The Centennial Beach Massacre, Touchdown Jesus, the Blue Lep . . . and Much More!!!

LA/XC-4 DAYS TWENTY-NINE AND THIRTY:  POSTING FROM PORT CLINTON, OHIO

Two-day mileage from Kenosha, WI to Port Clinton, OH:  481

Total LA/XC-4 mileage:  8,139

Road Music:  “Sweet Home Alabama” endlessly, to see if it still deserves #1 on Hank Herman’s 300 Favorite Songs of All Time, the revised edition, coming out this summer (I think it still does); “Free Bird,” just for that killer instrumental;

“Duets” playlist (“Better In the Long Run,” Miranda and Blake; “Who Says You Can’t Go Home,” Jon Bon Jovi and Jennifer Nettles; “Mockingbird,” James Taylor and Carly Simon, et al); Bring You Back — Brett Eldredge; Sirius cycle, and, of course, the Mets!

Weather leaving Kenosha Friday morning: 49 crisp degrees and beautiful blue sky for the 80th day in

a row, coinciding with the Mets win streak, which coincides with when I started wearing my Mets cap every day . .

Weather arriving Port Clinton Saturday night:  43 degrees — and windy on the shores of Lake Erie!

Two-day state tally:  5 (Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio)

New states for the Beagle Man:  1 (Michigan — my final new state of the trip and the 49th state I’ve visited overall; only missing Alaska)

Gas money to date:  $717.11

Most enchanting road sign:  Bono (OH)

What a stunning comeback on the penultimate (yes, I do like that word) day of this year’s Beagle Man Tour!  What a perfect day!  I don’t

know if I’ve had many better in my entire 4-year LA/XC series.  And all the more gratifying because it came on the heels of a 24-hour funk I’d hit from early Friday morning through early Saturday morning.  I’ll get back to the events of that special Saturday in a moment . . .

But first, I want to explain how LA/XC-4 went briefly off the rails, and why.  After writing my long catch-up post late-Thursday-night-into-early-Friday-morning, I took my foot off the gas.  I could already smell the barn (home in three days!), and lost my sense of urgency.  So I took my sweet time getting myself out of Kenosha Friday morning, and was about an hour late for a visit

with Laura, one of Carol’s favorite friends and business associates, in Winnetka, Illinois.  Had a longer-than-planned stay there — you’ll see — and then it was on to our good friend Rich in Kenilworth.  Rich and Irene live in a beautiful house on Lake Michigan, and Rich was plying me with good food and cappuccino — so what’s the rush?  I finally left for South Bend at 5PM, instead of 2PM, as planned, hit rush hour traffic on the Chicago loop, made a bunch of bad directional decisions, and got to my room in South Bend after 10.  Ooops — forgot — new time zone.  There goes another hour.  Now it’s 11PM — and every restaurant is closing down around me.  I try to find my way to some Notre Dame hangouts, but get lost, of course, give up, and have dinner in my room — an Asian-style chicken salad that Rich had very fortunately forced me to take along from his house.  Meant to settle down and work at this point, but washed the chicken salad down with two glasses of wine, and fell asleep on the floor next to Kemba’s crate, after whispering to him my nighttime sweet nothings.  Woke up at 3:30AM, got into bed, setting my iPhone alarm for 6:30, so I could kinda get back on schedule.  Next

thing I knew, Kemba was whining to get out at 8:40 . . . and I was in deep doo-doo, again, time-wise.

So maybe it was the over-confident feeling that I had this road trip licked that sent me into the momentary tailspin.  Or maybe it was the shock of witnessing the carnage that took place Friday at Centennial Beach . . .

Allow me to set the scene for you.  I arrive at Laura’s beautiful house in well-manicured Winnetka, and for awhile, Amazing Grace, her

adorable puppy, and Kemba, my adorable puppy, play an adorable game of you-can’t-catch-me in Laura’s picture-perfect backyard.  Now Grace is a small Terrier/Beagle/Bernese Mountain Dog/Dalmatian/Border Collie/Harrier Hound mix.  With an emphasis on the Harrier Hound.  Trust me on this.  The two young dogs sniffed and gamboled and pranced and frolicked, like the two innocents they are.  Then Laura said she’d drive us all to Centennial dog beach on Lake Michigan, the attraction she’d promised me via e-mail.

Kemba immediately induced me to start firing the usual endless volley of tennis balls into the lake/ocean, while Grace stayed off by herself along the sea wall.  She seemed very involved with sniffing.  Very involved.  Next thing we see is the adorable, innocent Amazing Grace racing along the beach, thrashing her head back and forth, with a small animal — we assumed it was a rat — dangling from her jaws, and screeching.  Laura and I were both horrified.  I grabbed Kemba’s leash so he wouldn’t join the fray, but he had no interest; he was only annoyed that I’d stopped flinging tennis balls.  Grace devoured whatever it was she’d killed — or almost

killed — and then went back for more!  When she grabbed her second victim, Laura realized what was going on:  Her dog had discovered a rabbit hole!  As I said earlier, Grace is part Harrier Hound.  A Harrier, says Wikipedia, is a “medium-sized dog of the hound class used for hunting hares by trailing them.”  And, apparently, swallowing them whole.  While they’re still alive.  And still screaming.  It was a bloodbath.  Grace caught and devoured four bunnies (maybe five; we were so stunned we lost count) before I had Laura hold onto Kemba so I could catch Grace by jumping around like a cheerleader (Heather the dog trainer taught me this trick; see, I learned something, Heather), which slowed Grace long enough for me to grab her collar.  Or maybe she stopped because there was nothing else in the rabbit hole but Alice.  As we drove back to the house, we waited for the deluge of vomit — it seemed Grace had consumed nearly her weight in bunnies — but even as of 24 hours later, according to a text from Laura, Grace was still fine.  I guess the little Harrier was just doing what she was raised to do — and doing it pretty well.

O-M-G, is all I can say.

So now we’re back to Saturday at Notre Dame.  And it’s way later in the morning than I’d planned.  And I’m still supposed to be in

Ann Arbor later in the day, and at Penn State by evening.  But I say to myself, damn it, I’m not leaving South Bend without seeing Notre Dame!  I’m going to see this freakin’ campus if it kills me.  So in spite of a steady freezing rain, I make all the right moves.  First, I have a few cups of coffee.  Then I quick e-mail Greg’s friend Derr (of Zermatt 6 fame), who went to B-school there, for a rundown of don’t-miss sights.  Then I put on my bright yellow LL Bean slicker, the very last article of clothing I hadn’t yet worn — perfect packing job! — and which the Notre Damians probably took for school colors.  I leash Kemba, and head, as Derr instructed, straight for the Golden Dome.  And since I’d deprived Kemba of his morning dog park fix, I keep him on point by heaving tennis balls in the direction of every stop I want to make — Dome, Basilica, Grotto, Stadium.  And, of course, Touchdown Jesus.  Very efficient and successful visit, if I do say so myself.

Next up:  the three-hour-plus drive from South Bend to Ann Arbor.  Got to the land of maize and blue about a day later than I’d originally planned, but this was another campus I’d never been to, in a state I’d never been to, so damn it (again!), I wasn’t gonna skip this one, either.  Nell, the daughter of our good friends Rick and Susan (remember, the horse ranch in Santa Ynez from earlier in the trip?), gave me a super tour of campus hot spots, rivaling the one her older brother Mack gave me at THE Ohio State University on LA/XC-3.  She left me at “the Arb” (Wolverine-speak for Arboretum), which she’d selected as the

perfect place for Kemba’s fetch/workout I’d told her we needed.  A jogging couple — Riemer, a med student, and Anna, a nurse — broke off their run because they absolutely had to be introduced to my handsome puppy.  Anna actually recognized him as a Duck Toller because, she said, she watches a lot of dog programs on TV.  I don’t know if they were just slackers who didn’t want to run, or if they’d fallen head-over-heels for Kemba, but they hung out with us for 45 minutes.

And then:  Nell had told me about a couple of legendary University of Michigan bars on South U (that’s Wolverine for South University) where I might find souvenir T-shirts.  I happened upon one of them — the Blue Lep (that’s Wolverine for Blue Leprechaun) on the way back to my car.  And here’s why the Blue Lep is now — at least for today — my favorite bar in America:  1.  The menu is perfect, and I just happen to be starving (remember: road diet is just a Muscle Milk in the morning and a Clif protein bar in the afternoon), so I order the blackened grilled shrimp skewers, which is spectacular, and a Jack D on the rocks, my new country-music-themed drink; 2. John, my bartender, couldn’t be more welcoming, and he finds the Mets-Yankees game for me on the screen facing my seat; 3. Matt Harvey is mowing down the Evil Empire as my red-hot Metsies resume their roll; 4.  Yes, they do have the souvenir T-shirts I’d originally wandered in there for, and 5. Lauren, my bar tender-ess, has a dazzling smile and an upbeat attitude, and when I tell her as I settle the bill that she forgot to charge me for the T-shirts, she winks and says, no, it’s in there.

I thought it would be a good idea to get out of Dodge after The Perfect Bar Experience and the free T-shirts, but I decided to push my luck, and asked John if I could easily find Michigan Stadium without getting too lost or going too far out of my way.  He gave me directions — and you can see my money shot of the Big House, below.

On tap for Sunday:  Throw some balls into Lake Erie for Kemba to fetch; drive 571 miles from Port Clinton to WePo, and sleep in my own bed tonight, even if I make it home after midnight, because Kemba and the Beagle Man WILL NOT SPEND ONE MORE NIGHT IN A MOTEL!!!

RANDOM ROAD NOTES:

•  After two dismal Best Western experiences in recent weeks (Tempe, AZ earlier in the trip, and my house-of-horrors in Kenosha this past Thursday night), and after one dazzlingly positive stay in a Comfort Suites Friday night in South Bend — and since I finally cashed in on my Best Western Rewards free room — I’m back on the Comfort Suites bandwagon . . . at least until they have a bad night.  I suppose it’s all kind of moot, since there’ll be no more motel rooms (please God!) on this trip, but I just want to put all the chains on notice:  The Beagle Man operates on a meritocracy.  (Or, as Carol put it, an “Americatocracy.”)

•  Made a wrong turn coming out of Kenosha while T-Swift and Tim McGraw were on my iPod singing “Highway Don’t Care.”

•  Saw my life flash before my eyes on Friday:  As I was simultaneously patting myself on the back for my great self-guided tour of Notre Dame and jogging back to the car with Kemba, I thought I heard something hit the ground.  Wasn’t going to look back, but did — and saw my voice recorder on the pavement.  The voice recorder that only has the record of my entire 31-day road trip on it.  The voice recorder that I haven’t backed up even once on my laptop — though it would probably take all of 5 seconds.

•  Wait a minute:  Did I really see the RV/MH (Recreational Vehicle/Motor Home) Hall of Fame some 25 miles outside South Bend???  Yes, I believe I did.

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Full disclosure:  While this entire post was written in Port Clinton Ohio, I ran into technical difficulties in trying to publish from the road.  So I’m actually filing from the comfort of home — which I did in fact reach after midnight.  More about the fiasco that was Sunday in an upcoming post . . .

I PLAN TO POST AS CLOSE TO DAILY AS POSSIBLE WHILE KEMBA AND I ARE ON THE ROAD.  BUT YOU KNOW WHAT THEY SAY:  MAN PLANS, GOD LAUGHS.    OH, AND BTW, YOU CAN ALSO FOLLOW ME ON FACEBOOK, TWITTER AND INSTAGRAM.