Hey everybody, It took a while to get the - allegedly - final installment of this Grand Tour chronicle done. In part because of the adventure that I had to go through in order to complete the journey itself, but I wanted to give everybody a conclusion. So with that in mind...

Welcome to the third installment of our expedition across Michigan’s rugged Upper Peninsula in a car that has less ground clearance than a standard skateboard. This time on reddit! The Corvette bleeds, the schedule breaks, and I perform a parking-lot surgical extraction.

When we left you, we were standing in St. Ignace, gazing in awe at the monumental Mackinac Bridge, our faces covered in a fine glaze of 19th-century logging dust, my passenger’s internal anger gauge sitting firmly in the red, but replete with a grand sense of having been somewhere and done a thing.

That morning we intended to leave St. Ignace at 8:00 AM under gorgeous, clear skies, cruise north on I-75, transition onto M-123, and blast straight up to the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum at Whitefish Point. From there, we would sweep across to Tahquamenon Falls and then make a massive westward charge back to our destination in Houghton to conclude the loop with a tasty Cornish hand pie.

It was a brilliant plan. A flawless plan. Right up until our tight schedule crashed into the reality of owning a 25-year-old sports car. You see, this was our final day. We had to complete this entire northern loop and return to Houghton, because the very next morning required a brutal, non-negotiable drive back south to reality. If we missed our window, we would be missing work.

Naturally, the Corvette chose exactly this moment to remind me that I had driven it down a gravel road and proceeded to throw a tantrum about it.

The brutal pounding from the Iron Mountain logging trail hadn’t cracked the block, but a stray bit of something had perfectly struck the low-hanging oil filter, slightly denting the canister and compromising the rubber seal. It wasn’t a catastrophic gush, but it was fast enough that pushing north to Paradise or Whitefish Point was a definitive dead end as my phone informed me that neither location had an auto parts store and I couldn't confirm they had a service station, either.

If we kept going, the LS1 V8 would run bone dry in the wilderness. We’d be marooned, we'd miss the return to Houghton, and our respective bosses would not accept "sabotaged by a cedar root" as a valid excuse for missing our next set of morning meetings. Careers would be terminated, mortgages would be missed, anger and resentment would fester, divorce would ensue, financial destitution, personal ruination, it would be an epic disaster.

I had to fix it myself, right now, on the road, and save this trip from catastrophe. The nearest actual parts hub was southwest in Newberry.

What followed was a masterclass in high-stakes, low-RPM mechanical survival. To keep the oil pressure as low as possible and prevent the filter from blowing its seal entirely, I short-shifted the V8, keeping the revs barely above a crawl. After 12 tense miles of nursing the car down M-123, I pulled completely off into a wide, visible gravel clearing in the forest. I popped the hood, looked around to assure myself I hadn't accidently made myself the next unwitting victim in a Wrong Turn film, checked the dipstick, and poured in a fresh quart of oil to keep the engine safely lubricated.

My passenger stood by, watching the clock tick away with an expression of pure, unadulterated existential dread.

Just a few miles outside of our destination town, I executed Pit Stop 2. We pulled safely into the paved M-123 Roadside Park. Working carefully on the passenger side - well away from the massive logging trucks barreling down the highway - I verified the oil pressure gauge was holding and dumped in one final quart of oil. We were bleeding, but we were managing the wound.

At 9:55 AM, we crawled into Newberry and pulled straight into the parts store parking lot right off the highway. I got inside, was able to find the filter I needed, a couple of extra quarts of oil, and a basic plastic drain pan.

Right there, in a level corner of the auto parts parking lot, the real work began. I had to drop flat on my back on the asphalt, reach up into the hot underbody and use every ounce of grip strength I possessed. I safely spun off the leaking filter, smeared fresh oil on the new rubber gasket, hand-torqued the new one into place, and topped off the engine.

Shockingly my desperate emergency parking lot car surgical transplant worked. The dripping stopped. No leaks. No warning lights.

But we had burned over an hour of our precious buffer. Our leisurely Grand Tour had officially transformed into a high-stakes endurance race against the setting sun. Bypassing the local Paradise general stores entirely to claw back time, we got back on M-123 North and hammered upward.

At 11:00 AM, with the engine running beautifully, we finally rolled into the parking lot of Whitefish Point. We had made it to the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum with total peace of mind.

Whitefish Point is a hauntingly beautiful, windswept finger of land jutting into some of the deepest, most treacherous waters on earth. Standing on the bleak, stony beach looking out over the grey expanse of Lake Superior, you quickly realize why this place is called the Graveyard of the Great Lakes. This is the very shore the legendary SS Edmund Fitzgerald was trying to reach before she was swallowed by a monstrous November storm in 1975. Inside the museum, hanging in the quiet gloom, is the ship’s actual bronze bell. It is a profoundly sobering place. Lake Superior may not technically be a sea, but it's got the teeth of a monster all the same.

But the clock was still ticking. We sprinted back to the car, verified the new filter was holding perfectly, and hurled ourselves south toward Tahquamenon Falls.

If Lake Superior is a monster, Tahquamenon is a force of nature dressed in a very strange color. It is one of the largest waterfalls east of the Mississippi, but what makes it truly spectacular is the water itself. It isn’t clear. It is a deep, rich, frothy amber hue - a direct result of the tannins leaching from the cedar and hemlock swamps upstream. We practically ran down the boardwalk, caught a glance of the fifty thousand gallons of what looked exactly like cold, fizzy root beer plunging over a 50-foot drop, took one collective deep breath of the misty air, and ran right back to the parking lot.

The ultimate test of relationship therapy, and our final destination, awaited us hours away.

We hammered westward across M-28. The new filter held flawlessly. The LS1 V8 sang its glorious, uninterrupted anthem across the endless miles of Upper Peninsula asphalt, aggressively reclaiming the minutes we had lost in the Newberry parking lot by taking rural relatively unpoliced highway speed limits as more of a suggestion than a regulation.

By the time we pulled into the parking lot of our destination hotel in Houghton, the sun had fully vanished below the horizon. The Corvette was utterly filthy, my knuckles were skinned, and our jobs were officially saved.

Which brings us to the ultimate reward: the Pasty.

For the uninitiated, a pasty is a magnificent, heavy, halfmoon shaped pastry pocket stuffed to the absolute brim with beef, potatoes, rutabaga, onions, and heaven-sent greases. It was brought over by Cornish miners in the 19th century because it could stay warm in a coat pocket down in the dark depths of the copper mines. It has the density of a collapsed star.

We sat in a local diner near the hotel, broke open the steaming crusts, and let the savory bliss wash over us. And do you know what? It worked. As the rich, buttery pastry and perfectly seasoned meat disappeared, I watched the absolute terror of the morning finally leave my passenger's shoulders. The terrifying logging trails, the bone-shattering suspension, the oil-covered arms, and the fear of unemployment. It was, all of it, forgiven, washed away by the sheer, unadulterated comfort of Michigan's greatest culinary invention.

The Great Northern Route had tested our spines, our satnavs, and our livelihoods, and occasionally our patience with one another. The car was held together by a brand-new auto parts filter and sheer luck, but we had conquered the wild frontier and made it back to basecamp. And as I looked out the hotel window at the Torch Red nose of the Corvette sitting under the streetlights, I felt the unique satisfaction of a road trip adventure having been completely successful.

The Trio of Clarkson, Hammond, and May have been in the past someone malicious toward this era of Corvette because of it's extremely stiff suspension, the fact that it's made entirely out of plastic, and it would get smoked by any proper European sports car on the market at the time, but it faced down the ever-changing landscape of Upper Michigan, came through with mere flesh wounds to show for it, and conquered the peninsula. I'm proud of the little screaming speed demon...but next trip might have to be in something that doesn't feel like it's trying to murder me with every pebble it drives over. It would probably be in my best interest if I wanna make sure my better half stays my better half.