Cooling off

Notes on (finally) taking a vacation, plus my weekly shareables

Grand Traverse Bay on Lake Michigan, seen from the lawn of the Sunrise Landing hotel in Northport. We loved this place.

It had been quite a few years since Alix and I took a real vacation. We spent a lot of time between 2020 and 2024 taking care of Alix’s mom. Then in 2025 my knee decided to give out. We had booked a trip to Michigan last summer and ended up having to cancel the whole thing. This year, we decided to give it another shot. This time, the gods smiled.

We left Charlotte on July 3. It was 98 degrees. Three days and more than 1,000 miles of driving later, we landed on the shore of Lake Superior in Munising, Michigan, way up in the Upper Peninsula. That evening, when we went out and sat by the lake, it was 65. We needed jackets.

This was the whole point of going north. We’re getting older and the planet is getting hotter and the Charlotte summers beat us down. It’s bad enough for me as a Georgia boy, but Alix is from Wisconsin. Her soul begs for the Midwest on these steamy days. Sounded good to me, too.

We aimed for the Upper Peninsula because we read about Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. It’s a series of cliffs and rock formations on Lake Superior—sort as if the Grand Canyon had been dunked in a lake. We took a two-and-a-half-hour tour—perfect weather, calm water—and saw colors and patterns we’ll never forget.

Note the tiny kayakers on the left

From there we came back onto the Michigan mainland and spent three days in Northport, north of Traverse City. There’s a whole string of towns along the Lake Michigan shore that landed in the top 10 of Places I Want To Move. (Only from Memorial Day to Halloween, of course. I’m not about to spend a winter up there.)

We ate blueberry pizza and pasties. We saw three Great Lakes. We crossed beautiful bridges and saw a breathtaking sunset and listened to the rain. We didn’t watch a lick of TV, except for the World Cup, and we mostly stayed off our phones. The biting flies that sometimes swarm the Midwest held off. And the smoke from the Canadian wildfires didn’t drift down that way until we were gone.

I think this is our best vacation ever, Alix said at one point. She was right.

A good vacation is a cooling-off period, no matter the temperature. We set out to see a few things every day but didn’t stuff our time with deadlines. We talked all along the way about our plans and dreams … but then, sometimes, we just said nothing and stared at the lake. We both grew up on the water and it gives us something we can’t quite name but can never replace. Just about every day of the trip, we were on the water or in it or right at the edge of it.

Back at the beginning of the trip, we spent the morning of July 4 in a river town—Point Pleasant, West Virginia, where the Kanawha meets the Ohio. We went there to tour the Mothman Museum, honoring the mythical (?) creature believed to have visited the area before the deadly Silver Bridge collapse of 1967. (There’s a movie about it starring Richard Gere and Laura Linney. It’s just OK.)

The town had its Fourth of July parade right after we finished up at the museum; when it started, we were at the coffeeshop next door buying Mothman cookies. It was a classic small-town parade: beauty queens waving from the back of pickup trucks, cheerleaders sweating in the sun, guys on random tractors, little kids throwing candy to the crowd. We hadn’t planned a parade as part of the trip. A lot of the best things about a vacation are the moments you just run across.

Posing with the Mothman

We don’t buy a lot of souvenirs on these trips anymore—mostly stickers and postcards and such. The experiences are enough. But we did bring something home: Up in Northport, we spent half an hour one afternoon picking cherries. That’s the heart of cherry country and orchards are everywhere on the back roads. We kept a bag of them cold for the ride back home and I’ve been having a few every meal since we’ve been home. They’re cool and sweet and bring back good memories. Just what a vacation should be.

If this edition of the Writing Shed is meaningful to you, consider sharing it with others. That’s how you can help our community grow.

10 things I wanted to share this week:

1. My earlier post this week was on my big summer read: LONESOME DOVE. So many great comments from Shedheads about this one.

2. My latest column for the SouthPark Magazine group is on the waves of summer.

3. The Sunday Long Read newsletter—a huge influence on what I do with these recommendations—had some kind words for my book DOGLAND in its latest issue (scroll about halfway down). If you’re looking for great reading, the SLR always delivers.

4. My favorite story of the week comes from Stephanie McCrummen, one of our best writers about the South. Her latest is on a bookstore in Maryville, Tennessee, that drew attention from the evangelical church across the street: They thought the bookstore held demons. (The Atlantic)

5. A video game called Backyard Baseball had tons of devoted fans in the ‘90s. Then it faded so deeply no one could even find the code. But a second-grade teacher who loved it as a kid brought it back. (NYT)

6. Chasing life goals can be a disappointment and a disaster. So start smaller. How about little experiments instead? (The Guardian)

7. I didn’t know that John Oliver recently had a run on GENERAL HOSPITAL, portraying a supervillain and playing it perfectly straight. And he’s going to be on DAYS OF OUR LIVES soon! (Type Click Type)

8. My next read: Lauren Collins’ THEY STOLE A CITY, about one of the most under-told tragedies in American history: The takeover of Wilmington, North Carolina, by white supremacists in 1898. Lauren writes for the New Yorker and is from Wilmington—I trust no one to tell the story more than her. Here’s an excerpt from the Bitter Southerner.

9. What happens when you find out somebody wrote an AI-generated biography … of you? Kashmir Hill dove into the world of AI slop books … and talked to an author of hundreds. (NYT)

10. It was a great thrill to find out this week that Ben Folds Five is releasing a 30th-anniversary edition of their debut album in September—and pairing it with an early version of the record that ended up being shelved. That debut record is on my list of perfect albums … I’ve still never heard anything else quite like it. And there’s a tour coming! As a promo, they’ve released the early version of “Underground,” which doesn’t sound too different than the original to my ears—maybe a tad slower. Either way, it’s a killer.

    Have a great weekend, everybody.

    —TT

My books DOGLAND and THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM are available in all formats pretty much everywhere books are sold.