Writer Brainers' current Question of the Week is about memorable roadtrips, so I thought I'd weigh in on the topic. But rather than offering up one from my distant past, here's a trip of more recent vintage, fresh from the mental scrapbook of my family's vacation last week in Michigan's Upper Peninsula.
We stayed in the Manistique area at an extraordinarily lovely cabin, and over the course of a week spent plenty of time on the beach. We also took some fun if slightly de rigueur sidetrips to Big Springs, Seul Choix Lighthouse, and Fayette Ghost Town. Many pictures were taken. Much fun was had. Good memories, all of them.
But we also made one sidetrip of a very different nature. We went to.... The Mystery Spot.
Why, you may ask? Why would a family with common sense coursing through its collective veins voluntarily pay an expensive visit to a known tourist trap that is based on nothing more than optical illusions and vestibular disorientation? What an odd thing for her to say! It's downright... mysterious!To understand the rationale behind our irrationality, let me take you back in time for a moment, to my and my husband's childhoods. (Bring your duster -- you'll need it for the cobwebs.) Though he and I didn't know one another then, we likely passed one another on the highway, as both of us made regular trips with our families to the U.P.
Those trips exposed us to those intriguing Mystery Spot road signs: those bright black, red, yellow and white signs dominated by a Giant Question Mark. Oh, those billboards were irresistible! I longed to go to the Mystery Spot. As I've written about previously (in my 9/16/7 entry on my News page) this desire ranked right up there with my fantasy of driving in to a truck weigh station. (Bear in mind when considering these somewhat odd childhood dreams that I spent most of my long car trips of yore stuck in the middle of the back seat, doped up on Dramamine....)
My parents were (and still are) good and smart people who knew full well that (if I can say this without being sued by the Mystery Spot people) a visit to the Mystery Spot would be a waste of time and money. I, and the world at large, know this to be the case. But knowledge was no match for my and my husband's combined 87 years of Mystery Spot curiosity. So when our children expressed their own strong interest in going (OK, well, it was really just a case of "Mom, what's the Mystery Spot?" -- but add thirty or forty years, I'm sure they'd be hankering to go), we figured it was time to pay a visit.
Needless to say, we were underwhelmed. Admission was even more than we suspected it might be, and we had to wait a while for our "tour" to begin, not an easy task with two trip-weary kids. Once "in" the Mystery Spot, our younger son found the tilt and slant of the Mystery Spot building to be so disturbing that he could barely stand to be in it (to an extent that I had to chase him down and demand that he Get Back In Here and Enjoy The Mystery Spot, Now!). Our elder son, an engineer in the making, held up his hand at nearly every opportunity to point out how the principles of physics were being utilized. Still, by the end, we all got into the spirit of doing such a ridiculous thing, and we were laughing happily -- if only at ourselves.
And thus are roadtrip memories made.
But one mystery remains. The brochure for the Mystery Spot invites visitors to "See for yourself why most of our one million visitors return year after year." Say it ain't so. People go back???????
5 comments:
Hmmm. So Debbie, we went to the Mystery Spot also this summer for the first time. My kids LOVED it and are dying to go back. Seriously. Must be a Yooper Thing. Thank goodness I'M not a Yooper :) (Poor kids were born here, but I wasn't!)
p.s. Can you BELIEVE how much it cost????? Ha! Not again in this lifetime, babes...
Debbie--I always wanted to go to the Mystery Spot too. My parents claimed they took me, as a very young child, but I sadly have no recollection of the trip and harbored much resentment toward them and really just suspected they were outright liars on the subject.
One to add to the list of unrealized childhood dreams: to be a bagger at the grocery store. How I died to do this.
Boni, my wallet is still moaning over it. I half expected the cash register to have a sign up, "Fools & Money, part ways here." But I'm glad your kids liked it! It was kinda fun.
Lori, I'm with you on the bagger thing. Contemporary grocery bagging doesn't do it for me, but the old style paper bags used to demand a certain engineering finesse. I always loved it when a bagger could take a huge mass of groceries and manage to fit them compactly into just a few brown paper bags. Ah, those were the days....
Hey, "Odd Childhood Dreams" might make a good Write Brainers Question of the Week?
Deb and Lori- You're welcome to come up and fulfill that childhood fantasy anytime-HA! We still use paper bags and are always looking for new help at our grocery store... I'll even teach you how to bag like a pro!
:)
My parents took us 7 kids to the Mystery Spot when I was old enough to enjoy it (probably about 11, which means the youngest kids don't remember it at all).
I thought it was cool how the water ran uphill and the room got big on one side and tiny on the other, and the floor moved... I felt like Alice in Wonderland.
Even then, I had a sense of the cash outlay, and an appreciation that it was probably a one-time trip.
Our kids always chuckled at the Mystery Spot billboards on the way up north, which is why I put one in the Ellie McDoodle book.
Alas, they still don't know the Mysteries because we haven't taken them there.
Maybe some mysteries are best left alone.
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