My county counting hadn’t gone so well this year thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. I did manage to make that one brief trip to Pennsylvania to complete the state. There I picked up a dozen new counties. Not bad. However, that hardly moved the needle overall. I knew one more opportunity loomed as the summer ended. Maybe I could squeeze in a few more counties deep within the Michigan mitten?
Those following the 12MC Twitter already knew the details. My older son finished high school this year and Michigan State University offered him a nice scholarship. So we got ready for the first of what would be many drives up to the campus in East Lansing (map).
It seemed like a nice opportunity for a vacation, too. The Pennsylvania trip worked out so well that we decided to try something similar here. We planned to arrive a week early and relax at another lake, this one in Michigan. At the end of the week we’d drop our son off at school and head home. Unfortunately MSU decided to go all-virtual for the semester just days before our trip. Undeterred, we took our vacation anyway!
New Counties
The trip — other than the college thing — actually went well. We got some family time and I collected a bunch of new counties. Notice the tight cluster. I concentrated on a contiguous set of counties in the middle of the state. This also left me in a good position to finish the Lower Peninsula in three more manageable chunks. Maybe that’s optimistic. However, I certainly hope I have multiple opportunities over the next four years. I can’t imagine the kid will have to take classes from his bedroom until he graduates.
Sixteen new counties joined my list, all in Michigan: Arenac; Bay; Clare; Crawford; Genesee; Gladwin; Iosco; Isabella; Kalkaska; Midland; Missaukee; Ogemaw; Osceola; Roscommon; Saginaw; and Wexford. That pushed my lifetime total to 1,535 or 48.8% of counties in the United States. It seems like I’ve been bumping up against that 50% ceiling for the longest time. I can’t wait to get past it.
Most of the captures happened on a day-long loop to Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore on Lake Michigan. We took a much shorter drive to a beach on Lake Huron another day and got a new county. Then I went on an hour-long “out and back” to grab two more. Unfortunately I left two potential captures behind because we never ventured down to East Lansing. One of them created something of a doughnut hole. Nonetheless I didn’t worry about it because that blank county (Shiawassee) will be an easy catch next time.
New Overnight Counties
I started counting “overnight” counties a few years ago as a special category. Spending the night in a county seemed more remarkable than simply driving through it.
We chose to stay overnight both on the way up and on the way back rather than drive 10+ hours in a single shot. That allowed me to finagle stops a bit to spend the night in some new places. I hadn’t used a hotel during the COVID-era so that became a new experience too. Of course I’d never been to our home base in Michigan before either, so I added a total of three overnight counties to my list.
Portage County, Ohio
We drove to Michigan via the Pennsylvania and Ohio Turnpikes. I’ve covered both of those roads many times, so nothing new there. However, I’d rarely stopped along the way so it left the field wide open. I selected Streetsboro in Portage County. It offered nothing much of note other than several acceptable hotel options and easy access to the turnpike. On the other hand, Portage County did appear in 12MC’s “Portage USA” article so that counted for something, I guess.
This location landed us right near the border of Summit County too. I’ll save that little piece of knowledge for a future trip.
Gladwin County, Michigan
During our week in Michigan, we based ourselves at a house in Gladwin County, on the shores of beautiful Lake Lancer. That put us about 120 miles north of MSU (map). It would have been an easy drive to drop our son off at the end of the week although, obviously, that didn’t happen. I’ll talk about the lake in more detail in a future article. For now I’ll simply mention that it allowed us to tally an overnight in a fairly obscure non-Interstate county. It sat within a rather lightly populated, generally out-of-the-way, rural part of the state.
Butler County, Pennsylvania
I felt most proud of my final overnight county. Discerning readers will notice that only a small segment of the Pennsylvania Turnpike barely clipped the southwestern corner of Butler County. The area fell within Cranberry Township (map), an exurb of Pittsburgh. I totally engineered this capture.
We wanted to get closer than halfway home on this leg because we had to drive through the remnants of a large storm on the second day. However, Allegheny County wouldn’t do me any good. I’ve done lots of overnights in its principle city, Pittsburgh (in 2017 for example). So I had to make sure I selected a hotel on the correct side of the border, which ran very close to the required highway exit. Mission accomplished.
And I got to visit Mars for an added bonus.
Articles in the Exploring the Mitten Series
See Also: The Complete Photo Album on Flickr
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