husband was disputing the price of a bottle of vodka.

We make this trip a lot – between Milwaukee and Grand Marais, Michigan – and we have it down. Where to stop for the cheapest gas, where to stop to use the bathroom, who drives which segment – I’m great at the stretch between Marinette and Escanaba. It’s a two lane highway so there is the constant contemplation of whether to pass the car in front, the playing out of disaster scenes in one’s head if an unexpected, battered Toyota truck happens to back out of a driveway at the wrong time, the adrenaline rush of passing, going 80 miles an hour, feeling that assurance, that complete capability that comes from merging back into the proper lane. Passing on a two lane road is narcotic. Especially if one is driving a truck which I was. Delicious.

The cat sat between us in his cat carrier. He yowls at the beginning of the trip and when we slow down but the rest of the time, he either sleeps or lies in what I call his ‘toaster’ formation. He’s doing that right now in the chair next to me, compact and square like a toaster. It’s my favorite cat pose. But then, instead of waiting for me to capture his repose, he walks across the table.

The dog stayed in the back seat, curled on the floor, like the sled dog he is, taking up as little space as possible and only standing up when we stop and tell him it’s time to get out. He never fusses, this dog. He simply never fusses unless, of course, there is a thunderstorm, but that is not our worry today. It is cloudy with no rain. So he sleeps until it is time to be awake and is never bothered by the distance or the traffic.

Once at our house in Grand Marais, we carry everything in from the truck. Backpacks and laptops, the cooler full of refrigerator remnants from home, groceries we bought in Manistique, minus the fried onions in a can, and three screen doors we had repaired in Milwaukee. We have hot dogs from Usingers, mac and cheese, and baked beans for dinner and it oddly feels like Thanksgiving, mostly because the windows are rattling a bit from the wind, albeit a June wind and not a January one. The lake sits out in front of us, calm and endless, curving with the earth, which we shouldn’t be able to see, but we do. We see the curve from where we are sitting.

It would be hard to have a better Thursday.