Before you get too engrossed in this tale, I want to remind you that all of the emails that I have written so far are now available on the World Wide Web at
http://www.etal.com
When you get there, just click on the biplane icon, and follow your nose. This is the work of Bill Newland, the webmaster at etal.com and a longtime TeleMagic fan. He's done some other neat stuff on the web site that relates to this biplane adventure, so check it out. There's even a picture of the plane.
OK, so here's what happened today:
Slept as late as possible, knowing that there is just not much to do on this island. Our hotel is right on the main street in town, and my room is facing the street, so my alarm clock was the clip-clop of horses hooves on the street as the town came to life. The air up here is very clear, and this far north the temperature gets down there at night, so sleeping with a window open contributes to a very good night's rest.
Great breakfast, then a long walk out of town to the Grand Hotel. This place is the main attraction on the island, and has been for a hundred years. The longest porch in the world. The largest summer hotel in the world. And a bunch of other distinctions. What I found to be the most extraordinary aspect of the hotel was the unbelievably hideous furniture in the lobby. A huge lobby jam packed with sofas and chairs upholstered in the most disgusting colors of bilious green, orange, pink, lavender, and others I couldn't identify. The rooms were kinda average. The whole experience was highly overrated in my opinion. But they sure did have some fine horse-drawn carriages, great looking horses with some first class rigging, and very well uniformed drivers and attendants.
We had to get out of there before 5pm when the men are required to wear ties and jackets, and no respectable biplane pilot (oxymoron?) would be seen doing such a thing.
Walked back to the main street in town, up one side and down the other, realized that there was no change at all in the same shops selling the same fudge, and came to the conclusion that this place is just plain BORING.
Came back to the room to catch up on some email (seems like I'm getting about 30 emails a day from friends who want me to visit with them, or their relatives, or offering travel tips, etc.). Got into it for about 15 minutes then fell asleep for a well-deserved nap. About 90 minutes later, through the open window I hear the unmistakable sound of a big radial engined airplane, and.... sure enough, its a red Waco biplane flying low over town, out toward the airport. It's our friend Mike Potts, who is the chief pilot for a biplane ride service. We met him at the Waco factory just a couple days ago and he said he may stop in to see us when we were at Mackinac Island.
He was taking his father for his annual Father's Day ride in an open-cockpit biplane. We all went to dinner together and then took the horse-drawn taxi back out to the airport to watch them take off into the sunset. It was a real treat to see our three great looking planes sitting next to each other in the light of sunset. We watched him take off and circle around for a low, slow pass over the runway before pulling up and heading home to the mainland.
On our ride back to the hotel, I got a lesson in why man invented the internal combustion engine. Riding behind horses has a certain adventure all its own. Especially when the horses seem to have gotten themselves into a bad batch of oats. Although the internal combustion engine is noisy, and odious, I would suggest that it is a vast improvement over the noise and smell of the EX-ternal combustion of the horses. I shudder to think what L.A. would smell like with 20 million horses on bad oats.
So that's it for today. Boring, yes. But a day to recharge before we head out of here. Tomorrow we fly low over the shoreline of Lake Huron, down to Pontiac. Young Mike Potts says that Pontiac is jumping on Saturday night, and the jumpingest place is the bar at the airport, and we can pull our planes right up in front of the place. Hopefully, Pontiac will be the last day we spend in Michigan, then we head east to Niagara Falls, NY. At least that's the concept, but we've seen that the best laid plans of mice and biplane pilots often goes astray.
I wonder what's going to happen next?