Warning – this is a long post.
Today we (finally) left the state of Michigan!!! We had to switch out all the tour books. After taking a picture of the sunset last night, we got up in time to catch the sunrise over the river as well. Yesterday we drove through Christmas, today we drove through Greenland after leaving Houghton. How’s that for traveling in one state! Next, we drove through Ontonagon to see our last lighthouse in Michigan. We were too early to take a tour, but we did get pictures.
After that, we stopped in Michigan’s Porcupine State Park. This name is because the mountain ridges look a lot like a porcupine. First we drove to the Lake of the Clouds overlook, but it was too cold and rainy to see much. Over 40 iron mines were started in the area but none of them succeeded, so there are lots of mine shafts throughout the park. They all seem to be marked on the park map. We stopped to look in one of them. Then we drove to the other end of the park to take about a mile walk along the Presque Isle river and see the 3 waterfalls on it. This was absolutely amazing! They did not even mention how beautiful this area is at the visitor’s center!!! It was sooo gorgeous – the falls and the rock formations in the river – wow. After stopping at a Quilt Store in Ironwood, MI, we reached Bayfield, WI at around 4pm, much later than we expected, but Grant and Kristy raced down to the dock just in time to catch the last Apostle Island boat tour of the day which left at 4:30.
The tour of the Apostle Islands was a 3 ¼ hour trip around 19 of the 22 islands. There are lighthouses on four of the islands and we saw two of them. They don’t know how the island group came to be named “Apostle Islands”, but they believe it was named for some reason by Jesuits. Over the years there have been various settlements on some of the islands. Madeline Island currently has an almost year round population. Raspberry Island is possibly the second most visited because they do tours of the lighthouse and it is apparently a very pretty island. The rest of the islands are accessible by private boat or kayak. There are stories associated with many of the islands. We found a few to be quite memorable.
Hermit Island was once named Wilson Island. Apparently there was a man who lived on Madeline Island in the the 20s or 30s. He got into trouble a lot, starting brawls and taking the brunt of them. He got tired of that, so he moved out to Wilson Island. Living out there, he got to be a bit of a hermit, warning everyone off the Island with a shotgun. When he died, they renamed the island Hermit Island!
Then there’s the gentleman who decided to move his house from Bayfield to his property on Madeline Island. So after Lake Superior was frozen over for the winter he had it loaded on a trailer to drive it across the frozen lake. Unfortunately, the ice under the trailer started to crack about 3/4 of the way across and the truck, trailer, and house sank to the bottom of the lake. Apparently such items are considered litter so, when the lake thawed in the spring, the state forced him to remove them from the bottom of the lake, but the house didn’t fair very well . . . it came apart while they tried to raise it. A local real estate agent decided to have some fun with it and advertised a house with 360 degree lake views with a “rock bottom” price.
In June 1960, Otter Island hosted a Jamboree of over 1500 Boy Scouts, but was later sold and clear cut logged. Apparently the loggers found it cheaper to transport logs from the islands than from lands. The hardwood they had to load onto boats, but they were able to dump the softwoods into the water and float them to town by attaching some logs end to end and forming them into a circle with the rest of the logs contained inside the circle then attaching the circle of logs to a boat.
Devil’s Island is the northernmost point of land in Wisconsin and is the most unique of the Islands. It is so named because the Native Americans believed evil spirits resided there. This belief is because the water hitting the caves on the north side of the island creates a thunder like booming sound.
Apparently the Raspberry Island light keepers families took such pride in their gardens that they competed with each other for the most productive and beautiful gardens.
Cat Island was named because early cartographers, who didn’t have aerial photos thought the island looked like a cat based on their measurements and guesses of the islands shape. We looked at the current map and can kind of see a cat, but it looks more like a goose to us.
After a long evening on the boat, Grant and Kristy were thrilled to discover that while they were on the tour, Sandy drove the Truck with this trailer for the very first time to the campground, but convinced the campground host to back it into the site! We all immediately crashed for the night when we got back to the campground.
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