I got a unique opportunity to visit counties in a corner of the Midwest I hadn’t touched much when my older kid decided to go to college in Michigan. But it didn’t offer a lot of time for my quest, just a four year window before graduation. Even so, I set what I thought was a rather ambitious goal. I wanted to finish visiting every county in Michigan’s Lower Peninsula (“The Mitten”) while I still had a logical reason to drive up there. Today I’m happy to report “Mitten Accomplished” with more than a year remaining on my self-imposed deadline! My Michigan map looks oh so much better now.
The route was pretty simple, basically head west on Interstate 96, skirt Grand Rapids and Muskegon, and drive up U.S. Route 31 into Oceana County. Yes, only a single county remained unvisited within The Mitten since last July and it gnawed at me. I had to look at that stupid map with its gap-tooth cavity abutting Lake Michigan for months. It’s very frustrating when a County Counter confronts a doughnut hole composed of a single county.
Several previous trips to Michigan brought excellent progress, including a stellar effort last summer. Unfortunately, I never captured Oceana by sheer happenstance. Somehow all my routes crossed elsewhere. I would need to make the most exacerbating, lowest accomplishment journey imaginable for a county counter: a lengthy, single-capture trip.
Crossing the Line
I could get to the southern edge of Oceana in about two hours on limited access highways with 70 mile per hour (110 kph) speed limits. So at least that worked in my favor. Traffic was light and the weather cooperated in spite of the time of year. It’s not the furthest I’ve traveled for such a frivolous purpose — I think maybe West Wendover just edged it — but it certainly pushed the boundaries of acceptability. The goal has to be pretty special to justify a four hour drive, and in this case I think it did.
I wondered why they called it Oceana County though, when the nearest ocean was several hundred miles away. The county does abut Lake Michigan which is somewhat ocean-like in a freshwater kind of way. Also, some people call the Great Lakes shorelines the “Third Coast,” so it seemed to apply in a figurative sense.
My destination? Well, “Rothbury Rest Area 529” on northbound U.S. Highway 31, of course (map). It seemed to be constructed in a 1970’s Pizza Hut architectural style with that peaked roof. More importantly, it sat about a mile over the Oceana line so I could get photographic proof of my accomplishment.
However, now we were two hours from our starting point and it didn’t make sense to just drive back with nothing else to show for it. Likewise, it didn’t make sense to drive out there to begin with, and yet somehow I rationalized it. But I cast that aside because I had activities in mind. Like lunch.
A Brief Stop for Lunch
Muskegon was the closest sizeable town on the return trip, maybe twenty minutes back from the target. From there it was simply a matter of finding the closest brewery to add to my list. I’d not been to one in this particular corner of Michigan so that was an added bonus.
It’s interesting to watch the brewery / brewpub model evolve. True brewpubs once ruled the landscape, with full-service restaurants in historic downtown neighborhoods. Later came the breweries without restaurant overhead, sprouting from gritty industrial parks. More recently something closer to a middle ground has emerged, not quite a restaurant and not quite a utilitarian brewery.
Unruly Brewing in Muskegon represented this convergence (map). It sat in an historic downtown although it skewed more towards the brewery end of the scale. However, it also had a completely separate counter where bar-food options like pizza and sandwiches were available.
The Bargain
My older kid will sometimes join me on my pointless quests but it generally requires a quid pro quo. Often it involves a zoo, or a whole string of zoos. That’s fair. I’ll take that bargain.
This time it was a little different. I had to reserve a slot for an aquatic insect hunt so the kid could work on a class assignment. We found a lake near Muskegon, specifically at Smith Ryerson Park (map), and I stood around for awhile while the search commenced. I sort of thought insects simply died during the winter but apparently many of the aquatic ones go through various lifecycle stages during that time. They remain quite active even below sheets of ice.
Fortunately we didn’t have to worry about that. Temperatures remained unusually warm, hitting at least 50° Fahrenheit (10° C) on most days. That’s unexpectedly nice for late November in Michigan. It snowed pretty good about a week earlier but it melted before we arrived.
Unfinished Business
I had one final stop on the way back. This was a little bit of unfinished business I didn’t have time to complete when we visited Grand Rapids in 2016. A cemetery sat on the grounds of the Michigan Veteran Home just off I-96. That’s the final resting place of my great-great-grandfather, John M. Howder, a Civil War veteran. He lived at what was then called the Michigan Soldiers’ Home when he passed away in 1903.
We stopped by to pay our respects for a few moments, and appreciated the fortunate weather that made it all possible. I had visions of skipping it once again as I planned the trip because one never knows how it will go. It’s hard to find a marker in the snow although we didn’t have any issues that day. Also, I’ll leave this next bit of information more for myself than for the Twelve Mile Circle audience in case I ever want to find it again: Plot 4; Row 14; Grave 15 (map: 43.02047,-85.65820).
Now I wonder if I can finish the Upper Peninsula over the next eighteen months, and then I can call Michigan done.
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