A Question of Timing

I was reviewing some of the many photos I’ve taken on my travels throughout the United States and I realized something very important. It is something that I’ve left out of almost all of my extensive planning for the road trips I take. The missing ingredient is timing.

Whenever I travel, I try to schedule at least three stops per day at some historic, natural or architectural attractions. Oh, I do get to most of the ones I’ve put on the itinerary, but I can’t begin to recount the number of roadside wonders that I’ve arrived at before they are open or after they’ve closed for the day.

Well, I might not be able to recount them all, but here is a partial list of those great things I’ve had to sadly go past without seeing them all because I arrived there at the wrong time of the day, or week, or year.

Point Reyes Light was a destination that I had visited previously and I wanted to take my wife, sister and brother-in-law to see it on our trip to San Francisco. If you’ve never visited it, the lighthouse sits on a rocky spit of land that juts out over the Pacific Ocean. To reach it you have to walk down a staircase and path over the spine and the steep path is about a quarter mile in length. The view on either side or looking back down the coast is absolutely stunning, and the lighthouse itself is a beauty, perched about 200 feet above the water.

We had been at a family reunion in San Jose over the weekend. On Monday the four of us started by crossing the Golden Gate Bridge and went up into the headlands above there. Then we took in Muir Woods and drove over the Pacific Coast Highway to Point Reyes. We arrived at around 1 PM, and hiked from the parking lot about 400 yards to the gift shop and stairway. That was when we discovered that the lighthouse is closed on Mondays. We couldn’t even go partway down the spine to see the view, but had to content ourselves with looking at the path and lighthouse from above.

The Leggs Inn, an eclectic restaurant located on the Lower Peninsula of Michigan was a destination on the Michigan trip I took in 2010. I had heard good stories about the food and the atmosphere inside the restaurant, so I was primed for a visit.

My traveling companion, Tom, and I started out from Traverse City after breakfast and drove to the town of Charlevoix and then on to Petoskey. We spent some time scavenging on a rocky beach for the famed Petoskey Stones – didn’t find any – and then continued up through Harbor Springs to Cross Village, home of The Leggs.

We arrived at the restaurant at about 10 AM only to learn that it didn’t open for another hour. We thought we had killed enough time to get there for an early lunch. The place was locked up tight, and even after we had spent some time driving through the small town, it still wasn’t open. We just couldn’t spend any more time there, since we had other places to visit, including a ferry ride over to Mackinac Island. Alas, The Leggs would have to be scrubbed from our itinerary.

I later found out that I had also missed the Hobbit Houses of Charlevoix, which likely would have consumed that extra time, but may have eliminated some of our time to visit Mackinac Island. I might have to return to that area sometime and see everything with a longer stay in the area.

The Garden of Eden in Kansas is another of those weird roadside wonders. This one is in the center of the town of Lucas. It features a lot of stone figures and stone trees, and I mean concrete stone. The man who built the Garden of Eden way back in the early 20th Century is one of the featured attractions, as his glass enclosed and preserved corpse rests inside for viewing. Yes, he is displayed on his funeral bier inside the strange house.

I really wanted to see everything in the Garden of Eden, but we arrived there just past 5 o’clock on a Sunday, and the place was closed for the night. If you look at a map of central Kansas, you’ll see that Lucas is off the beaten path, so the side trip was a complete waste of time.

The Looff Carousel is a huge and fully operational carousel that is located in Crescent Park south of Providence, RI. It is housed inside a specially built round building, and you can ride it for a very reasonable fee, 75 cents. That was our intent when Judy and I visited there in May of 2011.

This time we arrived on a Thursday afternoon. You would think we would be there at just the right time of day and week. You would be wrong!

The sign on the door to the building indicated that the Looff Carousel is only open on weekends. I suppose that makes sense, since they probably need a lot of riders to keep the place going, and weekends are the only time the kids are free in May. Boy, I sure was disappointed to have to miss even seeing the carousel. The building was locked up with nobody around at all.

Folks, it really does pay off to read up on places you want to visit before you go. It’s a lot easier to alter plans by a day or even a few hours in order to avoid the heartbreak of not getting to see the attraction after you’ve traveled that far to do so.

Have I learned from my experience? Well, apparently not, because the span of time from the first to the last of those descriptions was fourteen years (1997 to 2011). Much as I like to think of myself as a seasoned traveler, I still make some terrible blunders in my planning.