Thursday, September 2, 2004 -- The trip down Lake Michigan We are aboard Reverie docked at the Du Sable Harbor Marina near downtown Chicago. We left Duncan Bay on Thursday morning, August 12, 2004 and spent two weeks going south before crossing Lake Michigan to have the mast removed at Waukegan. The weather started cool and built to near summer conditions by the time we got to Holland, MI. In preparing the boat, we recoated most of the teak with one or two coats of varnish and made sure she was shipshape. Putting our 'life on shore' to rest was a different matter. We had left a car at Cheboygan while we sailed to Canada, and now we wanted to sell it. An ad in the local paper brought two responses, neither of which was a serious buyer. Used car dealers would buy it, but for less than we wanted. It sold on the evening before our planned departure to someone Jim had met on the dock and casually mentioned that we had a car for sale. When Jim removed the car key, his key ring was empty -- a symbol of our freedom from 'stuff'! We began this leg of our trip with a nice sail to St. Helena Island but, because of north winds, had to anchor up under the Upper Peninsula shore. Next day we had a great sail toward Beaver Island and anchored in a small wilderness bay full of blue-green water on the south side of Garden Island. The next day we motored south toward Northport and anchored off the Leelanau State Park. This positioned us to arrive at Leland by 10 AM on Sunday to get a dock. Jim’s Aunt and Uncle from Traverse City met us there, and we enjoyed a nice lunch ashore with them. Bobbie enjoyed hearing of Jim's ancestors who started the original sawmill at Lake Leelanau. Leland was a great stop with high-speed Internet, fresh fish and a grocery store just up the hill from the Marina. After a night at a dock and newly provisioned, we were ready for more travel on Monday morning. It was blowing about 20 knots out of the south and we sailed to the north side of South Manitou Island were we again had the place all to ourselves. It was the last night we would be away from civilization. We left the next morning in the rain and sailed south to Arcadia in fairly strong winds. We hardly got to see Sleeping Bear Dunes (National Lakeshore) because of the rain. We anchored in Arcadia Lake Tuesday night and went to a dock the next day to collect our mail -- our first use of General Delivery to a small Post Office. It was there and waiting for us as expected. Somewhere in here we learned that our son Jim was going to be able to join us for a week, and we made arrangements to pick him up in Chicago on Saturday. We left Arcadia and made the short hop to Portage Lake for another night at anchor. From there we rounded Big Sable point and pulled into the Harbor View Marina at Ludington. It was new and nicely done, and had wireless Internet from the boat. We were able to get all our laundry done and the boat cleaned and vacuumed and ready for company. Saturday morning we rented a car for the day and had a long, sometimes traffic-filled drive to Midway where we met our son, drove back to Ludington and still had to shop for food. We finally got back to the boat at 11:00 PM after a very long and different kind of day. Jim’s folks drove up from Ann Arbor to see all of us, and we met them at a local restaurant for breakfast on Sunday morning August 22. After concluding our visit in the very nice lounge at the marina, it was time to move on.
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