Archives 2022

If you’ve never been to the Upper Peninsula —GOOD! Don’t go. It isn’t for you. It’s a shit place with nothing to do and nothing to see. Stay away, for your own good.

If you have been, then you know it’s heaven on Earth, and not to tell anyone about it. The first rule of the real diehards of the UP, the so called Yoopers, is not talk about the UP with the trolls. Trolls, if you don’t know, are everyone who live under the Mackinac Bridge, which separates the Upper Peninsula from the rest of Michigan. And the rest of the planet, really. If you do make it past the bridge, stop at the Yooper Tourist Trap. It’s well worth a visit.

Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is one of the most stunning natural places on this little blue ball. The fresh water lakes, the untouched forests, the rivers and waterfalls tucked away from the swarms of tourists. It’s a dreamland for the outdoor enthusiast.

Biblical Plagues in Rapid Secession

There are downsides to the UP, and they aren’t for the weak of heart or faint of knee. ‘Round about spring the mosquitos hatch. These nasty buggers can hatch right out of the snow. I’ve seen them crawling around on the ice looking for blood. There aren’t a few mosquitos here or there, but swarms of them so thick you can’t go outdoors.

One time my dad and I decided to hike to a nearby lake through the woods. I had head to two coverage and a hat. I had on so much mosquito repellant that I probably gave myself brain damage. My boots covered my feet, and I had gloves on my hands. So, we set out in mosquito season. ‘Round about the time we reached the other lake I couldn’t take it. I snapped an evergreen bough off of a nearby tree and started whacking the air around me. I saw the lake, muttered, “yeah, it’s great. Let’s get out of here.” And we dashed home, swinging pine boughs at the mosquitos. My neck, face, ears, wrists and ankles were covered in bites.

When the mosquitos die down a bit, the mayflies hatch. These congest the surface of everything from screen doors to picnic tables to windshields to boats. And if you were planning on fishing during bass season you can forget about it, because the fish are full to the gills with mayflies. They don’t want your stupid lure, they want a La-Z-Boy and a multi series Netflix show to binge while they chill in their nests and ignore you.

After the mayflies come the bitting flies. These assholes will nip and gouge at any exposed skin on your body, including your eyelids. But, if you think you’ll just wear long sleeves and pants to fool them you can forget about it, because they can bite through steel. Also, it’s 90 degrees outside, Celsius, and you’re damp and covered in sweat, which only attracts more flies.

And then there is about a week of nothing trying to bite or kill you. In that week, you can enjoy the fall foliage, stroll around in the amber-tinted forests or take in stunning vistas of Lake Superior.

After the Plagues Come the Snow

But right as you start thinking, “Hey, we should get a cabin up here,” the snow hits. And it hits hard. In the UP there is snow from about early October to round about May. And if you haven’t heard the very technical term “round-about” before, you haven’t studied the weather or insect patterns of the UP because that’s as good as it gets. ‘Round about is a technical term in the UP.

Finally, the fishing report for the UP: Many of the folks who come up, the trolls, they come up for the fishing and hunting. Hunting season is so-so, but you might as well stay downstate and save yourself the $5 Mackinac Bridge fare. Lodging costs more in the UP for hunters, too. Stay away, stop killing all of our wildlife, ya jerks. Fishing, on the other hand, is also horrible in the UP. So many people escaped to Michigan after the tourism board launched their Pure Michigan campaign that pretty much all of the fish in the great lakes are now in troll bellies down south. Fishing reports for the past five years have been abyssal. 

‘Round about now, you’re probably asking why I’m even writing about the UP. The answer is that this is a warning, a morality tale of sorts. Stay out of the UP so the fish come back, and the mosquito populations die down. Stay away, ya damn trolls! Back, back! Try somewhere else in America.

Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan are the land of plenty. Plenty of space. Plenty of weight on the locals. Plenty of cheese on the french fries. Plenty of everything. We started in Minneapolis, home of the Mall of America, the largest mall in the country. You can walk for hours and not see everything. I know. We tried. There is a theme park in the center, a movie theatre, spas, hundreds of shops and dozens of restaurants. Anything you want you can find at Mall of America, except your car. You’re going to lose your car. My god, where is the car?

Minnesota: Lakes, Malls and Snow

Minneapolis has a great free zoo in Como Park, out on the east side. Check out the Como Park Conservatory. You can donate at the entrance if you want to, or don’t. I don’t care. But we always tried to drop a few bucks in the pot because damn do they do a good job with the animals at Como. They have a free-range sloth in the greenhouse area, and there are meerkats all over the place right inside the entrance. They have larger animals, too, but for me the greenhouse always won out. Such a lovely spot to come, especially in the colder months. Which, in Minnesota, are about 10 months of the year.

If you’re anybody at all worth knowing than you live on Lake Minnetonka. We don’t, because we’re not worth knowing, but we have friends on the lake. Experiencing how the elite live is a joy and a curse. It’s such a delight to experience, but then you have to zip up your suitcase and go back to the cheap motels with holes in the bedding and curly hairs in the sheets. You can get a taste of the rich life by strolling around the quaint villages that ring the lake, or driving down the mansion-lined streets. There are several open access points to the lake. You can even check out Prince’s house, which is nearby.

Wisconsin: Land of Cheese and Roller Coasters

Wisconsin is famous for cheese, but also for the Wisconsin Dells, which house a bunch of theme parks. Here you can ride all manner of rollercoaster or spinning tea cup. There are decent resorts and it’s near enough to an airport that you don’t have a long drive after landing. The prices are reasonable in the off season, and a bit extreme in summer. If you ever wanted to learn an Eastern European language, many of the staff at the Wisconsin Dells resorts and theme parks are there on summer work visas. 

We didn’t spend much time in Wisconsin because it wasn’t theme park season. Instead, we sort of transited the state, and our hearts thank us for avoiding the artery-blocking cuisine.

Michigan: The Mosquito’s Playground

Michigan is for nature lovers. If you don’t love nature, don’t bother congesting the freeways and airports, it won’t be the place for you. The best thing to do in Michigan is get outside. Detroit has a lot to offer, as does Ann Arbor, but your best bet is to get into the woods, enjoy the lakes, go on an ATV ride or rent snowmobiles if it’s winter. Just get yourself geared up and get outside.

With the launch of the Pure Michigan tourism campaign, RV, ATV, boat and snowmobile enthusiasts from around America started to explore the bounty of Michigan. This was great for the economy but bad for those of us who were already outside enjoying the peace and quiet. Nothing says hike faster than having a group of loud tourists behind you in the peaceful forrest.

I have so much more to say about Michigan. I’ll do a whole post on the Upper Peninsula soon, so stay tuned.

We have done a lot of US road tripping, check out more on the Road Trip page.

For about a year and a half we lived in Missouri, smack dab in the middle of the American Central Midwest. This, I can assure you, was culture shock to the extreme. As a vegetarian and flex vegan, Missouri was a whole new world, culinarily speaking. And not a good one. More like a Mad Max wasteland world, where everything was barbecued or deep fried, and nothing came with vegetables, despite the fact that they were being grown all around us.

In Missouri, we checked out Branson, of course, and St. Louis. Now, if you’re in the market for a solid heart attack, we’d suggest dining in St. Louis. Go literally anywhere. But St. Louis has some healthy options too. You could walk around the zoo, which is free. And St. Louis has a massive park (that houses the zoo, conveniently) and a nearby free science museum. All of these attractions are well worth a visit.

Indiana: Corn, Literature and More Corn

Indiana has some perks worth checking out. For one, Kurt Vonnegut, my favorite writer of all time, hails from Indianapolis. Sure, he spent most of his productive years elsewhere, but the midwest doesn’t have shit to claim, so we’ll let them have it. Indianapolis is now home to the Kurt Vonnegut Museum & Library, which is pretty sweet, to tell the truth. You can go right in, have a tour, buy some themed gifts or attend some of their events. They really are doing an awesome job of sharing Vonnegut’s vision. So, that’s something the midwest has going.

Indiana has an awesome downtown area. We checked out The Garage, an eatery for everyone with tiny stalls selling everything from lobster rolls to Pakistani to cheap margaritas and soup. We loved the downtown. We also checked out the Indiana State Museum, which at $17 was well worth it to see the throngs of taxidermies animals and era-by-era cultural items. Indiana has a lot going on back in the day, including being trampled flat by mammoths. True story.

Illinois: The Cornhole of America

Illinois has a few things to offer the intrepid tourist eager to see real America. I hear Chicago is nice. I went once. It was cold, wet, and everywhere we went a Sheik came up to us and said, “you probably shouldn’t be here.” Apparently south side Chicago is not where I’m meant to be? No joke, that happened more than once as we were looking for a well-known philately shop. I missed the downtown, the skyscrapers and the views of the great lakes because we ran out of gas and decided to leave after the third person in an hour told us to get out of there. So, we did. 

Cahokia is one of my favorite things in the midwest. This, at one point, was the largest native city in the United States. Now we know almost nothing about it, or the people who built it. All we have left are these huge mounds that you can walk around on. We climbed several, looked out at the ol’ Mississippi and enjoyed the views. I can see why they picked that spot. Endless flatlands for crops or grazing and the river for fish and transportation and trade. Still, very little is known about them, and most school-aged kids haven’t even heard of it.

The midwest has some pretty cool parks. Not Yellowstone or Niagara, but still. They try. One of my favorite things about living in Missouri for a year and a half was watching the farming community do their thing. I have to assume this is a labor of love, because they aren’t making a profit. Everything I read about farming suggests it’s all but a starvation wage after investing in everything needed to keep the farm active. Still, I can see the appeal of farming from a job-satisfaction standpoint. You work hard, hands in the soil, and you see real results. We watched the field near our house go from snow-covered to sludge to ribbed for seeds, to sprouting and finally to fruition and harvest. It was a thrill to watch the machines roll through and see real live farmers in coveralls out there checking the plants. I suppose if you’ve always lived near fields it wouldn’t be that exciting, but corn, soybeans and yarrow grew nearby and it was stunning.

We made trips to Minnesota, Colorado and Kansas in addition to our Illinois, Missouri, Indiana trips, but I’ll write about them later. For now, that’s the midwest as we saw it. You’re welcome to it, especially in harvest season when the sky turns grey with little tiny specs of husk and ear finely chopped and ready to clog your lungs.

If you missed our American Road Trip adventures, you’ll find more including routes on the Road Trip page.

I’ve written before about learning languages, and how much I enjoy the undertaking. Here I’ll discuss learning the Bulgarian language and culture. I speak German, and tried for many years to improve my Mandarin. I find languages totally fascinating. How a whole group of people see the world is limited (and advanced!) by their language, their ability to think and talk about what they see, feel and experience. It’s all driven by language, and the differences between languages are so thick and vast sometimes that it feels impossible that any two people from different root languages could share similar ideas, and yet—we do!

For work I was tasked with learning the Bulgarian language, and sent to an instructor who would teach me one-on-one. This was pretty sweet for me, as a lover of words and languages. We sat across from one another for about four months talking about Bulgaria, Bulgarian customs and traditions and ideas, and of course learning the language. This is exactly my type of exploration. A mix of understanding a new place and a new way of thinking about the world. My teacher was an older woman who never acclimated to life in the US, and spoke of her homeland as heaven on Earth.

Bulgarian Language Roots

Bulgarian is a slavic language and Bulgarians swear they invented Cyrillic. Cyril and Methodius being Bulgarian, of course. The Macedonians and Russians also claim them, but they are wrong. I know because my teacher told me, and later every Bulgarian I met would mention it at some point. So yeah, they invented Cyrillic, which was created by simplifying Greek and adapting it to the more guttural sounds of the spoken language. Of course this was all to translate the Bible, as the Bulgarians are the best Christians since Christ. 

In the video below you’ll see a very pregnant me reciting part of a Bulgarian poem alongside others.

The Bulgarian language is stunningly rich in culture and history that it can’t be separated out. You can’t untangle words to find simple nouns, but instead stories and fables support single words. It is a joy to learn.

Any language you approach from the outside seems methodically structured, but of course they aren’t. They are hobbled together by necessity. With English, it’s apparent in how we steal and use words from other languages (Garage, aisle, kindergarten, for a few examples) but other languages aren’t as Frankensteinian. Bulgarian has words from Russia, words from Greek and words from the Turkish language, all neighbors geographically, but for the most part Bulgarian is pretty pure. And this isn’t surprising once you meet a Bulgarian. They don’t want outside influence. 

Stubborn People, Stubborn Language

When the Ottomans took control of Bulgaria they held it for over 500 years. That’s longer than America has been around, folks. And in all that time, the language and culture of Bulgaria hardly budged. Their religion, often underground and attacked, survived. Their style of clothing: intact. After 500 years the Ottomans were forced out (bloody, horrible affair, too) and the culture was little changed. That is some grade-A stubbornness. And they retain that stubbornness to this day, steadfast in the preservation of their culture and language. So when you learn a new word you don’t get a one-to-one translation but an epic story complete with a Bulgarian hero or grandmother or saint.

You can learn more about Bulgaria here.

Bulgarian music takes advantage of the easier grammar (at least compared to Russian!) to fuse traditional music with modern rap. This is a delight to any listener, and should be appreciated as a complex cross-cultural experiment in both language and music.

If you haven’t heard Bulgarian before, check out this video clip of a native speaker and note how fluidly and smoothly the language cascades, as compared to the harsher Greek, more nasal Turkish and more guttural Russian languages that surround Bulgaria.