(OT) Praise/rant/etc #13

[Eye of Hoffs]

As I reported in my last post, the trip to Mackinac Island did not get off to a promising start. Things began going south at the docks in St Ignace. Almost as soon as we arrived at the terminal someone pounced to check in our bags. Now we were only taking a single suitcase with us to the island, our smaller one, and our hotel was just down the road from the docks there. So really we didn't want it checking. But before we knew it the bag had been whisked away from us. We'd packed the bag with most of our necessities at the previous stop but there were still some things we had to add in. Yet in all the rush we didn't get the chance so we had to stuff what we could in our carry bag.

The whole reason we didn't want it taking was because it brought into play the whole tipping thing. I hate tipping. It's not that I object to parting with a few measly dollars, just that I am never sure about the whole when and how much. It's a constant source of worry, especially on guided tours when the first thing we always say to each other is “are we supposed to tip at the end?” Generally we hang back after a tour has finished to see what other people seem to be doing. It's okay in cafes and restaurants because it's just a standard 15-20% depending on service, but everything else seems to be a grey area. Of course, the US is not the only place where this applies, but it is worse here than elsewhere.

The trip over to the island was fairly quick and uninteresting with the exception of first mate Kylie on the ferry, Once we arrived on the other side we made a beeline for where the luggage would be. But it was too late. Hovering around it was someone who would be only too pleased to save us the burden of wheeling it the six paces to our hotel. Hey, we're English, quite capable of expending the few extra calories it would take to carry a poxy suitcase a few hundred yards down the road. But nooo, once again the bag was whisked away before our eyes. To make matters worse, the directions to the hotel that Caroline thought the bag boy had given us were at odds with where I thought it was. And so it was that we ended up on Market Street, which oddly has no shops, when our hotel was on the street that wasn't called Market Street that had all the shops, We eventually arrived and I think Caroline passed on $3 to the handler, which may or may not be the going rate. Who knows? But the bottom line is that all that BS a) caused us stress, b) took us longer and c) cost us extra money than if they had just left us to do the fricking thing ourselves as we wanted. Grrr...

And all that leads me to another major gripe of mine â€" hotel housekeeping. Why oh why oh why do you need someone to come into your room every day and do whatever it is that they do? Do you clean your bathroom each day at home? Do you change your towels each day? Do you put a new bar of soap out each day? I think not. So why the hell do we have daily hotel maids? I mean, how long does it take to make your own fricking bed? It's just an invasion of privacy and it's Sod's law that any time you want to go back to your room, Rosanna happens to be in there descaling the inside of the taps or whatever. I give props to the Duluth hotel we spent three nights at - no housekeeping during your stay there.

At this juncture I should clear up one point of pronunciation. Mackinac is actually pronounced Mackinor, just like the nearby mainland city of Mackinaw except that there they gave it a sensible spelling. *blank stare*

But back to matters at hand. The room in the hotel we were staying at was called a historic room, which means that it was absolutely tiny. After the double bed there was just enough room to walk sideways along the edge of it. It's just as well we didn't bring the second suitcase otherwise we'd have had three in the bed. But I can't really complain here because we knew in advance it was going to be somewhat compact (although perhaps not that small). Hotel rooms are expensive here on the island and the one we were staying at was one of the more reasonable options. Ignoring some of the B&Bs that is, but we'd been avoiding those like the plague since our last trip, though that's another story. Or perhaps not because it involves B for Breakfast. But I digress. Besides, our two-night package had included the ferry crossings, breakfast and a free pound of fudge,

Yes, that's right, fudge. It's the local speciality and is absolutely everywhere here. Every other shop is a fudge shop. Our hotel sells it. The cafes sell it. We didn't visit any spas but you can be sure that they use it in place of oils and creams. And I bet that they put it in the soap dispensers in the stressrooms, if you can figure out how to get them to work. Every type and flavour you can imagine, and several you can't, can be found somewhere along Main Street, usually coloured some shade of brown.

And fudge is by no means the only solid brown mass to be found by the bucket load here, oh no. You see, Mackinac Island doesn't allow motor vehicles with the exception of emergency and construction ones. So the only way to get around other than the mark one limb is either a bicycle or a horse & cart. Now there's a wonderful English expression called “after the Lord Mayor's show” which refers to the rubbish or dross which follows something amazing, for example Alien 3, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace or Justin Bieber's second heartbeat onwards. This is a reference to what happened in olden days after all the horses pulling the pageant's magnificent carriages and floats had passed by â€" someone had to come along and clear up their mess. And so it is on the island. The carts are the big yellow taxis of the area which means that of the small percentage of the workforce not involved in the fudge industry, about 90% are employed shovelling away all the horse shyte, Heaven knows where they put it all. Most probably they load it on to a small fleet of freighters which then ship it over to the UP to be dumped down all the old mines. Just remember that if you find yourself in that area when a major earthquake hits.

So the upshot of it all is that when walking down the major street in the town you are greeted by the sickly scent of sugary confectionery interspersed with the strong waft of Dobbin's detritus. Oh, and watch where you are stepping when you cross the road.

After making ourselves uncomfortable in our hovel we went down to the lobby so that we could fully extend our legs for a while. Then came the most difficult conundrum of the day â€" finding somewhere to eat. As we begin the fourth quarter of our stay I am becoming seriously food fatigued â€" an inability to have the same plain, monotonous diet I am used to at home. Now as you may have gathered from all my posts, I am a particularly finicky eater. There are very few things that I like. Milk, eggs and butter are fine, but not cheese. A few vegetables are okay, but not others. And nothing with any sauce, spices or seasoning except just plain meat gravy. As for foreign foods like Italian, Chinese, Japanese, India, Mexican, Aborigine, you must be out of your **** mind if you think I would even touch them. In my opinion garlic and curry should be put on the UN's banned substances list with summary execution for anyone trading them. The smell of curry literally makes me want to throw up.

As a consequence the places I will actually eat is very, very narrow. The likes of Denny's and Perkins are fine, but even otherwise similar establishments have been blacklisted. Applebee's got the chop for making my mouth catch fire with their fries. The Outback Steakhouse got the boot last trip after I ordered their expensive 22oz porterhouse only to find that 21oz of it was fracking pepper. But outside these chains it gets even harder. Oh sure, you can ask them to do something plain without any additives, but half the time they don't listen and depending on how upscale they are they always insist on putting something on; a sprig of this or a splash of that; “but mon ami, shoorely theez Engleesh cannot want it playeeen. We must add ze sauuus, ma uoi.”

Now I recognise that this is all very unfortunate for my long-suffering better half, but what am I supposed to do, eat something I can't stand? They tried that at my first elementary school. Back then there was just one choice of meal and it was the same each day from week to week. Tuesdays was the indescribably awful cheese pie, mushy peas and squishy tomatoes followed by bread & butter pudding, all of which I wouldn't touch with a barge pole. The other kids gobbled it down but I'd be ****** if I was going to. They had this policy of making you eat everything and I distinctly remember Mrs Austin dismissing all the others and saying to me “well we'll just have to wait here until you have finished.” So there we both stayed with arms folded until fifteen minutes later she angrily waved me away and they never tried pulling that crap on me again,

But back to the point of all this, on top of my fussy nature you have to add in the problems of being a diabetic (my pancreas will shortly be receiving a special award from the International Brotherhood of Socialist Organs for forty years of being on strike) and being in a country that does things very differently. American menus seem very samey and you can't get the things you can in an English pub. Vegetables here seem rare and you never get more than one kind. And what have you lot got against sheep? Lamb is my favourite meat but try finding a good old mutton chop or leg of lamb here. Sheesh. It all seems to be about beef here. I tell you, if cows had never been invented then the American civilization would have died out decades ago.

Thus it was that we perused the hotel's book of restaurant menus and came to the horrid realization that there was nothing much for me. So we decided to just walk along the street and surely we would see somewhere. We didn't and ended up just going into somewhere that might be okay. Big mistake. The (all male) staff were disinterested and despite the huge list of wines, cocktails and beers they didn't have any cider (or rather what you call hard cider). And they didn't have much in the way of non-alcoholic stuff either, I don't drink coffee, hot chocolate is sickly sweet here and tea is...well you know about that. All they had was Pepsi, which I'm not a massive fan of and it gets somewhat monotonous, but it's about the only sugar-free product to be found in most places, so I made do with that.

As for the entrée, I went for the whitefish, but all they had to go with that was vegetable and potato of the day, which was roasted potato. No fries, no options.

“You want the fish fried or broiled,” asked the bored waiter,

“I dunno, just as long as it's got nothing on it.”

“I'll make it broiled then,” he replied.

And so the meal turned up. The fish was okay but the vegetable was some ghastly long green bean and the potatoes were cold and certainly not what we would call roast potatoes. And I don't think I have ever seen so few of them in an American restaurant, which didn't matter much as I could only stomach one or two. I don't think I have ever had so little insulin at a meal other than the times that I have seen what was put in front of me and not eaten anything. And as for the Pepsi, it tasted like regular to me so I didn't have that. But at the end of the day we paid sixty-five bucks for a meal and I left hungry and thirsty. And to think I could have gone to Denny's for half that, or McDonald's for a third, and left full.

We returned to our room where I wrote my previous post and made some tea, which wasn't easy because about the only usable power sockets were up near the ceiling and we had stupidly forgotten to bring our levitating kettle with us. I was miserable and didn't get to sleep until two in the morning,

Wednesday at last brought the end of the rain and the morning was cloudy and cool, much like our moods. Despite my hunger I just made do with some oatmeal and cup of milk at the breakfast buffet, which was okay. We were both feeling somewhat hacked off so we decided to just walk around the eight miles of the island highway. But that was not so good either. For one thing the Mosqwaffe were out in force having had all the previous day to plan operations:

“Okay chaps, now pay attention. Wing-Commander Buzz will position his men above the walkway near the marina here. When the targets pass by, red section will move down and attack the exposed limbs whilst yellow and blue sections will attack their heads here....here...and just above the ears here. Any questions? Well good luck everyone and I'm sure there'll be plenty of blood all round. Haha.”

We got as far as Arch Rock, a local beauty spot, then decided to turn back. I had left my walking shoes behind in the car in the suitcase rush and didn't feel I could do this rest of it in my civvies. So we returned to the town and Caroline went on a tour of the few shops not selling fudge whilst I stayed and watched life go by on the street. The SQ of this place was decidedly miserable. During the entire stay I only saw three women who I'd give a 7+ to and one of those was first mate Kylie.

After that we had a nice lunch in a place that unfortunately isn't open at dinner and that lifted our spirits a bit. So we then decided to hire a tandem from one of the myriad bike places in the area. This was a first for us and I was surprised and suspicious when Caroline suggested that I go in front, but that's what we did. And so we launched off into the unknown. The bike handled badly and felt really back heavy, and the gears were awkward to change, but once we got going it wasn't so bad really, at least for me. But my rear-gunner was soon sounding off, as I knew she would. Caroline likes to be in control when it comes to moving vehicles. She isn't comfortable with anyone else driving a car. So she was complaining that she couldn't see and wasn't steering and that we would surely soon crash and burn even though we were just trundling along a highway with no motorized traffic. Now it's true that we were moving pretty fast as tandems go and were overtaking everything else along the highway, which was sometimes difficult as other bikes were not expecting to be passed, least of all by a tandem, and so were moving all over the road. But all the same....

So about half way around we stopped for ten minutes or so and I suggested that Caroline go in front. We adjusted the seats and then set off again. But no, this was even worse she said. I was pedalling too fast, the thing was too difficult to control, yada, yada, yada. So we stopped again and I took over once more and before long we were back at the start. I would have liked to do another lap but that wasn't going to sit well with Miss Uncongeniality so we returned the bike and that was that. I'm quite certain that I wouldn't get these problems with first mate Kylie on board or meteorologist Stephanie Abrams. Total time taken was exactly one hour with about twenty minutes of stoppages.

To finish the day's activities we called at Fort Mackinaw, which was built by we British during the Revolutionary War. We saw a demonstration of cannon loading and firing and toured the various buildings inside. Sadly there was nothing much there regarding the various military skirmishes that the fort had seen, such as how the British recaptured it just after the start of the 1812 war, or how the British captured a couple of US warships that arrived there, or how the British successfully fought off American attempts to win it back. But hey, I can see how that wouldn't play so well with most of the visitors:

“And if I now direct y'alls attention to that seereees of rocks over there. That is the spot where the military forces of the Yoonited States ov Armerica suffered their fourth humiliating defeat in around twelve months.”

And don't worry, we handed it back once the peace treaty was signed.

All that was left after that was the nasty task of finding food again. We settled on a tavern near the hotel, the oldest in the town apparently. The good news was that they did serve cider, without glasses of course. The bad news was that it was cold in there from the damn air conditioning; we kept trying different tables to no avail. I ordered the fish again, this time with the mashed potato and veg of the day. We have mash most days at home, so surely this was okay, and the server said it had nothing added to it. Well along came the dish. Again the fish was okay but the potato was just one tiny scoop. But that didn't matter because it was horrible dry garbage with some kind of herb in it. And that is Herb, as in a word that begins with the letter “H” and thus is pronounced Hhhhhhhuuuuuuuuuurrrrrb. And as for the vegetable, just yuchy sweetcorn with other nasty bits mixed in. So it was ker-ching, sixty more dollars for the privilege of going to bed hungry again. Thanks Mackinaaaaaaw. At least I didn't need to bother with a dose of insulin.

So it is time to move on from this unwholesome place, It had its moments I suppose if I am really, really, really trying to be generous, but Caroline put it best:

“Thank God we're not staying here another night.”

Picture of the day

“Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer dooo,”

[Sara Dale]

Is that basket on the bike your riding?  If it is, no wonder your having trouble with it.  The handle bars are backwards as is the wheel.     


*wonders about the demerits this gets me*

[Eye of Hoffs]

Haha. I almost added a comment that anyone who mentioned that would receive double demerits for the rest of the year. I didn't of course but the penalty still applies.

And can someone clear up a big mystery for me. I see these "For sale by owner" signs all over the place. So this is as opposed to what, for sale by Mafia? Please explain!

[CharGar]

It means it's not for sale by a store.  Lol

[ii & Sabin]

I think what you are seeing is a house for sale without the use of a real estate broker.

[Eye of Hoffs]

I think what you are seeing is a house for sale without the use of a real estate broker.

It's mostly cars and bikes.

[Ian James]

That's the sign they found in the hardware store.


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