I've been back from the picnic (in the Keweenaw) for a few days. Here's a quick recap.
Since I was on my own, I took the motorcycle. It's a nice drive but it's an even nicer ride. Highly recommended. Also being on the bike keeps my packing tighter. I actually still packed twice as much clothing and much more kitchen stuff than I actually used. I can tighten that up more next time.
The bike only has about a 180 mile range at highway speeds (80ish on some of the roads) so I had to stop at Claire, St Ignace and Marquette up and down.
I have mostly convinced myself to replace my entire stable, or at least most of it. I'm feeling like I'm pretty much over the older bikes. The Tracer is fantastic as a local bike; it's super versatile and agile. It's capable of long distances but it's not ideal; it gets uncomfortable after 5 hours or so and the range is a bit low. I'm sorta looking at an FJR1300. When I get rid of the Goldwing I'll start looking seriously. They're not hard to find for sale.
Lunch was at Hiawatha Pasties both up and down. It's about 45 minutes west of St Ignace in Naubinway. No bathrooms so I finally stuck my nose into the Snowmobile Museum for their bathroom, but I also browsed the gift shop and found a nice sticker for the bike. I really have no interest in snowmobiles so I didn't go in.
On the way up, on the approach to Munising, suddenly there was a slowdown and when I got closer there was a motorcycle down. I pulled into a driveway a few feet away and went to help. A woman on a beautiful Indian bagger was down. She was OK with just some scraping on her arms. The bike was just scraped a bit, it was a low speed incident. Her husband was on a matching (black instead of white) Indian. I helped him lift it (it was on its right side, I reminded him to put the side stand down before we lifted) and moved on. As I went into Munising a minute later there was a state cop and an ambulance on the way back.
I stopped at the Shrine of the Snowshoe Priest - dozens of times past there and I've never stopped before. There is a pile of markers there on HMDB so I got those as well, though I seem to have missed one.

I stayed at a friend's house in Laurium Mon-Wed evenings, going out during the day to hit some local historic markers and a couple of museums - the firefighter's museum in Calumet and the Houghton County Historical Museum in Lake Linden. The latter has a steam train but they only run it on Saturdays, so we were unable to ride that though we did ride a smaller gas powered train around the tracks.
I also finally visited the Italian Hall memorial site. I really should have gotten there earlier. The firefighter museum in town has the doors from the hall. I think they were the outer doors, not the inner, but touching them was still emotional.

I had planned to hit the site, set up my camp and help set up infrastructure on Wednesday, but it was raining steadily all day and the word was the porta potties were not yet on site, so I opted out. Thankfully everyone who was on site also decided to just sit it out.
Wednesday evening was at the house on the ridge, BYO takeout food and hang out.
Thursday I finally got to the site (it had stopped raining) and we got nearly everything set up - everything but the showers.

Thursday evening was pizza and hanging out on Mt Horace Greeley.

Friday morning we got the showers set up - wanting to TAKE a shower is a good motivation to work on it. There were some issues, there always are, mainly from trying to assemble a somewhat complex bit of random bits into something working before any of us were properly caffeinated, but in the end we got our showers.
My contribution was mainly wrangling.
Friday afternoon I went up and built the new sink platform from leftover plastic decking contributed by SK. When done I was reminded that plastic lumber is HEAVY and a 4x4 foot object does not fit in a passenger car. It was transported down Saturday morning by an attendee with a pickup, and we drilled the last few holes to bolt down the sink and manifold and put it in place.

Also, Kevin redid the entire filter and manifold assembly so in total, that area was much improved.

Friday afternoon and Saturday morning was more rain but nothing terrible. We sat it out and had a good Saturday for most of the day. There was a dawn double rainbow on Saturday.

Besides the aforementioned offsite food events, we had liquid nitrogen ice cream, carried in pasties, and a new addition, Sandy brought in a double pot deep fryer so we got on-site fresh french fries, experimental funnel cake things and jalapeno poppers.
The usual events had about the usual amount of unplanned but usually interesting or even exciting failures which are fun to look back on anyway and nobody required significant first aid. So it was a successful event!
One unfortunate thing was that JH's truck needed to be flat bedded out. While towing the trailer down, he noticed his steering felt wrong, and when investigated it turns out the tie rod was barely attached to the Pitman arm. He attempted to buy parts for an on-site repair but that didn't work out so he lined up a repair shop and a rental car.

The pavilion takedown is now MUCH easier - we do it as normal Saturday night but we have the trailer there so everything goes straight in and we never have to touch it until next year.
Sunday was as per normal. We announced water cutoff at 9AM, shut everything down and drained and put it away in the trailer. Everyone packed up the last of their stuff and we were off. Until next year...