Sorry for the delay in posting. These next few posts go back a few weeks to get you caught up to date. There are not too many photos initailly but I do have a quite few in the next posts.
Our stay in Minnesota was limited and we continued east on Hwy. 2 reaching the Wisconsin border at Duluth/Superior. After a quick trip into Duluth to the Duluth Trading Post (don't we all get their catalogs?) for a look around and a few purchases, we then continued south toward Stevens Point, WI. It is here in Stevens Point that we were to visit with a grad school friend of Cynthia's, Guillermo and his wife Carol. It was a long day on the road but we arrived at the county park just outside the city for our 3 night visit. Stevens Point is a nice little university town, with the Univ. of Wisconsin, Stevens Point located here, which is a smaller school of about 9,000 students. It was a great visit with Guillermo and Carol but soon enough it was time to move on again.
A short drive from SP is Green Bay, of course home to the GB Packers. The road took us right by the stadium so we took the short detour into town to check this out. The area immediately surrounding Lambeau Field is ALL Packers! It was fun to see and realize just how much this team is the city and the city is the team! Weren't we all Packer fans once?
Not wanting to drive too much further that day we moved a few miles down the road to another city park in Oconto, WI. A beautiful day found us set up on the Oconto River which was once used to transport timber for the lumber mills, long since gone. A great camping encounter with a local couple provided us with great company, "spirits" and travel information for the UP. There is a great historical museum in town (unfortunately no photos were allowed) with some great items some of which were original to the family that lived in the house and other items donated by locals. In the carriage house were two electric cars, a "Waverley Electric Car" fully restored and a "Detroit 22" electric car waiting for restoration. Fascinating to see these early 1900s vehicles.
We decided to only stay one night here in Oconto as the weather was turning rainy again. We moved on the the Upper Peninsula (UP) of Michigan. Our first night was in Gladstone, again at another city run CG. We then moved on to Marquette, MI on the shore of Lake Superior. We booked a couple of nights here hoping to get some riding in but as usual the weather came back to limit that. Our first day was beautiful and I managed a 10 mile MTB ride on trails surrounding the CG but that was all I got in. Marquette has a great MTB community and their local trails organization is strong thus creating miles of trails in the local forests. This would be a good place to come back to. At the end of my ride I stopped at the lake shore for a while to watch an ore carrier coming into dock and just sat there trying to grasp the size and scope of Lake Superior. It is the largest of the Great Lakes and holds 1/5th of the worlds fresh water! On a beautifully calm day it is also hard to imagine that come November (the most dangerous month on the lakes), the squalls and storms that blow create waves 10-20 feet high! Of course we all know about the Edmund Fitzgerald that sunk here-waves that night we reported to be 35 feet high, just incredible! In many respects looking out into Lake Superior is like standing on the Seawall at home and looking into the Gulf of Mexico-only the horizon line is visible and the lake seems just as big. It is really quite impressive. Marquette has a small Maritime Museum depicting the history of seafaring in the area and it does not take long to understand the importance of these lakes both to the local and national economies.
A quick note on the Edmond Fitzgerald. We all know the story as presented to us in Gordon Lightfoot's song. The true cause of the wreck is still undetermined-some say the ship broke in two then sank, others believe some cargo hatches gave way thus causing the ship to capsize. The ship was a little over 700 ft long (the largest Great Lakes carrier at the time it was built) and it sank in water over 500 ft deep. One amazing vision: if the ship sank as a result of the cargo holds filling with water then essentially taking a nose dive to the bottom, when the bow hit the bottom 200 ft of the ship would still have been above the water line!
Another rainy day pushed us on toward the Pictured Rocks National Seashore a little further east.
More to come....
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