US 10
Day 1
Rock All Night. Eat All Day.
Day 2
Ten to the Lake
Day 3
Floating on the Highway
Day 4
One Pavilion, Two Diners
Day 5
The End Is Here
Day 6
On the King of Trails
Day 7
How Sweet It Is
Day 8
The Finale is Sweet, Too
August 3, 2025 (day 8)
I made it home after two repeats, one threepeat, and one completely new to
me roadside attraction and eatery.
August 2, 2025 (day 7)
Unfinished nutcrackers, stationary windmills, and submarines on grass can
be bit unsettling, but ice cream makes it OK.
August 1, 2025 (day 6)
I started home, more or less, on US-75, a.k.a., King of Trails, today, and
got as far as the aspiring Nutcracker Capital of the World. Along the way
I saw giant fish, wooden fishermen, and cars both smashed and not.
July 31, 2025 (day 5)
I reached the current end of US-10 today after visiting some biggies and
dining rapidly.
July 30, 2025 (day 4)
I only had one must-stop on my agenda for the day, but I stumbled across
a dragon, an old service station, and a world's fair pavilion on my way
to the must-stop diner, then worked in a maybe-stop diner, too.
July 29, 2025 (day 3)
The bulk of the day involved crossing Lake Michigan on US-10, but I also
managed to work in a brewery and a Sputnik landing site.
July 28, 2025 (day 2)
It was a nice drive along the section of US-10 east of Lake Michigan.
July 27, 2025 (day 1)
After a Saturday night start with some rock and roll, the trip rolled on
to Bay City with a couple of diner stops and a pause in front of a closed
rock and roll museum.
Prelude - July 9, 2025
It is July and not one trip has been documented here this year. The only
other time that has happened, once the first couple of formative years
had passed, was in COVID ravaged 2020. To be honest, I could have reported
my April birthday trip via a daily journal but chose to do it as a single
after-the-fact blog post instead. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
The primary reason that this is the first journal entry of 2025 is that
three conferences that I have often attended have, for a variety of
reasons, come and gone without me. When I recently noted a blank spot in
my calendar, I grabbed onto something that had been hovering in the back
of my mind since 2019.
At that year's SCA conference in Wisconsin, Christine Henry gave a presentation titled "Blue Highways: Where Cars and Trucks are Passengers". That is when I learned of the SS Badger, a Lake Michigan ferry which was designated part of US-10 in 2015. My initial thoughts were of dashing to one of the ferry's terminals, floating across the lake, and dashing home. I also briefly considered dashing to the eastern terminal, leaving the car, taking the ferry over and back, then dashing home. Of course, all that talk of dashing came from a sense of time pressure that really was not justified. When I finally allowed myself to realize that, I let in project creep, and for once it was a good thing.
I quickly opened up to the idea of looping around Lake Michigan through Michigan's Upper Peninsula from the ferry's western end. Then I realized that I could rather easily reach US-10's eastern terminus. US-10 had never been a full coast-to-coast route. It originally reached Detroit but was truncated to Bay City in 1986. The other end took even more of a beating. As interstate highways took over, US-10's western endpoint was moved from Seattle, WA, to West Fargo, ND. The result is a 713 mile long United States Numbered Highway that I think I can drive end-to-end with dashing, if any, limited to getting home from North Dakota.