To Hell and Back; A Travelogue

Back before the turn of the century, during my teaching (or refereeing days), the mansonry trades teacher and myself talked about driving to Hell MI and taking each other's picture in front of a sign there. That way the next time an angry student told us to go there, we could whip out our wallet and show it to him, saying "been there, done that." My students are always pretty rough around the edges as are his. We never did get around to making the trip.

Since I have moved back to Bryan, I still thought it would be an interesting trip to make. I probably wouldn't be a very good travel agent. Probably make people mad if I suggested a trip to Hell. So this past Tues or Wed, whichever day was the sunny one, I decided to go to Hell. I tried using my Tom-Tom gps for directions. Tom-Tom said he never heard of the place. So I tried Mapquest. Mapquest gave me directions. Said it should take about 2 hours.

I was on main roads till getting off I-94. After I-94, it was the scenic route. I didn't mind that at all. I spent the last 20 miles or so driving through Michigan marsh lands. For whatever reason, I had a flashback. Back in the late 60's, I think it was, the people around Ann Arbor (Hell is NW of Ann Arbor and is in the same county), reported seeing unidentified lights in the marshes. The govt. said it was marsh gas. I don't think those people were very convinced that it was marsh gas. I haven't heard anything about those lights for years.

On top of a hill, I went past a really neat white church and a brick one-room school house. I turned around to take some shots. I would have taken more but it was very muddy.

A sign said this was the Mt. Hope school. I didn't see a sign Identifying the church.

I drove through Hell without realizing it. I drove around trying to figure out where I took a wrong turn. I drove into Pinckney, the nearest town in the area that was on the map. I asked for some help (I'm a guy, but I ask for directions and think nothing of it) and soon was in Hell. Hell has a mall. It is small. The nice lady there showed me the post office.

After the post office photo, things started going to Hell. My camera started giving me problems. It was saving to the internal memory instead of the memory card. The internal memory was full and I couldn't get it to switch to the memory card. The nice lady said tlots of things go to Hell around here. She had all the cliches.

Hell's liquor store is in the glass counter. The pizza/sandwich shop, Hell's Kitchen -- what else could they call it, is in the front corner of the store. There are some other little shops in Hell's Mall, but I have forgotten what they are. The camera switched to the memory card like nothing was wrong when I got out of Hell. I guess I will have to go back for more photos sometime.

Almost forgot, the lady told me that on June 6, 2006 (06-06-06) nearly 2000 people came to Hell wanting to buy something just to have a receipt dated 06-06-06. Nearly cleaned them out of merchandise that day.

I told Tom-Tom I was ready to go home and he routed me a different way. I went through Chelsea MI. There is a block sized brick building there with a huge clock tower. Gotta at least get back to Chelsea for some shots of that clock.