Up North ramblings

I spent last Sunday night at this place, and Monday attending a day-long workshop about library instruction at the nearby campus of Busy Bee College.

I've found it very easy to get accustomed to being able to make such trips without having to worry about whether my rusty steed will make it there and back without ending up in the ditch.

After the workshop, I wandered about the town, camera in hand. Cadillac reminds me of a somewhat diluted version of Marquette. It has a residential area with a few nice old lumbermen's mansions:



It has an attractive traditional downtown area with a collection of touristy shops, although none of them were able to satisfy the craving for thimbleberry jam that the sight of think, piney northern forests and blue lakewater had reawakened in me. ("Ya hafta go upta da Yoop, up over The Bridge for that.")

A degree of awareness of the local history is in evidence with this fading but still informative building:



A sign explains the reason for the little Shay locomotive on display near the lakefront.






One of the town's former passenger depots is now a veteran's center, and the nearby lakefront possesses everything that I could reasonably require for a pleasant afternoon's stroll:




It appears that someone in Cadillac has constructed the world's biggest and heaviest set of wind chimes.



Those are brake drums, and yes, they do chime quite nicely when they contact each other. It would take a hurricane-force wind to accomplish this without human assistance. If one gets tired of heaving chains and brake drums together, there's always the nearby giant wooden xylophone and a bench carved out of tree roots for an appreciative audience (if any such existed.)

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As evening approached, so did a short train of the Great Lakes Central, formerly Tuscola & Saginaw Bay Railroad, which has taken over the remnants of the former Ann Arbor and Pennsy lines in the area.



As evening approached and the sun sank toward the lake, the local orchestra prepared to play a concert in the small theater-like structure on the lakeshore.



But not for me. Miles to go, promises to keep, that sort of thing.