67 day miles; 1,605 total trip miles
After a hearty breakfast at Perkin's Pancake House, we packed our bags and headed to the ferry. The boarding process takes about an hour - they have to pack in cars, buses, RV's, motorcycles and bicycles. There was a BMW motorcycle rally in Wisconsin, so there was a long line of motorcycles waiting to get on the boat.
The SS Badger was built in 1953 and originally used to transport train cars across the lake. You can still see train tracks in the cargo hold floor. We had to 
tie down our motorcycles against the hull of the boat. The ship is huge, with two passenger decks above the cargo deck. We had a smooth crossing and each of us managed to get in a short nap during the four hour trip.
We landed in Ludington, MI, at 6:15 pm and immediately headed for the Jamesport Brewing Company - a really great pub and restaurant I discovered when I camped in Ludington several weeks ago. We had a 40-minute wait to get a table, but it was worth it. I highly recommend Jamesport to anyone visiting Ludington.Finding good lodging was a different matter. I had called several hotels in town while we were on the boat, but they were either full or had exorbitant prices. So we decided to travel down the coast to find lodging. After stopping at several places we began to get worried - every place was fully booked. Around 10:00 pm, we wondered if we would ever find a place to stay. The receptionist at one hotel had a list of about a dozen hotels, but said they were all full. She then remembered a small privately owned hotel in a nearby town, and called them for us. That hotel had a couple cancellations, and we finally had a place to stay. The western shore of Michigan certainly has more tourists than the north shore of Lake Superior!
1 comment:
Beautiful part of the country would love to ride up there some time.
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