It’s hard to find a hiking trail in the Lower Peninsula that allows for a 3- or 4-day hike with dispersed backcountry campsites. Jordan River Pathway is advertised as a 2-day hike, but with the new detour around the wetlands, that’s going to be uncomfortable for some. Camping is only allowed at the Pinney Bridge site. So in order to make ours a 3-day, 2-night trip, we drove an hour east to Pigeon River Country and Pickerel Lake, which has a drive-in campsite.

Being Labor Day, the place was packed with RVs and unfortunately our site ended up near some rather loud and boisterous kids who had brought everything they owned with them. But my feet had blisters from our elongated hike out of the Jordan River Valley, so I was happy to be wearing flip flops and carrying things a few yards from the car rather than on my back. We had a nice fire, sitting in the stadium chairs my sister happened to have left in her car, and slept well after our nearly 12-mile day. (My FitBit told me that we had climbed the equivalent of 91 stories during all the up and down and up, up, up.)

The next morning we drove out to the elk viewing area to see if perhaps the elk herd was hanging out there.

They were not.

Nonetheless, it was a pretty field.

And we saw wild turkeys.

Seeing the turkeys was rather macabre because we had already determined that on our way home we were going to stop at Gobblers, a place that sells mostly Thanksgiving dinners for lunch.

The meal was fantastic and we had another hiking trip in the books, albeit a short one. Next year we’ll have to try to get back to the U.P.