We rejoin our two intrepid travelers in Marshall, Mich., where they have just pulled up to another Hampton Inn. They unload the car and set off to get a bite to eat.
Marshall is a pleasant, quaint, historic little town in Michigan, just over the Ohio border. It dates back to the early 1800s. The big, peaceful old homes along its tree-lined streets are impressive. We stopped at a restaurant, Win Schuler's, that began in 1909 and is known throughout the Midwest for both its roast beef and its "Bar Scheeze." The spreadable cheese condiment is now sold in supermarkets throughout the region, but was once given away in stone crocks to restaurant patrons when the eatery started.
We drove back to the hotel and took the elevator up to the second floor. Pop put the keycard in the door and nothing happened. "[Expletive deleted]," he grumbled. "Stay here, I'll go down to the desk and clear this up."
He was back a few minutes later. He looked at me with a smile on his face. "We're in the wrong hotel. This is a Holiday Express - we're in the Hampton next door."
As I walked out, I began looking around me. The elevators were in the same location; the front desk was the same, but with a different clerk" even the disabled-parking spots were in the same spot. That shows how closely we looked at the signs.
The next morning we got up and drove to Bay City, Mich., where we had lunch with my late mother's one brother, his spouse and Mom's sister. We then drove a short ways to Caro, where another 90-year-old uncle and his spouse still live on the family farm. Just down the road, now paved, is the little one-room schoolhouse they all went to.
As we drove along the Michigan farm roads, we would see farmers out preparing their land for the next crop. Small flocks of sea gulls would follow their tractors as they pulled drills that turned the earth and exposed worms and grubs for the birds to feast on.
After an uneventful, but much more crowded than in the past, drive from Michigan's thumb area down to the Detroit suburbs, we pulled up in front of my retired younger brother Ron's house. (Do we feel old, or what?) When we walked into the house, we were greeted by stacks and stacks of boxes.
"Remember to get my screwdriver from Cotton," were practically my brother's opening words.
The moving van would be there the next day. Pop and I spent our two days in Detroit trying to stay out of the way, seeing a number of friends and getting ready for the next leg of our Lap around America.
The next morning, after repacking the car, Pop put the key in the ignition and turned the key. Click. That was all, just a click. We got on the phone and rousted my brother. "Bring your jumper cables over," Pop told him. "The cooler we've got in the trunk must have drained our battery."
Ron walked out into his garage and looked at a sea of boxes. "The jumper cables," he thought, "right." Luckily, one of the movers couldn't start his car the previous day when they were packing the moving van and had borrowed the cables. When he put them back, instead of just leaving the "garage" label intact, he also wrote "jumper cables" on the outside of the box.
We got our car fired, and as Pop tried to give back the cables, Ron told us to keep them with us and to give them, and the screwdriver we had to remember to pick up in Spartanburg, back to him when we saw him in Texas. We put the cruising gray landshark back on the Interstate and headed for points east.
That night, after a drive of only 346 miles, we stopped in DuBois, Pa., home of some of Pop's wife's relatives. As soon as he lifted the car's trunk lid, he realized that he'd left his hanging bag of clothes at the hotel back in Michigan. A quick cellphone call to both Ron and the Hampton we'd stayed in had Ron picking the clothes up the next night when he stayed there on the first night of his trek to Texas.
It would be a ransom/tradeoff: Pop's clothes for Ron's tools. Pop stopped at the first WalMart we came to and bought new slacks and Polo shirts.
The next day we drove only 278 miles through rolling, forested hills that even approached mountain size at times. However, being used to seeing western mountains, its difficult for me to think of anything as a mountain that does not have at least some exposed rock faces.
We registered in a hotel just off the beltway around Washington, D.C., and then set off to Annapolis, Md., in pursuit of crab cakes. Earlier I had told Pop that one of the things I desired to do while making the Lap was to have a good eastern crab cake.
After stopping at the Annapolis Chamber of Commerce for directions (see, men do stop for directions), we drove through the old city, past midshipmen jogging along the roadside, until we came to an old, weathered restaurant located on the very edge of a waterway that emptied into Chesapeake Bay. Inside were long tables with benches, and at the end of each table a tin bucket filled with wooden hammers to crack open whole-crab orders. But we chose a picnic table outside in the fresh air where we could smell the sharp scent of the nearby saltwater. The crab cakes served to us were spheres the size of pool balls of lightly browned lump crab meat. They were delicious.
The next morning we would drive into Washington, D.C., a city I'd never seen, and play tourist among the capi-tal's historic buildings and monuments.
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