I stopped in St Joseph, and by chance I parked near the only other place I’ve been in St Joe: the Amtrak station. It shares space with a pizza restaurant in the old train station building… or rather the restaurant shares a little bit of space with Amtrak, since it’s an unstaffed station with just an automated ticket machine.

You can tell that someone is trying to revive the downtown/waterfront area. There’s a park with lots of artsy sculpture along the river, a freshly redone beach area on the Lake, a carousel/ballroom and a big fountain under construction just off the beach, and an old building being renovated into megabuck condos just up the hill.

I saw something I hadn’t noticed on my train rides through: the rail bridge over the river rotates to let tall boats through. Freaked me out when I looked down the railway and saw the control booth for the bridge sitting right in the way. I watched it close, then an Amtrak train went over it (too early in the day to be the Pere Marquette to Grand Rapids). Kinda neat.

I’ve stopped to eat at Gersch’s Gourmet Burgers & More, a small but fairly popular (it seems) sit-down or to-go place with super-fast service, on the south side of St Joe on the Red Arrow Highway. “Now open on Sunday” the sign on the door declares. Naturally, at a burger place I got a chicken sandwich. Yum.