Escanaba, Michigan

Sunday night’s Game of the Century had me looking for a motel for the first time in these travels.  It was three o’clock when I arrived in Oconto, a town with a couple of motels, four hours before Tom Brady took on his former team in Boston. The Packer/Steeler game was about to start.  I wasn’t all that interested, but being in Packerland and having paid a visit to Lambeau Field the day before, I was feeling infected by the urge to join everyone all round to give it my attention.  

I didn’t mind cutting my day short, as I was overdue for an abbreviated day.  More motels awaited me twenty-five miles up the road in the neighboring towns of Marionette and Menominee on the Michigan border.  It would be a nice ride with the road all to myself while everyone within miles would be glued to their televisions, but I needed to show my legs some mercy after ten straight seventy-plus mile days, plus I had a fair amount of washing to do and would need as much drying time as possible.

So I denied myself the pleasure of staying on the bike and stopped at the first motel I came to, an Econ Lodge.  I was concerned it might not be open as there was only one car in its parking lot.  That was because most of those staying there were at Lambeau Field for the Packer game thirty miles to the south.  I could have had a room, but the price was inflated to $130 due to the game.  

I was told there was a cheaper motel down the road,  but that it might be filled with out-of-towners in for the game.  It was a “Florida Project” motel with seventeen rooms catering to long-term rentals.  It had a room available for about a third the price of the spiffy chain motel. It was barebones, with the dimmest of light bulbs in the two lone lamps and the WiFi so weak I feared I’d have to go to the nearby MacDonald’s to use my iPad and the heat hadn’t been turned on, so my gear and clothes couldn’t fully dry,  but the TV worked and there was plenty of hot water for all the washing I needed to do, so I couldn’t complain.

I nearly stopped earlier in the day in Shawano, tempted by the Silo Inn and it’s advertisement of “Weekly rates starting at $110,” compared to the $260 where I ended up, but that would have left me over one hundred miles the next day to the next Carnegie in Escanaba, and I wanted to get closer than that. 

I didn’t care to go two days without a Carnegie, as there’d be none this day after averaging two a day for the first ten days of these travels.  The last had been in Clintonville at dusk the evening before. It sat nobly on a hill, unmarred by any additions, though no longer a library.  It was now home to a real estate firm.  A plaque acknowledging Carnegie had a variation on the usual tribute, stating “this building was erected with means donated by Andrew Carnegie.”

A little north of Clintonville I passed through the tiny town of Embarrass, which took its name from the Embarrass River, named by the early French lumberjacks for its many snags that made floating logs down it difficult.  Embarrass is a French word meaning to impede or obstruct.  There is also an Embarrass in Minnesota, a couple of hundred miles away and much further north not far from the Canadian border.

The Packers were handling the Steelers, so I could tune into the hour-long pre-game show on NBC for the big showdown in Foxboro.  Loads of New England fans came to the game wearing Brady jerseys, so it was no surprise when he was greeted with cheers by the fans he had played for the previous twenty years.  But once the game began, their allegiance all turned to the home team and they treated him like any visiting player with boos.  He was a bit shaky and his former Coach Bellichek, as great of a coach as Brady is a quarterback, devised defensive schemes that kept him off-balance.  

Tampa Bay was a touchdown favorite.  Many thought Brady would annihilate his former team with four or five touchdown passes. He had none, partially due to the rain, but still managed to eke out a narrow victory when an end of the game field goal attempt hit the goal post.  It wasn’t the best of games, but I was glad I had been able to see it and didn’t have to wait until the next day to learn it’s outcome and all it’s ebbs and flows.  It kept me up until eleven, more than an hour later than if I had been in my tent.

None of my clothes had dried in the morning.  I put on a nearly dry jersey and strapped the rest on top of the gear on the back of my bike.  After an hour when the jersey I was wearing had dried, I put on another damp one to dry it. An overcast day was no help as I biked along the northern shore of Lake Michigan for fifty miles to Escanaba.

The forest was thick and inviting to my left with modest homes along the lake to my right, some abandoned.

I had my most luxurious campsite so far, with the easiest access and mosquitoe-free.

Once again I had a morning mist but it had burned off by the time I reached Escanaba and it’s monumental  red-stoned Carnegie.

It had been replaced twenty-seven years ago and was now privately owned, undergoing renovation   The new library attached to the city hall several blocks away overlooking Lake Michigan had a painting of the Carnegie entitled “Old Friend.” It was the first of these travels with a dome, elevating it to the most distinguished of the trip so far.

The new library also paid homage to the Little Free Libraries in the area with a flyer listing the locations of all of them—three in Escanaba and others in Bark River, Ford River, Gladstone and Wells. They are always a welcome site.