caracolina

After breakfast at Frankfort’s Crescent Bakery we headed north for a short drive to the Point Betsy Lighthouse, then returned briefly to Frankfort where I filled up a bottle of water from the local mineral springs and hunted down a few locally made “Frankfort” stickers.

Finally on the way south we stopped for some apples at a roadside stand and met Greg M. who almost sold us on an acre of land right around the corner. We even toured it! It was very pretty, affordable, and tempting, but we just can’t decide on where else other to put roots down quite yet. Plus there was really nothing on the land yet which is a little daunting considering all the work that goes into homesteading from scratch. And again, something that did strike us was how friendly everybody was here in the countryside. Very refreshing considering how impersonal life in Phoenix can be and definitely something to consider in the search for our future farm.

We had lunch in Onekama at the Fish Tale Cafe (home of a humongous burger which I think was called Whale Tail Burger) and did some more sightseeing in the pretty town of Manistee. After strolling down the riverwalk we realized that time was catching up with us fast and we headed for the highway towards St. Joseph, where we watched the sunset by the lake. Just as we were going to return to the car I noticed someone had left a cell phone at the beach. It took quite some time to first call someone who actually knew the owner of the phone and then some more time for him to locate her. Eventually we found a police officer and handed to phone over to him just as the owner called to arrange a meet-up but we were now able to get on our way.

Our original plan had been to stay in St. Joseph or Benton Harbor for the night but we couldn’t find any decent motel (the part of Benton Harbor that we saw was downright scary – lots of boarded-up store fronts) so we decided to keep driving towards Indiana to shorten tomorrow’s drive. However we did make two stops before leaving town: First to do our laundry, then to pick up a fast food dinner at BK. We kept driving south until we found a motel in Niles just before the Indiana stateline.