Don’t let the beauteous star fool you. It was “frickin'” cold down there on the beach this morning. All I will say about my Beachwalking Uniform is that it was the same as yesterday’s. We were comfortable in the cabin overnight and I had no trouble dragging myself out of my sleeping bag and into the shower this morning.

I didn’t see any evidence of snow until I was well into my walk and saw this little skiff next to this stick or board or whatever (piece of wood?). I puzzled at it for a while. Was it somehow wave-related? I couldn’t find evidence that any waves had made it quite that far up the beach.

I posted the photo on facebook and soon after, Jeep and Pan posted a comment that there was snow on their vee-hickles and deck. (Can I just digress for a minute here and say that I *love* communicating with my cousins and other members of our beach community via text message and facebook? I feel like this brings us closer together and is a positive consequence of the technology in our lives. But that might be a whole ‘nother post.) Anyway, that comment prompted me to walk up the road to look for more snow and yes, there was snow on J&P’s vee-hickles and there was a dusting all over the woods up at the top of our road by Our Northern Correspondent’s house.

I hit the road to Troll Land at 9-something and I had a decent drive with nice dry pavement until I got to Gaylord. I wrote about Gaylord a wee bit back. What I didn’t mention about Gaylord is that its location is right smack in the middle of a lake effect snow belt. It is also located at the northern 45th parallel but that’s only tangential to this story. The point is that, if there is a possibility of snow in northern lower Michigan, it is almost certain that it will happen at Gaylord. And usually in spades. We won’t go any further into snow in Michigan because I am kind of done done done with snow for the year but let’s just say that when I got to Gaylord today, there was a serious blizzard going on. There was “stuff” on the road. Most people were still driving 70-80 mph and that wouldda been okay except… Visibility was just about zero. This stuff started at Vanderbilt and I white-knuckled it the next few miles down to mile marker 282. At that point, I bailed off the I75 SUV Speedway and hung a left into Gaylord. This pic does not show the mayhem on the freeway. There was no way I was going to take my hands off the wheel to take a pic of that. I did take my right hand off to downshift onto the exit ramp that I could barely see. BTW, Titanium Pinky works just fine nowadays and I don’t even think about her when I shift the Ninja’s gears. It was weeks and weeks after I broke her before she could help me drive the Ninja but she is now a fully functional member of the hand that operates the Ninja’s clutch.

So I drove through Gaylord on the old road. I could see pretty well most of the time. By the time I was passing Michaywe on old 27, the sun was coming out again and by the time I got to Waters, the roads were dry as a bone. I grabbed onto the freeway again and, although Old Man Winter threw a few more snowballs at me, my trip from there was pretty smooth. Except for Orange Barrel Season… (I thought about visiting Chloe Belle and Daisy in Michaywe to wait out the storm but wasn’t sure if they were home and I kind of wanted to barrel through the crap and get home to Troll Land. So I sent a 💜 from the road.)

So I am back here in Troll Land. I saw Mr. K of Plutification Blues at the grokkery store. I’m feeling pretty good about this visit to the moomincabin. I feel like we left it in pretty good shape for the summer although there is always work to do when you own vacation-type property. The last two years, I have left the place at the end of the summer in a diminished form (the cabin and me!). I had a terrible cold virus in 2014 (eyes encrusted shut when I woke up, I love you but don’t hug me because I don’t want you to get what I have) and a broken pinky in 2015. We were busy with fun and business things this weekend but we had enough down time in the cold weather that I sort of got vacuum cleaner zen energy. And so I did a lot of that and cleaned some of the floor and pulled a few more boxes of stuff out of the garage to process and and and…

Love y’all and good night, ‘speshully to those in Gaylord and at Brevort/Brevoort Lake.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 15th, 2016 at 5:30 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.