Today we familiarized ourselves pretty thoroughly with the town end of Mackinac Island. We started out at the fort, where the boy scouts raised all the flags en masse at 9:30 accompanied by Reveille. There were various re-enactors in costume showing how to load and fire a period rifle, how to load and fire a period canon, how to march in formation, how to play period children's games, and so forth. All of the buildings have been restored (all original to the fort from the 19th century), and they are furnished to show the supply house, the commandant’s office, the officers’ quarters, the enlisted men’s quarters, and the like. We learned that the fort was, indeed, staffed during the Civil War—by one man, a 61-year-old sergeant. It was used, briefly, during the war to house three Confederate prisoners from Tennessee, until it was decided that it was too expensive to keep a unit there for three men, at which point, the unit and the prisoners were sent elsewhere, leaving the sergeant to his own devices for the next three years or so. The fort is quite an interesting spot, even though there is no passport stamp (the fort’s having passed out of the National Park System just about 100 years before the passport program began. I think we should get some sort of extra credit for picking up places that USED to be NPS sites—we could get credit for the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, too.)

After lunch, we took a walk down the east side of the island . We visited a butterfly house (tickets included with our Bed & Breakfast fee) and ogled the numerous period buildings. Many are historic landmarks, including a Catholic church that was founded by Pere Marquette in the 18th century and moved to Mackinac in something like 1850. We then climbed up the hillside to the East Bluff to ogle less historic but perhaps more oglable houses: the summer "cottages" of the very rich. I’ve included a photo of the most decadent of these, a little hut called Baby Grand. It must be about 5,000 square feet inside.

I spent a lot of the day gawking at the many horse-drawn transports. I saw beer trucks, grocery trucks, package delivery trucks (there is also a UPS bicycle), and trash trucks of every variety. Someone (presumably the town of Mackinac Island) hires a fleet of pooper scoopers. These men ride around on bicycles outfitted with a disposal bin and they shovel up the manure left by the horses. As you might imagine, in a town of 500 people and 600 horses, this is a full-time effort by SEVERAL people . They do a good job, too. The streets stay pretty clean. (Early in the morning, there is a brigade of street washers that wash Main Street with some perfumed water. It smells a bit like lavender to me, but since Mackinac Island advertises itself as Lilac City—and there is a big Lilac festival mid-June—I’m guessing that the scent is Lilac.

About five minutes after we got off the ferry yesterday I said to Tim that I could already foresee that I would be leaving with about 400 pictures of horses; since I took right around 700 photos in two days, I am sure that 400 with horses in them is a conservative estimate.

We got back to the B&B about 6, and Tim took another little walk around the west side of the island. We walked partway up the West Bluff yesterday when we went to ogle the Grand Hotel, but he finished the job. He also saw the infamous monument to Somewhere In Time. If you’ve never seen this work of wonder starring Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour, you can easily imagine how bad it is by thinking about the kind of movie that would star BOTH Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour . Short version: modern man accidentally travels back in time, meets woman of his dreams, spends rest of movie trying to figure out how to get back in time to be with her. I saw it about the time it was new, I think, in 1979. It was filmed largely at the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island. At any rate, apparently the Somewhere in Time fan club meets at the Grand Hotel every year for some sort of weekend debauch, and somewhere along the line they installed a monument (NOT on hotel grounds—that would never do!). Evidently it consists of a rock with a photo embedded. Tim did not waste any electrons taking a photo and I did not care enough to go look at the thing myself—though I bet it would make a fantastic tacky postcard!

We had a very nice dinner at a restaurant down by the harbour and now it’s time for bed—it’s just about dark and Taps is playing.

Tomorrow we transfer to Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore on the Upper Peninsula. This is another spot we visited sans passport in 1991.