menominee, michigan: august 7-9, 2009
Posted in michigan on August 12th, 2009 by jenni | No Comments »
Tags: family, michigan, roadtrip, wisconsin
Since my grandma passed away a couple years ago, there’s been some question as to what’s going to happen to my grandparents’ house in Menominee, Michigan. My parents go up there regularly (my great-aunt still lives nearby), and so does my uncle and his family. It mostly sits empty, though, and nobody particularly wants to live so far away. We all want the house kept in the family, but it’s a huge commitment.
Knowing a decision about that will probably made at some point, I really wanted Matt to go to Menominee. He never got to meet my grandma, so it was a big deal to me. I also wanted to see the town we visited at least twice a year for as long as I can remember, since the chances we’ll go there again are pretty slim.
We drove up Friday afternoon, with my mom and sister following an hour and a half behind us. We got up to Michigan in a little over 5 hours, and had some time to kill before they showed up with the house key. We decided to go hang out at Jozwiak’s and wait. It’s a well-known hamburger place that we used to visit as little kids (in the UP and Wisconsin, it’s totally normal for kids to hang out in bars).
Within an hour or so, we’d made friends the bartender, Addy, and made plans to meet her after her shift ended at 11pm. (This is one of the things that’s awesome about most other places that aren’t Minnesota: strangers aren’t abjectly terrified of meeting new people.) We went to the house to find my mom and sister there with my cousin Nicole and her boyfriend John. We said hi, brought our bag inside, and were presented with our sleeping arrangements: a twin-sized bed and a cot. We pushed them together, but the cot was a couple inches shorter than the bed. Argh.
We went back out and met Addy across the river in Marinette, Wisconsin, at a bar called Cappy’s. The bar was made of what seemed to be lumber scraps, and there were cages by the stage. Drinks were about $2.50 at most, and the DJ ruled. We loved it. Far later than we’d planned, we arrived back at the house in Michigan. I climbed into the twin bed with Matt and managed to maintain our very cozy situation for at least half the night.
Saturday, we got up and began the grand tour of the other Twin Cities. We stopped with my mom and Stephanie to say hi to my Aunt Pat in Marinette, then Matt and I went down to the Peshtigo Fire Museum. I’d been there years ago, and needed to revisit it, if only to verify that the before/during/after mural is as morbid as I remember. It is.
We toured the museum, and I found it to be a lot more interesting than I’d previously thought. They actually only have a few cases of stuff that was charred and recovered after the fire, and a ton of other period items. The story of the fire is horrifying: it occurred the exact same night as the Chicago fire, only it killed many, many more people. The entire town was destroyed. This terrified us a lot:
After the museum, we toured the cemetery and saw the mass grave. (There were 350 unidentified victims from the fire.) The good news about Peshtigo, though, is it’s doing well. At least til highway 29 is finished and skirts it completely.
We headed back up to Marinette to visit the Pine Tree Mall, where I’ve spent at least 2 hours of my life, since it takes about 10 minutes to see it all. It’s even worse than it used to be; most of the tiny stores have closed, because they raised the rent after Wal-Mart moved in. (Worst possible business to move into small towns? Quite possibly.)
We did some shopping at Younkers and the sporting goods store, when went over to Shopko. Man, I love Shopko.
We decided to get pasties for lunch, as well as to bring home with us. We went to Dobber’s, which my mom swears is ‘the best ever! Way better than Colonel K’s!’ and ordered two hot pasties, and a dozen frozen ones. They were out of vegetable pasties, though (we did get 6 frozen ones, thankfully), so we made a trip over to Colonel K’s anyway. Which was awesome, because the strange guy behind the counter ruled.
We stopped back at the house briefly to shove our giant bag of pasties in the freezer, finish eating, and then we headed back out to explore downtown Menominee. We made a stop at the yarn shop, which is awesome but surprisingly expensive for a small town, then wandered down Front Street.
The Waterfront Festival was in full swing, with a bad cover band playing at the bandshell, and food and beer tents set up in the park. Since we’d be down there in the evening, we skipped the festival and walked across downtown, out onto the breakwater. It was insanely humid, so there was a heavy fog hanging over Green Bay.
Having pretty much seen all of what Menominee/Marinette had to offer (at least, what they’d offered me as a child), we decided to find a place we could sit outside, have a drink, and hang out til it was time to meet the rest of the group for dinner in Marinette. I racked my brain trying to think of a place that had a patio or sidewalk seating there. We definitely hadn’t seen anything, and the one place that looked promising wasn’t open til 5. We drove out to Schloegels, and were told they didn’t have a liquor license. Finally, we accepted that the area must hate drinking in the outdoors, and crossed the bridge to Marinette. We picked a bar called Cusack’s that looked entertaining, and holy crap, it was.
There was both a Catholic school reunion and a softball team hangout in full swing. Older ladies were singing and dancing with a tambourine. A girl at the bar who looked like the trashy version of Scarlett Johansson wanted to know everything there was to know about my tattoos. The smoke was so thick, I got cancer twice. The bartender bought us our last round, just because.
I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned in the last few minutes how much small-town Wisconsin rules.
Round about dinnertime, we headed down to the Rail House to meet the family. Nicole and John were already there drinking at the bar, and my mom, aunt, and Stephanie rolled in shortly after we arrived. We ordered dinner, and Matt and I split the beer sampler, which arrived on a train car.
After dinner, the old people (which included my sister) headed back to the house to wait for fireworks, while we went bar-hopping with my 21-year-old cousin and her boyfriend. We hit up the Aloha Lounge, which had a bartender of absolutely indeterminate gender, and then Corky’s, which seemed fluorescent-lit. The bartender there told us about her band, and demanded that we return after the fireworks. We said we would, knowing that plans would take us elsewhere.
The entire population of the two cities were downtown for fireworks. We found a spot, and got to Front Street just as the fireworks were starting. From our spot, we could actually see where they were firing them from the breakwater, which was awesome.
Once the fireworks ended, old people and families headed home, while the younger people headed to one of two bars on the main street. We of course picked Pirate’s Cove, an old favorite. It’s the first place I became aware of the existence of those molded plastic drop-in shotglasses, after all.
We hung out with Nicole and John, watching the place get fuller and fuller, to the point that we couldn’t move. They decided to head home for an early trip in the morning, and Matt and I went next door to see what the other bar looked like. On the way out, we kept hearing the name “Chelsea”. There was an ambulance parked outside, a crowd of people on the ground in front of the bar, and the paramedics where wheeling out a stretcher. A girl passing us announced on the phone, “Chelsea drank herself into a coma!”
Oh, Chelsea.
The Irish bar was alright, though rockin’ the upscale vibe didn’t seem to fly well in Menominee. We had a drink and headed out, stopping to hang out atop a propane tank along the way. It was the right thing to do.
On Sunday, we headed westward around 10am, making sure to stop at Seguins and Nueske’s for the required cheese, beer, and meat needs. I cried a bit leaving town… my grandparents and the fact that I may not get back there again, you know? We got home mid-afternoon, and I spent most of the rest of the day in repose on the couch. As always, Wisconsin-time requires plenty of recovery.
(Many more photos, including a tour of my grandparents’ house, are here on Flickr.)
horse tongue! 
We survived the bleak nothingness of southern Illinois and stopped quickly in Metropolis so Stephanie could see Superman. We arrived just in time for some kind of bizarre religious Superman festival; the main street was blocked off and there were vendors selling state-fair food and cheap designer knockoff schlock. A couple hundred old people were crammed in a tent listening to gospel music. It gave us the willies, so we got the hell out of there and crossed the border into Kentucky.
We drove over to see the Parthenon. Stephanie was unimpressed. As a sports fan, she was way more excited by the Coliseum (I even learned there’s a sports team there called the Titans, and apparently they play a game known locally as ‘football’), which was crawling with country music fans in town for the CMA festival. We drove around for a while trying to find a parking spot amongst the crowd of cowboy-hat-tube-top-wearing fans. The nice thing about Nashville is that all the funny touristy stuff is confined to a few blocks along Broadway, from Ryman Auditorium (the original Grand Ole Opry) to the… well, Hard Rock Cafe. Whatever.
Anyway, we wandered. I pointed out the Batman building. We went into the offensive souvenir shop where half the merchandise comes emblazoned with a confederate flag. We stopped into Hatch Show Print, because I’m obsessed (my 
They had a bunch of tents set up, selling state-fair food (again!), and crappy beer. There was a tent with Sharpie markers, one for eBay, and a cooking tent sponsored by Mrs. Dash. No, I’m not joking. There was even a karaoke stage, on which bemused fans in various degrees of patriotic decoration were belting their hearts out to today’s greatest country. It was… interesting. We went to the Charlie Daniels museum instead. And then, we were just in time for the opening of the world-famous Wildhorse Saloon. If you’re not me, you probably don’t recall that it’s the place I learned to line-dance.
I was feeling nostalgic, so I ordered fried pickles even though Stephanie wouldn’t touch them. I ate a few, then had a ‘cowboy’ caesar salad. As she pointed out, I was eating the same thing I eat at Luce: caesar salad and a diet Coke. I told her to shut up, since it was the only thing on the menu I could eat.
We got to Bonnaroo at 10:30, well before the shows started. We had no trouble getting into day parking, as all the campers had finally settled. I wish I could adequately represent what the camping looked like: huge open fields full of tents, as far as one could see. It was pretty awesome. And a complete mess. People were walking down the road to bathe in the dirty creek. The whole place already smelled like garbage. We, however, were clean.
The show was so great. I loved it. We were up close enough to see everything, and they rocked hard in that Tennessee way. They had crazy hillbilly hair and the tightest jeans ever seen on human beings. During the show, which was under a big tent, it started pouring outside, and everybody cheered and ran out into the rain.
We saw Del McCoury and My Morning Jacket, and spent some time laying in the sun listening to whatever band was nearby. I ate a hummus wrap and immediately felt sick because of the heat. It was better to not eat at all, and drink water whenever necessary, but not too much, as we had a very good reason: avoiding the port-a-potties again. Word was getting around about how bad they were already, and there was no way I’d go willingly. So we devised a carefully-executed technique we termed ‘controlled dehydration’: drink enough to stay conscious, but not enough to have to pee. And it worked!
We got coffee, then headed to Jack Daniels. I was hoping Goose would be there to give us a tour. He was working, but had just taken a group out and wouldn’t be back for a couple hours. We didn’t have the time to wait, so we checked out the visitor’s center, did some souvenir shopping in Lynchburg, and then headed back to Manchester.
We heard some of Burning Spear, Marc Ribot, Marc Broussard, Taj Mahal, and Cracker as we walked around. I got a falafel sammich and met some awesome people from Louisiana who talked about their camping nightmare, and how they were prepared to run as fast as possible after the last show that night. We weren’t even waiting around for that, we were leaving after Maroon 5. None of that 9 hour shit again, thank you.
A cute boy complimented my dirty kitty shoes and offered me his pipe; I declined. I hope Stephanie appreciates my restraint. Guster was OK live, but not great. The crowd was really fun, though. The second the show was over, I pushed my way near the front, as instructed by my sister, who was desperate to see Maroon 5 up close and personal. We congratulated ourselves on being maybe 20 feet from the stage before the rumors started circulating: they had cancelled. The singer had blown out his voice. I felt really bad for her.
It wasn’t actually that bad for me, because Stephanie took over driving and I zoned out. I putzed with the CDs, I cleaned the car, I didn’t sleep, but I pretended to in hopes I could even convince myself. On my shifts, I averaged between 80-85, and kept bumping up my time estimates; I had planned on getting home by midnight at the earliest. We managed to hardly stop at all, and were back in Minnesota by 9:30pm.
If you don’t mind, I’ve taken the liberty of redrawing the map in accordance with my theory. So, you’ll see that the large tangerine-colored state is the territory now known as Kentuckinois. The salmon-colored state near the top remains as a tiny remnant of the original Illinois, and contains mostly Rockford and various tollbooths along the interstate. The lime-colored state along Lake Michigan encompasses what is now officially named Chicagoland. All other midwestern states remain as is (for now). I think you will all agree that this is a great improvement on United States cartography.
I dumped the quarters from my wallet onto the table and headed to the jukebox. What I found there was almost too wonderful to relate, but I’ll try: the first twenty or so selections were all songs
On the way out of town, we stopped for coffee; all the Starbucks baristas were singing along with that Natalie Merchant song about getting older, and complaining about their pathetic barista lives. We took a detour to the town of Juliette, home of the Whistle Stop Cafe (of 
We had discovered it in the AAA guide the last time we were in Georgia, and Heather has had recurring fantasies involving their biscuits and sweet tea ever since. They’re only open for ‘luncheon’ during the week. The kitchen is in the middle of the little building, with a lunch counter facing it. There’s a hallway on either side, and then dining rooms that branch out from there. The rooms are small and connect together like a maze. One of them has a large table with eight seats around it; another has two huge old creaking booths and nothing else. The seating is á la VFW post, cheap veneer tables and vinyl chairs. The waitress brought us the bread, which is amazing: buttermilk biscuits and little corn bread sticks. I asked her where the restrooms were located, and she gestured off towards the distance somewhere, saying, “through that door, you take a right and a right and a left and a left.”
I love the south.
Leaving the restaurant, I again felt like crap, so Heather got to drive. I passed out for half an hour in the passenger seat, then felt like returning to the living. She informed me that I had missed the bamboo farm that I was intentionally looking out for, and then pointed out the hurricane evacuation crossovers that allow people to drive on both sides of the freeway while running for their lives. We figured those would probably be in use before long, since Hurricane Isabel was headed that way. At 2:50, I sighted my first seagull. We were getting near the ocean.
(Tybee island is on the Atlantic, 20 miles east of Savannah, across a series of bridges and causeways, and past miles of seagrass, turtle crossings, and palm trees.) The girl at the counter called me honey and sweetie and told me I was very striking. I swooned.
I called the parents to let them know we had arrived safely. They couldn’t believe how quickly we had gotten there, and I could hear my dad silently calculating driving times and speeds in his head, as usual. He highly disapproved of the fact that we had driven all night as well, of course. I told them about Atlanta and Macon and our early-morning visit to the Waffle House. Then my mom told me Johnny Cash had just died. That kind of dampened my enthusiasm for the beach.
We drove three blocks past our hotel and found the end of Highway 80, and a block and a half of little shops and restaurants. We went into a couple stores, which had everything on end-of-season clearance. Heather saw Ben & Jerry’s, so we stopped in, and discovered that their flavor of the month was sugar-free blueberry. Yay!
I got oatmeal with apples and cinnamon, and the world’s largest iced americano. From there, we walked down to the riverfront along the Factors’ Walk. It’s a level down from the rest of the downtown, with cobblestone streets built with the ballast from ships coming from England. The shops there are all pretty cheesy/touristy, and we stopped into one for postcards. One of the women who worked there came running at me from across the store, raving about my hair. And, yes, I had to admit, my hair was perfect. We had named it ‘ocean hair’, because of the effect of the humidity. It was really curly, but not at all frizzy. I hardly had to do anything to it in the morning, just poke it around a little and spray it. It was magical. I wanted ocean hair to come home with me, but that was not to be.
On the way to the hotel, we stopped again at Jaycees Park to see if our ducks were still around. Heather found a gigantic, cranky blue heron, various other waterfowl, tiny fish, and finally, the ducks. This time, we came armed with some styro-corn chips from Schnucks, so they were happy. We met a guy out walking his dog, Lucy. He called her a hound dog and said, “Y’all have a good night,” and I was charmed by his Georgia-ness. We stopped at our hotel, changed, and went back to the beach.