WI / MI Big Trip

[dirty6]

After about a year of living in Wisconsin, summer rolled around and we had the opportunity to take another “Big Trip” with our 560 (Muiriel). We had lots of ideas and a lack of motivation to pick a route and build a plan, so it all came together pretty late. We considered:

• Isle Royale National Park
• Minnesota boundary waters area, Voyageurs NP
• North Dakota - the only state I haven’t been to, either a quick jaunt to Fargo or all the way out to camp at Theodore Roosevelt NP
• Lower Michigan north of Ludington (we lived for a year in Michigan but never made it past Ludington)
• Upper Peninsula of Michigan
• Oshkosh EAA Airventure airshow

That’s more geographic space than we could cover in one trip, and eventually our haphazard planning started to come into focus with a couple cornerstones. First, the youngest teenage child’s birthday present a few months ago was tickets to a Mumford and Sons concert in Minneapolis on the last day of July. That would be the far boundary of the trip. Then, we agreed to test the waters of the EAA Airventure a couple weeks before the big concert, which formed the near boundary of our trip.

With that shell, we elected to stay north and east with Michigan itinerary options rather than spending the bulk of our time driving out to ND and back. Thankfully, that helped us to dodge the wildfires in northern Minnesota that weren’t on the radar when we made these choices.

Initially, we drew up a plan for Oshkosh, then the ferry from Wisconsin across Lake Michigan, then a lazy wandering hook headed north in Lower Michigan, across the Macinaw Bridge into the Upper Peninsula, and back down to our Wisconsin home before re-setting for a couple days in Minneapolis.

However. That ferry was going to cost north of $800 (!!) for the car, camper, and 3x tickets. Considering the drive up and around the UP from Oshkosh would be 8-9 hours and the trip with the ferry would be 6-7 hours total, it didn’t make sense for us to spend that much to cut out 5-6 hours of driving while only shortening the entire trip by a couple hours. So we opted for the “out and back” route. The itinerary:

Day 1: Drive to Oshkosh (2-3 hours total), set up camp
Day 2-3: Oshkosh EAA and airshows
Day 4: Drive Oshkosh north, skirting Lake Michigan, across the Mackinaw bridge, and down to Traverse City
Day 5-6: Traverse City and local area “stuff”
Day 7: Drive Traverse City north into the UP with a tourist trap stop at Mackinaw Island
Day 8: Sault St. Marie
Day 9: Drive Sault St. Marie to Munising with a detour north to Grand Marias to allow a drive through Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore
Day 10: Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore cruise
Day 11: Drive home, clean and drop camper, re-set from “camp mode” to “hotel mode”
Day 12: Drive to Minneapolis, Royals vs Twins baseball game
Day 13: Minneapolis “stuff” and the Main Event: Mumford and Sons concert
Day 14: Drive home (or, in my case, get dropped off at the airport to begin a work trip)

I’ll add multiple posts to this thread with our activities along that itinerary and some pictures.

 

[dirty6]

Oshkosh and EAA

As a bit of a huge nerd, I have always been fascinated with aviation and flight. My first real dream (dashed by a pair of glasses in the third grade) was to fly Tomcats off of carriers. I grew up loving airshows, and have had the chance to take my kids to a few. But, life is life and the military often constrains when I can attend things, so I haven’t been to an airshow in more than a decade now. When we moved to Wisconsin, I was aware that Oshkosh had “a big airshow” and it was a priority for me to make it there. But I also knew nothing about what this “big airshow” was.

After some solicitation for assistance from this audience, I eventually pieced together some of the construct. We joined EAA for a year as members so we could have access to camping, I sort of started to grasp the map of the grounds and the schedule of events, and we had the beginnings of a plan. While I could have stayed all week, I was worried that the flavor of the daily airshows would not change much (incorrect), and I was also worried that the appeal of the event would soon wear off of my spouse and my daughter since they represented two-thirds of the traveling party but only 10% of the interested party. We settled on a plan to arrive on Sunday, go hard on Monday around the grounds and airshow, and have a slower airshow day Tuesday. Despite the encouragement to not miss the Wednesday night airshow, I thought three days of airshow would be too much for our crew so we decided we would leave on Wednesday morning (and collect our camping refund). Instagram showed me later why that was a poor choice. You all were quite right.

The camping was … certainly something. There was a fun energy to the place, sometimes it was a bit much for us. I can see why a big rig or a proper RV is appealing for an event like this, since it affords some privacy we didn’t have in the Camp-Inn. We also arrived late to the free for all for camping spots and got pretty tucked away in a corner. While we were close to a bank of porta potties, it took a few days for us to figure out the shower situation.

Monday at the EAA grounds was a hot zoo. I was enamored with the Warbirds section. I’ve never seen so many old aircraft together in one spot. I have a particular affection for P-51s and was gaga to see multiple of them parked on the grounds. While the majority of the vendors (catering to the aviation crowd - I don’t have any particular need for an all-glass cockpit) and the forums/lectures were a little beyond even myself, we enjoyed racking up the miles walking around and taking in the event. The afternoon airshow itself did not disappoint, starting with an F-22 teaser and ramping into a number of fun acts. We enjoyed the static displays as well. My family was once evacuated in a real-world emergency from an overseas tour via C-17s, which is a crazy military family memory. My daughter was quite excited to walk onto a C-17 for the first time since then and stand roughly in the spot where she had occupied a seat during a hasty departure from her then-home. Oh, and despite the advanced schedule saying nothing of the Blue Angels or the Thurnderbirds, I was delighted to see Thunderbird 8 scream into the airshow and then park on the grounds for static display.

After racking up the miles on day 1, we took day 2 a little slower. I was even less interested in the vendors at this point, my spouse needed some internet connection to do some remote work, and my knee was achey from all the walking on the first day. We took it slow, went into town for lunch, and didn’t make it onto the EAA grounds until the early afternoon. Our plan was to take in just a little bit of the airshow and then head back to camp for a quiet night. I was still under the impression that the airshow would mostly be a carbon copy of the day before; this was a very mistaken impression. We ended up finding a shady spot without our chairs and reveled in the “theme” of the day’s airshow, with flight after flight of multi-ship WW2 aircraft formations rumbling across the sky in presentations that i’m sure I’ll never see again. We also got a surprise B-1B flyover, which I have never seen in either airshow world or in real world military work.

All the variance helped me to realize maybe it would have been worth it to stay a couple more days and keep experiencing what was new (even the static displays kept changing), but our course was set. We went back to the campground and enjoyed catching a number of the VTOL/STOL shenanigans close to us while settling in for a quiet dinner and preparing for a long road trip the next day. This is my daughter’s new camping gear for the season - a wearable puffy fuzzy blanket and a clip-on LED reading light.

All in all I was overwhelmed and blown away by Airventure. I can’t even begin to list the great things we saw on the ground or in the air. P-38, check. Multi-ship DC-3s, check. BONE, check. Multi-ship P-51s, check. Wild aerobatics performances, check. F-22 and F-16 demonstrations, check. Gorgeous restored DC-6, check. Acres of warbirds, check. Static displays for days, check. The place was chaos but I’d do it again. And, I’m quite grateful we had good weather (not blisteringly hot) and the wildfire smoke abated just before we got there. Now I just need a plane, and a license, and million dollars ….

 

[JohnC]

Thank you for all the photos. (Feel free to post more.) They add a lot for those of us taking it all in vicariously.

 

[dustinp]

Oshkosh and EAA

As a bit of a huge nerd, I have always been fascinated with aviation and flight. My first real dream (dashed by a pair of glasses in the third grade) was to fly Tomcats off of carriers. I grew up loving airshows, and have had the chance to take my kids to a few. But, life is life and the military often constrains when I can attend things, so I haven’t been to an airshow in more than a decade now. When we moved to Wisconsin, I was aware that Oshkosh had “a big airshow” and it was a priority for me to make it there. But I also knew nothing about what this “big airshow” was.

After some solicitation for assistance from this audience, I eventually pieced together some of the construct. We joined EAA for a year as members so we could have access to camping, I sort of started to grasp the map of the grounds and the schedule of events, and we had the beginnings of a plan. While I could have stayed all week, I was worried that the flavor of the daily airshows would not change much (incorrect), and I was also worried that the appeal of the event would soon wear off of my spouse and my daughter since they represented two-thirds of the traveling party but only 10% of the interested party. We settled on a plan to arrive on Sunday, go hard on Monday around the grounds and airshow, and have a slower airshow day Tuesday. Despite the encouragement to not miss the Wednesday night airshow, I thought three days of airshow would be too much for our crew so we decided we would leave on Wednesday morning (and collect our camping refund). Instagram showed me later why that was a poor choice. You all were quite right.

The camping was … certainly something. There was a fun energy to the place, sometimes it was a bit much for us. I can see why a big rig or a proper RV is appealing for an event like this, since it affords some privacy we didn’t have in the Camp-Inn. We also arrived late to the free for all for camping spots and got pretty tucked away in a corner. While we were close to a bank of porta potties, it took a few days for us to figure out the shower situation.

Monday at the EAA grounds was a hot zoo. I was enamored with the Warbirds section. I’ve never seen so many old aircraft together in one spot. I have a particular affection for P-51s and was gaga to see multiple of them parked on the grounds. While the majority of the vendors (catering to the aviation crowd - I don’t have any particular need for an all-glass cockpit) and the forums/lectures were a little beyond even myself, we enjoyed racking up the miles walking around and taking in the event. The afternoon airshow itself did not disappoint, starting with an F-22 teaser and ramping into a number of fun acts. We enjoyed the static displays as well. My family was once evacuated in a real-world emergency from an overseas tour via C-17s, which is a crazy military family memory. My daughter was quite excited to walk onto a C-17 for the first time since then and stand roughly in the spot where she had occupied a seat during a hasty departure from her then-home. Oh, and despite the advanced schedule saying nothing of the Blue Angels or the Thurnderbirds, I was delighted to see Thunderbird 8 scream into the airshow and then park on the grounds for static display.

After racking up the miles on day 1, we took day 2 a little slower. I was even less interested in the vendors at this point, my spouse needed some internet connection to do some remote work, and my knee was achey from all the walking on the first day. We took it slow, went into town for lunch, and didn’t make it onto the EAA grounds until the early afternoon. Our plan was to take in just a little bit of the airshow and then head back to camp for a quiet night. I was still under the impression that the airshow would mostly be a carbon copy of the day before; this was a very mistaken impression. We ended up finding a shady spot without our chairs and reveled in the “theme” of the day’s airshow, with flight after flight of multi-ship WW2 aircraft formations rumbling across the sky in presentations that i’m sure I’ll never see again. We also got a surprise B-1B flyover, which I have never seen in either airshow world or in real world military work.

All the variance helped me to realize maybe it would have been worth it to stay a couple more days and keep experiencing what was new (even the static displays kept changing), but our course was set. We went back to the campground and enjoyed catching a number of the VTOL/STOL shenanigans close to us while settling in for a quiet dinner and preparing for a long road trip the next day. This is my daughter’s new camping gear for the season - a wearable puffy fuzzy blanket and a clip-on LED reading light.

All in all I was overwhelmed and blown away by Airventure. I can’t even begin to list the great things we saw on the ground or in the air. P-38, check. Multi-ship DC-3s, check. BONE, check. Multi-ship P-51s, check. Wild aerobatics performances, check. F-22 and F-16 demonstrations, check. Gorgeous restored DC-6, check. Acres of warbirds, check. Static displays for days, check. The place was chaos but I’d do it again. And, I’m quite grateful we had good weather (not blisteringly hot) and the wildfire smoke abated just before we got there. Now I just need a plane, and a license, and million dollars ….

Yes, even though I tried to explain the enormity of it all to you when you were first inquiring about making the trip there earlier this summer, it's really difficult to do justice to it without actually taking it all in personally.
Your departure and my arrival pretty much coincided, so I'm sorry we weren't able to meet up.
In the 32 yrs I've been flying, I've attended AirVenture approximately 20 times. At first it was every year, and for most of the week, but eventually it got to be every two or three yrs, but never longer than that, and like this year, and several in the past, I have said OK this will probably be my last time here, in a yr or two or three, I find it calling me back. The popularity of the event has been both a boon for the EAA, and a curse for those who remember what it was like decades ago when the daytime crowds were smaller, the campground much less congested, and just a less commercial flavor to it all. Despite those negative changes over that time frame, the fantastic spectacle of it all is hard to resist.
Glad to hear and see that you were duly impressed, and enjoyed your time there.