TWO PEAS AND THE POD: HURON NATIONAL FOREST (MI)

SATURDAY - Today we're driving 170-miles south in Michigan to go camp in the woods, well actually it's in the National Forest.

About 140-miles of the drive will be down US-23 on the Sunrise (east) Coast of Michigan. From Macinaw City to the town of Oscoda we saw not one, not two, but three Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox statues. None of them seem to measure up to the "original" 1937 statue we saw in Bemidji, MN last month.

The best of the three we saw today, yes the other two were worse.

While the drive down the coast was nice and scenic, we didn't have the ability to pull over into any of the small roadside parks with ROVER and THE POD to take any photos. The parking lots were not set up for RV parking and besides, today is a travel day, not a sightseeing day.

In the town of Oscoda, MI we turned west onto River Road. River Road is a 22-mile long Scenic Byway that roughly follows the path of the Au Sable River. The Byway brochure we picked up at the Forest Service Visitor Center shows 18 points of interest along the road, ranging from simple access points for launching a boat into the river, to large monuments depicting the importance of the logging industry back in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Maybe we'll go check the Byway out tomorrow, after we get set up in our ½-acre primitive campsite here in the forest. It's not just our site that's huge, it's most all the sites here in the Au Sable River Primitive Campsites section.

SUNDAY - Feeling kind of lazy today, but we did manage to get out and do a little sightseeing before 10:00AM.

At the first stop we happened across an annual event here on the Au Sable River. It's the The AuSable River Canoe Marathon, which is billed as a grueling, non-stop 120 mile canoe race starting in Grayling and ending in nearby Oscoda.

Elite paddlers from across the world battle portages around five dams, darkness and fatigue as they navigate the scenic and challenging course. The race starts at 9:00PM on Saturday night and usually the winners cross the finish line before noon the next day.

The end of the 120-mile course is about 18-miles downriver from our campsite where the river passes under the US-23 Highway bridge. We got back to our campsite in time to see the back half of the pack paddle past our campsite, the winners had already finshed the race by the time we set up our chairs to watch the action.

Unfortunately our campsite is on a wide bend in the river and on the wrong side to see the paddlers up close as they hug the far shoreline making the turn.

We did manage to visit one of the main points of interest along the Byway before heading back to camp, the Lumberman's Monument and Visitor Center located just a few miles up the road from our campground.