Bayfield, WI to Woodbury, MN

So, today’s interesting town name was Taylors Falls.  We just had to go through it, for obvious reasons!  Sadly, the falls have been gone since 1906 when they constructed a dam. 

Grant had to stop for Wisconsin cheese while we were still in Wisconsin.  We got to taste 12 year old Wisconsin cheddar.  That made Grant very happy.  

We made it to another state today – Minnesota, where we dropped the trailer in Woodbury and headed straight for our destination of Minneapolis.  Mom and Dad wanted to show Janine and Kristy some of the things they remember about the city when they lived here in 1974.  After parking the trailer, we headed for Nicollet Mall, a 14 block open air mall including restaurants, stores, hotels, interesting sculptures, fountains, and even a huge beautiful old church (spanning almost a whole city block).  While there we had dinner at the Brit Pub, an English Pub style restaurant, and then watched some people lawn bowling on the roof (English style).  Then we walked the open air mall for about 3 blocks.  There were lots of people bicycling on it and other people riding in the cart pulled by bicycle taxis (only public transportation, bicycles, and bicycle taxis are allowed on the street).  The neat statue of the newsboy on the newspaper building reminded us of the movie Newsies.  Grant remembered using the walkways between buildings when it was snowy miserable weather in Minneapolis.  We just had to take a picture of a multi-story Target.  There was also a Target Home Decorating store on the other side of the street – never heard of that.   It looked like it had some nice furnishings. 

Then, we tried to find the Minnehaha Parkway loop around the lakes in Minneapolis, but we could only find a small part of it – too many one way streets and major highways confusing the drive.  The directions we printed out were very confusing.   We also tried to find the apartment building, where they lived in a one bedroom apartment and baby Janine slept in her crib in a closet, and the YMCA where she learned to swim before she was one year old.  We didn’t find those either.   We gave up and had ice cream sundaes for dessert.

Houghton, MI to Bayfield, WI

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.

Munising, MI to Houghton, MI

Last night Kristy finished knitting a pair of socks, so we decided we wanted to show them here.

We started our day by driving through Christmas, MI as we left Munising.  We all thought it might be fun to live in a place where you could say “I live in Christmas”!  Next, we came to a rest stop that overlooked Lake Superior.  The wind was blowing the Lake hard enough that there were some beautiful waves, so we stopped at an overlook to watch them for a bit.  While we were there, we noticed someone working with some sort of sail and discovered after a bit that he was preparing to go wind surfing.  We watched him wind surf for a little bit.  It was very neat.  A little further down the road, we stopped at the Michigan Iron Industry Museum in Negaunee, MI.  We learned a lot about the Iron mining industry in Michigan.  For our late lunch we stopped at a very pretty picnic area on Lake Bacon. 

We finally reached Houghton where we left the trailer so we could take a drive up the Keeweenau Peninsula to go to the furthest north spot in Michigan and see some of the lighthouses on the peninsula.  There were about 17 working lighthouses on the peninsula at one point.  We managed to find 4 of them.  First was the Copper Harbor Lighthouse which is part of the Fort Wilkins State Park.  Then we saw the Eagle Harbor Lighthouse.  It was working when we saw it – flashing white and red lights.  Next we found the Eagle River Lighthouse.  It is now obviously being lived in as a private residence.  The last one was the Sand Hills Light, which is currently an active bed and breakfast.

On our way back we stopped for Buffalo hot dogs and Big Mac ice cream sundaes with 4 flavors of Mackinac Fudge ice cream.  The Mackinac Fudge Cherry Amaretto ice cream was the best.  Janine wishes we had discovered this flavor a week ago.  We would have been eating it every night. 

We got back to the campground just in time to catch the tail end of the sunset over the sparkling river just behind the trailer at the campground.  

St. Ignace, MI to Munising, MI

We only drove three hours to our next campground today because we didn’t want to miss the glass bottom boat shipwreck tour in Munising, MI. After setting up camp, we headed directly to the tour offices. We were just in time to get tickets for the 12:30 tour. It was one of the best tours we have done.

The tour took us to three shipwrecks on Lake Superior near Grand Island, where many shipwrecks have occurred. They told us that, in the last 200 years, roughly 2500 of the over 6000 recorded shipwrecks on the Great Lakes have occurred on Lake Superior, many of them occurring at Whitefish Point (yesterday’s lighthouse). The water is so clear in Lake Superior, you can easily see at least 15 feet down.

They first took us to the wreck of the Bermuda. She sank in 1870, looks like she is just sitting on the bottom of the lake, and is one of the most intact wrecks in the area. Apparently she had a leak when she left port to cross the lake, but then a storm caused her to leak even more. The captain beached her and left 3 crew members on board to continue to pump water out of the hold, but the ship continued to fill and sunk to the bottom of the lake. We could easily see her through the water from the upper decks of the boat, but she was even clearer looking through the clear Plexiglas bottom of our boat. It was about 7 feet below us.

Next, we went around the side of Grand Island and passed the East Channel Lighthouse on our way to the next boat, the Hettler. She sank in 1926 after grounding on a reef in a bad storm. The whole crew escaped leaving half the boat stuck on the reef above the surface of the water while the other half broke off and fell into deeper water. Apparently the sight caused future ship crews to worry about their safety in that area. So, three years later, the other half was dynamited so it would no longer be a visible reminder of the shipwreck. This ship has not been salvaged, so much of the furnishings are still down there, including the bathtub and commode from the captain’s cabin. The anchor is back underwater with the ship after many years in the yard of a local citizen. When he retired, he donated it back to the Underwater Preserve, which preserves and protects the shipwrecks in the Great Lakes areas.

Probably one of the oldest known shipwrecks in the area, the last ship is called the Scow. It was apparently “discovered” by one of the passengers during the tour company’s first season operating glass bottom boat tours. After experts examined it, they decided it was a scow (these were last built in the late 1700s), but could find no historical record of a scow sunk off Grand Island. They surmise it was used for the French fur trade. Though it was about 15 feet below us, we were able to take fairly clear pictures from the upper deck of the boat. If Lake Superior had been calmer, the pictures would have been even clearer.

After almost 2.5 hours of somewhat windy but beautiful mostly clear skies on the boat, we headed to the Miner’s Castle formation on the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. When we got there less than an hour later, the skies were cloudy grey and raining. But, the views of the Miner’s Castle were still gorgeous. We considered going to the Miner’s Falls, but decided we did not want to walk over the a mile in the rain to see them. Instead we went to the beautiful Munising Falls and Horseshoe Falls. We wish we could have gone to all the falls in the Munising area. There were about 15 or so falls within a 10 mile radius of Munising!!!

St. Ignace, MI to Paradise, MI to Sault Ste. Marie, MI to St. Ignace, MI

Today was a very long, but beautiful day. We got up early to see everything we wanted to see, so we got to see the sunrise as we left the camp ground. It was very pretty reflecting off Lake Huron.
First we drove an hour and a half north through Paradise, MI to Tahquamenon Falls State Park (rhymes with “phenomenon”). The upper falls are second only to Niagara Falls east of the Mississippi in their flow. The falls are red because of all the tannin from trees in the swamps and rivers that drain into the falls.
Next we went to the Whitefish Point Light Station and Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum. It seems that everywhere we go on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, we find another lighthouse. This is still a working lighthouse and has the distinction of being the oldest working lighthouse on the great lakes. Grant and Kristy took a tour of this light house too, but instead of taking them into the Lantern room they got to walk around the platform outside the top of the lighthouse. It was a great view. They managed to see windmills on the coast of Canada. The museum talked about many of the shipwrecks that have occurred around Whitefish Point over the last 200 years. Whitefish Point has seen the most shipwrecks of any area on the Great Lakes!!! The known number of shipwrecks in that area alone is in the hundreds.

Next, Sandy just had to pet a black bear, so we went to Oswald’s Bear Ranch in Newberry, MI (oswaldsbearranch.com). He rescues bear cubs from all over the U.S. and keeps them for their natural lifetime because they cannot be released to the public. We had our picture taken with the bear cub Sam. Sandy got to pet and feed the bear while they took our picture.

After this we drove east as quickly as possible to Sault St. Marie (over an hour away) so we could go to the Soo Locks. We decided to take a sunset dinner cruise through the locks because it fit the time we would get to Sault Ste. Marie. The 4 locks are run by the U.S Army Corps of Engineers. There is no charge for any crafts to go through the lock. It is the similar for the one Canadian lock. We had a wonderful thanksgiving style dinner, complete with turkey, ham, yams, stuffing, green beans, and mashed potatoes and gravy. During dinner we cruised up and down the Mary’s river for a bit. Then it was time to go through the lock. As we were waiting for our turn, a very small motor boat came through from the other direction. It was funny to see such a small boat come through the lock. After entering and mooring in the first lock, they closed the doors and we had to wait for the water level to rise about 35 feet or so before they opened the doors on the other side for us to go through. Then we cruised down the river for a bit before turning around and going through the Canadian lock in the other direction. Here we entered the lock and had to wait for the water level to lower before going through. It was a wonderful two and a half hour cruise, nice and relaxing. However, we arrived back at the trailer and went immediately to bed.

Traverse City, MI to St. Ignace, MI

Today we drove up the western coast of Michigan from Traverse City to Mackinaw City and then across the Mackinaw Bridge to St. Ignace, MI. It was a mostly driving day. But, we did stop at the Oden Fish Hatchery part way up the coast. They mostly produce Brown and Rainbow trout. Then we proceeded up the coast to Mackinaw City. We toured the Old Mackinaw Point Lighthouse and got a great view of the 5 mile suspension Mackinaw Bridge connecting the main part of Michigan to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. This is where Lakes Huron and Michigan meet. We also found a restaurant that hand made pasties for dinner. Grant was very happy about this. We bought some frozen ones to eat later on in this trip. As we were crossing the bridge, we saw two of the Mackinac Island Ferries heading toward each other with their rooster tails shooting into the air. When we got to St. Ignace on the other side of the bridge, we found a campground and then explored the city. We went to the Museum of Ojibwa Culture. It is in an old restored Jesuit church.

Oscoda, MI to Traverse City, MI

Today we drove across Michigan from Oscoda to Traverse City. We got to Traverse City around noon, so we found a campground and then went to explore the area.
We drove past the harbor in Traverse City on our way to Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. It is situated between Glen Lake and Lake Michigan on the western shore of Michigan. The story behind the name is that a momma bear and her two cubs were swimming across Lake Michigan, but her cubs didn’t make it, becoming North and South Manitou Islands. She is the Sleeping Bear Dune waiting for her cubs.
When we got to the Dunes, the first thing we did was climb a very steep and tall monster sand dune. We were hoping/expecting to see Lake Michigan when we got to the top. Kristy got all the way to the top first and told us it was just more views of dunes!!! We were very very very disappointed. But, the view towards Glen Lake was gorgeous as we were climbing to the top. Sandy rested at the top by making sand angels.
After the dune we explored the more of the park by taking a drive with views of both lakes. There was a set of 3 beautifully architected barns in the park that we couldn’t resist taking pictures of.
Then we went to Glen Haven historical village. They had a building with artifacts and supplies from the Life Saving Service which was eventually merged into the Coast Guard. It was very interesting to learn how they got the rescue boats into the ocean. Some were mounted on wheels and hauled around with horses. Others were “launched” from the storage area on tracks right into the water. They depended on manpower and gravity to get the boats the last bit of the way from the tracks into the water. It sounded a little bit like a luge team to me. They even had handles on the sides of the boats that retracted so the oarlocks could be put in place.
Land rescues were a little different. For these, they hauled a cart to the beach that carried several special items. First, they fired a special cannon that shot a “faking” rope over to the distressed ship. Then crewmembers would pull it in and read the instructions on the paddle attached to the rope to know what to do with the rope. They were instructed to tie the rope to the mast and it became like a block and tackle. They had a life-saving tool called a breeches buoy that they would pull along the rope which a person would climb into and then they used it to pull the person to shore. It was called a breeches buoy because it was a life saver with what looked like breeches on the bottom.
Next, we went to the Old Mission lighthouse and got to go up into the lantern room and see the views of Lake Michigan from there. It was a beautiful end to a very long day.