I paid a visit to Upper Michigan’s Fayette State Park last weekend and it was, I am happy to report, worth every minute of the hours and hours it takes to drive there from Our Humble O’Bode. The park is beautiful, the campgrounds are comfortable if just a tiny bit cramped, and I had gorgeous weather every single day I was there. I couldn’t have asked for a better weekend.

I was going to visit Fayette because I’d been there at least twice before, a long, long time ago, once when I was about nine years old and once when I was in high school. My mom tells me the first time we went was no more than a happy accident. We weren’t planning to go there, we just found it one day while we were out exploring. Years later, when I was in high school, we made a return trip to stay for at least a weekend. There may have been a third time, but mom and I can’t recall for sure.

About a month ago I got the itch to see it again. Don’t know why. It was just one of those things. I found the park’s web site on line, found a vacancy at the camp ground for a weekend I knew I could get time off work for, and booked a couple nights.

Weeks later, when I was telling My Darling B about my upcoming camping date, she asked me how I had managed to score a reservation on Memorial Day weekend. Her question took me completely by surprise; somehow I had completely missed the fact it was a holiday weekend. She wanted to know if I was staying just two nights or all three nights. In fact, I had booked only Friday and Saturday night, but when I logged in to see if I could extend my reservation for a day, I was pleasantly surprised that it let me.

I departed the Madison area Friday afternoon at about 1:30 pm, which was a LOT later in the day than I wanted. Time got away from me fast. I had originally planned to get out of town at about 11:30 am but I hadn’t packed up the van the night before, a mistake I have made in the past. When I think of packing, I visualize throwing a couple pairs of underwear and socks in a bag but I should know better. I always take a lot more things, which takes a lot more time. On this trip, the forecast called for cold weather, so I packed a variety of cold-weather clothes which I’d be able to wear in layers. Took about 90 minutes to pick and choose all the clothes I wanted and pack them in the van. Ironically, it turned out I would not need most of it.

Then I showered and after showering, I ate lunch. I didn’t pull out of the driveway until about 1:00 pm and I still had to stop at the bank to pull some cash from the ATM and swing by the deli to buy some lunch meat and potato salad. So that’s why I didn’t really leave the Madison area until way too late in the day.

The Google told me the trip should take about 4 hours 30 minutes, a bald-faced lie based on I don’t know what. It just didn’t seem possible to drive from southern Wisconsin to northern Michigan in such a short time, and guess what? It’s not. By the time I got to Marinette, The Google was telling me that my arrival time had slipped to 7:30 pm, and after I passed through Escanaba my arrival time was closer to 8:00 pm. This was about six hours after I left; if the math seems off, it’s because Fayette is just over the line separating Central Time from Eastern Time.

The holiday traffic didn’t help. The highways were clogged with comically large pickup trucks towing campers the size of hay barns. Trying to drive through the Fox Valley, from Fond du Lac to Green Bay, was not a nightmare but it wasn’t a pleasant dream, either. It was one of those very puzzling dreams where everything seems to be something else and it’s all in the wrong place and the faster you try to go, the slower you actually go.

So I didn’t get to Fayette State Park until almost eight o’clock in the evening but, thanks to the town’s location being just over the time line, or whatever you call it, the sun was about a half-hour from setting so there was still lots of daylight left to go into town to take a quick look around. No way I could wait until morning. I found my camp site, parked the van, unshipped my bike from the bike rack and rode into the town.

You get to the ghost town on a gravel road that used to be a railroad. It’s a level, well-kept road less than a half mile long, an easy ten-minute walk and less than five minutes on a bike. When you finally get there you end up on the east side of town, so I first set eyes on Fayette with the setting sun behind it, very atmospheric.

The biggest buildings still standing in the center of town are all two-story wooden structures with heavily weathered clapboard siding. The hotel is the the most prominent building (to the left in the photo above) and the one I recognized right off the bat because o the two parallel wings jutting off the back of the main building out front. It’s also the building behind yours truly in the background of the first photo of this post.

The town hall is probably the next most notable building (center background above) because its narrow, angled shape gives it a very unusual appearance. The company office (to the right) is a rather unremarkable crackerbox of a building with a chimney at either end, and behind the company office I could see the front limestone wall of the company store. All much as I remembered them.

Riding down into the town, I stopped on the road between the company office (to the left but out of the frame of the photo above) and the machine shop (to the right above). In my memory, all of the limestone buildings were open to the sky when I last saw them in the 1970s. Now, the machine shop and the buildings around the furnace complex (background, to the left of the machine shop) are all roofed over to protect them from the elements. Only the company store (left above) is still a windowless open box of limestone walls.

The furnace complex looked most different from the last time I saw it, and yet was entirely recognizable because of the twin furnace stacks. The casting rooms to either side of the stacks are roofed over now with what appears to be a reasonable facsimile of the original roofs, when I compared them to the photos they have posted around the site. The furnace stacks are roofed over as well; I’m not sure what was originally up there, but I think they didn’t try to replicate the original tops, only cover them over with a protective peak.

These structures were all roofless in the recent past, if memory serves. The casting rooms on either side of the furnace stacks reminded little boy me of the ruins of medieval castles, their limestone walls in tumbledown disrepair.

I had the town pretty much all to myself and the setting sun reflecting off the limestone cliffs to the east gave the town a very dramatic air. As it turned out, this was really the very best time to come see the town and I returned to it in the evenings over the next two days to relive the experience.