Hey, it’s a three-day weekend! Let’s go Up North. Let’s go to Houghton Lake! Hey, as long as we’re at Houghton Lake and it’s a three-day weekend, let’s go to Petoskey! We’ll pick up the Uncly Uncle on the way! And what the heck, let’s hike 18 miles in the Jordan River Valley on the way. We’ll still get to Petoskey for lunch!

Okay, we didn’t hike anywhere near 18 miles in the Jordan River Valley. I’m just kidding the UU, who dragooned his son-in-law into an 18-mile hike in the Jordan River Valley sometime during the summer. If I get it right (and I may be wrong), they ended this odyssey with the half-mile trek up to Deadman’s Hill. In the photooo below, the Twinz of Terror are heading up that hill and shortly into that ascent, the UU told the GG to get into a lower gear. Good advice. It was a long haul.

Here are the Twinz of Terror signing in at the North Country Trail kiosk at the bottom of the half-mile ascent to Deadman’s Hill.

I reeeaaallly wanted to go to Petoskey today and I was reeeaaallly annoying about it. I think that the Twinz would’ve been happy spending the whole day galumphing around the Jordan River Valley. But they humored me and we had lunch at our long-time fave Mitchell Street Pub. I remember so well going there with my parents and Radical Betty. Seems like it was just yesterday. Sigh. But I love going there with my Cfam relatives too even though we approach Petoskey from a different direction nowadays. Life goes on…

On the way home, we took a late afternoon mini-hike back into the Jordan River Valley — about a mile in and back out — to see a newly built bridge / system to try to foil a beaver dam. It was a loverly bridge but we are all a bit skeptical about how well the system will work to foil the beaver dam. The GG can comment about the yooperland beavers who incorporated a whole North Country Trail boardwalk into their dam if he wants. The photoooo below is the silhouette of three happy hikers standing on a boardwalk looking out at a device that is supposed to let water through a beaver dam. We’ll see how well that works but it was a beautiful way to end the afternoon.

We reluctantly dropped the Uncly Uncle off at his house in Gaylord. It would’ve been fun to hang around there for the evening but we have spent so little time at the Houghton Lake Group Home recently, we wanted to get back down there. The sun was setting as we were driving down the freeway and, as we were driving along the north shore of Houghton Lake, our GPS flipped from light to dark. The sun had set.

Class A day up here in the “northern lower” and glad we were able to share it with the Uncly Uncle and thanks for humoring me about Petoskey!

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