General George Armstrong Custer was born in Monroe, Michigan and lived there throughout his life when not on active duty, off killing Indians or, before that, Johnny Rebs, and in the end being killed by Indians he had neglected to kill earlier.  Mistakes were made. The house he grew up in, at the corner of Elm and Monroe, still stands.  Monore itself, conveniently enough, is in Monroe County, which is in the far southeastern corner of Michigan. We were no where near there on our trip.  We went to Northwestern Michigan, although not as far North or West as you can go if you first go to Central Northern Michigan and then onto (into?) the Upper Peninsula.  We went near, but not to, Custer, Michigan, and even managed to bypass Freesoil, Michigan -- which for sounded far too much like Liberal, Kansas to visit. Not that I've ever been there.   Liberal, Kansas.   Sort of an oxymoron, isn't it? We did visit Peshawbestown (more or less on purpose) and Cedar (several times, all of them involuntary).  We did not go white water rafting;  luckily it rained that day.   Nor did we go swimming in Lake Michigan.  Michigan is an old Indian word meaning "water that never gets warm."  The absence of the fruitful cherry tree picture was not due to a lack of candidate trees.   There are over 500,000 cherry trees in the Traverse City area. We learned that from the National Cherry Festival, which is held in Traverse City.  We had not planned to go to the Cherry Festival.  Nor to Traverse City, but mistakes were made. And while we did not get any pictures of cherry trees laden with fruit, take my word for it, cherry trees in Northwestern Michigan do get laden with fruit.  Very laden.  Somehow we just never found the time or quite the right setting or background or whatever to actually capture the essence of cherry trees by the hundreds of thousands and cherries by the uncountable billions; although the red barn with the big sign reading "Sample Red Barn" came pretty close.  We saw the barn on the larger percentage of our wanderings to or through Cedar.  We wondered what the real one would look like. Cedar is a small town, population about 2500.  There is an annual Polka Festival held on July 24th at the intersection that marks downtown Cedar.  From what we could tell, nearly all the intersections in this part of Michigan are at that red-light in downtown Cedar This was a "Jim" vacation.  As we have reported previously (in connection with a 5 AM visit to O'Hare just before a flight from there, over Orlando and past Palm Beach to Miami, change planes and fly back to Orlando so we could drive two hours back to Palm Beach which is a 30 minute drive from Miami International, where we waited 45 minutes for our connecting flight) we take turns scheduling and planning vacations.  Jim planned this one. It would be more accurate, actually, to say that it was his TURN to plan the vacation. He knew about the Cherry Festival, but figured that two pies and the Fourth of July would pretty much do in the Cherry Festival.   He figured we could wander from town to town in remotest Michigan without worrying about reservations.   He figured that the Cherry Festival was a non event.  He was wrong; the Cherry Festival draws 30,000 people on a Wednesday long after the 4th of July weekend.  Hotels and motels are full.  Those that have a room or two left know about the law of supply and demand and demand $100 for a $52 room. His only planning for the trip was to look at a 15 year old atlas and determine that there was a Michigan State Tourist Welcoming Center on the Interstate as one enters the state.  The sort of place that has brochures and maps and stuff.   Someplace, Louisiana, I think, also has free coffee for travelers.  But you cannot depend on Louisiana customs to prevail at a Michigan tourist center, so we stopped in South Gary, Indiana, for coffee. Fact:  The MacDonalds in South Gary, Indiana, has a police station inside it.  A booth, actually.  Sign:  South Gary Police Substation.  Officer sitting there, looking as though the coffee was not to his satisfaction.  We got our coffee and left.  Quietly. After driving longer than was absolutely necessary for Jim's peace of mind, we did come upon a Michigan State Welcome Station, got brochures and maps and used the rest room.   We switched drivers so Jim could "finish" planning the by then underway vacation.  Lightouses, wineries, Lake Michigan, quaint towns; even a few quaint shops thrown in.  A stop at Holland. Mistakes were made.  The highly recommended Dutch Village at Holland was sort of an industrial strength Cooperstown Farmer's Museum.  The highly recommended Queen Ann's Restaurant next door was not the culinary highpoint of the trip, but was enjoyable.  And we had lots of time to enjoy the interior decor because our waitress was busy looking for the mustard, which was right there a minute ago.  The food was pretty much what you would get in a Bavarian Bierstuben of indifferent reputation.  This was a salutary introduction to Michigonian cuisine.  We had the obligatory cholesterol breakfast at a faux Denny's in Traverse City.  We had what the waitress would let us order, served the way she liked it, at a remote hotel on a rainy night on the Leelanau peninsula.  We left most of the food.  We did not leave much of a tip. Other less than memorable meals were had, but I do not recall them.  I do recall the two evenings we spent at the National Cherry Festival, watching the crowd wander around trying to figure out what they were doing there -- mostly just eating cherry products.   Cherry pie.  Cherry ice cream.  Cherry mustard.  Cherry jam.  Sun dried cherries.  Turkey legs glazed with cherry sauce.  Cherry pizza.  And the sporting events:  Ladder climbing.  Toss the cherry into the milk bottle.  Something that involved several fire hoses.  Cherry beer drinking, which by Michigan law took place in a fenced in enclosure about the size of a football field.  This made sense ast he evening progressed and the competition stiffened. Cherry pit carving, which was more exciting than you would expect, especially  the speed events such as carving the Last Supper on a single cherry pit, or using matched (previously dried, I suspect) cherry pits to assemble a lifelike statue of Knute Rockny using a cherry based glue.  And the Cherry Pit Spit.   I found the finals of the Teenage Girls' division strangely  interesting. Of course, this was after several days isolated in pine forests, driving along glacial moraines and miles and miles of cherry trees, visiting closed wineries, not finding open wineries, parking long distances from rain shrouded, abandoned light houses.  Actually, the lighthouses were pretty good, as was the Sleeping Bear National Sand Dune or possibly Dunes.  I was never clear whether this collection of slowly advancing sand was considered one unit or a series.  Either way, it's one large heap of sand -- seemed to be 20 miles long  and a mile or two wide.  The sand had been and was apparently still being driven up out of Lake Michigan by the prevailing winds and waves.   I've got a brochure around here someplace that explains it, but this isn't a science lesson.  The Northern terminus of the Dune was very steep and very high.  Imagine the edge of a sandpile a mile across and maybe 600 feet high.   But even though it was steep and high and the day was the sort of hot and humid one Coca Cola is preying for with it's temperature sensitive machines, I decided to climb the face of the dune.  About halfway up, panting heavily, I had a heart attack or something very like it.  Sharp pain. Shortness of breath.  Sweats.  I rested until the near blackout passed.   Shawn told me later that the sharp pain I felt in my calf was probably not a heart attack after all, so I remain mystified.  She explained it in medical terms like age and weight and conditioning and other technical terms doctors use to confuse the layman. After a rest I did get to run down the hill and fall and tumble and get all full of sand and try to hop into the car like that and get told I was behaving "just like a little boy" by my traveling partner.  I counted it as a successful outing. In atonement I took her to The Largest Cherry Shop in the World, which seemed to refer to the shop, because their cherries were the same size as everywhere else.   We also ate lunch there and were waited on by the brother of the very large and very slow lady we had met at the Queen Ann so long ago. We had mediocre soup and sandwiches, then stayed and drank our water after the waiter disappeared with our credit card.  He brought the thrice requested water when he brought the bill.  It was that sort of place,  which would have been okay had we brought along our paperbacks.  The newspaper rack was empty, and I'd read all I ever wanted to about cherries so I took a pass on the local Chamber of Commerce's brochures.  Three other customers, probably locals familiar with the service, had books, but did not seem to hear my suggestion that they could tear out the pages as they finished them and pass them over. There was not a culinary high point to this trip.  Best we could do was the salad bar at the Cheap Steak Inn in Manitowoc, Wisconsin,  where the ferry docked.   We took the ferry across Lake Michigan to avoid the MacDonalds in South Gary and the Queen Ann in Holland.   And to get out of Michigan before we saw any more cherries.  Much to Cynthia's perverse enjoyment, we had to leap out of bed at 5:30 am to rush to the ferry docks by 6, in order to board at 6:30, for a 7 am departure.  The only part that made sense was the half hour boarding time.  It took that long to load the approximately 800 cars and trucks onto the S. S. Badger.  Calling this thing a ferry misses hinting at it's size.  It's like calling Lake Michigan a simply a lake.  If you cannot see land in any direction for a couple of hours, and you can't, you'd better be in something bigger than the one car at a time car ferry that crosses the Firth of Forth  to Cromarty.  It runs no longer, but  I've taken it and had a pretty exciting time,  too.  Largest and smallest.  That's me, the record collector.  Any ferry that has a cruise director who organizes bingo and guessing games and such to distract the passengers from their seasickness during the crossing is running a pretty big operation on a pretty large route on a pretty large body of water.  The wind was blowing down the lake from Canada, giving the high sided ferry a 10 to 15 degree list.  It wasn't as exciting as the Cherry Festival, but almost.