Riding a motorcycle for days is almost like being in solitary confinement. No real interaction with other people when you are in motion. Like looking through a window at the world. An occasional "motorcycle wave" to the other bikes you pass, a brief comment to the other riders in your group when you stop at an intersection. Universal sign language helps you communicate. It's just me, myself and I taking in all the sights and being able to absorb them and analyze what I saw, it's a different way to travel. They say when you lose one of your senses your others kick it up to compensate and funny enough it's true. My eyes were it!
One of the things that were very apparent to me were the different classes of people that made their homes in the North. Traveling the back roads we saw the poorest of families trying to live with barely a roof over their head. Their make shift homes were old trailers that had been added onto with whatever they could find to add a few more square feet. No city code in place here. Broken big wheels, rusted bikes, toys for the poor? Trying to make extra money by selling firewood to the tourists for their campsites. Everyone seemed to have something for sale, lined up along the road just waiting for someone to come along and put an extra couple of dollars in their pockets. You just wonder how they make it from day to day, because you cannot figure out where they could be employed because there just isn't much up their outside of town.
Do they worry the same way we do? Think about what you worry about and wonder if someone in that environment worries about the same things? Sobering thoughts.
When you made it to town you discovered the wealthiest of families enjoying their Summer homes. The lakefront homes with sun kissed children running around enjoying all the toys they can accumulate on the shore. Jet skis, pontoons, dune buggies, water ski's, water trampolines, even a few sea planes dotted the coast line. I think the biggest gap in class was never more prominent than in Harbor Springs. Now mind you, these are places I have never been so it is all new to me. Taking it all in for the first time. As we approached Harbor Springs it was almost like crossing over from Detroit to Grosse Pointe. It was a sudden change. A simple road as a definition.
Harbor Springs almost gave me the creeps. As beautiful as it was, it seemed fake. A movie set we had stumbled upon? The homes were perfect, the people walking down the street were perfect, the store fronts were perfect, the blades of grass were so green and perfectly manicured, not a weed to be found. If not for the for sale signs dotting the landscape, I would be hard pressed not to think it was a back lot of a film studio, built for a Steven King novel... everything so perfect, there must be a sinister undercurrent present. But, I know it was real, those for sale signs were the clue. I have solved the mystery. The very poor and the very rich all have the same issues. Right now it's money! So different, yet so much the same.
