We are caught between really wanting to be home and really not wanting this trip to end. For the past 24 days, I have spent all but a few hours with Julia and Kellan. It's been great. They seem to have matured quite a bit on this trip and are on their way to becoming seasoned travelers. This morning when Kellan asked how far we had to drive today and I told him it would be about 6.5 hours, his reply was “oh, then not so bad!” Gotta love that.
As has become our custom, we broke camp early. We were going to have a whirlwind tour (aka our usual browse) of Duluth, but we thought we’d start with a good feed. Plus, I really didn’t want to do dishes this morning. The Duluth Grille came through for us, with a taste of home: fresh local ingredients, friendly (bordering on hippy) service and real maple syrup. All of their coffee mugs are hand-made and original, so we bought one to bring home for mom.
Julia's yawns went away after her French Toast arrived. It was the size of one and a half loaves of Italian bread.
I don’t know the full history of Duluth, but I do know that many of the sewn products that I prefer have come from this place. The bags on my old motorcycle were made by Frost River, the canvas pocketed Bucket Boss organizer (that we use in the van as our garbage can) is from Duluth Trading Co., and then, of course, there’s Aerostich. Any serious motorcycle road rider knows Aerostich. They have been producing textile safety apparel and accessories since the early 80’s. You will recognize their signature Roadcrafter suits and Combat Touring boots on many a BMW rider and I have had (and still have) quite a few of their products. They were open when we drove by at 8:15 AM so a visit was mandatory.
This little rocking horse is actually used for fitting riding suits. When you sit on a motorcycle, your pant cuffs rise and your sleeves pull back. So you try on your gear and then sit on the motorcycle to see where the cuffs fall. Predictably, a device like this one is irresistible to a 9-yr old boy.
The repair wall at Aerostich.
Our next stop was the Duluth Aerial Bridge. This span is a vertical lift bridge over the Duluth Ship Canal that is different from a draw bridge in that the entire middle section is hoisted up using a system of huge chains, cables and counterweights. You can imagine it like opening the bottom sash of a double-hung window. We took a time-lapse video:
This is one of the ships that was heading for the bridge, but unfortunately we couldn't wait around to see it go through. Duluth is supposed to be one of the best ship-watching cities since the huge ships go through a relatively narrow canal with so little room on each side that you could almost reach out and touch the ship.
Invasive eastern monkeys on the pier.
Duluth is now on my list of places to visit again in the future to spend some more time. The city may be convenient to nowhere, but from what I could see, this is a town that is making the most of what it has. It will probably take more than a few days to experience all of its facets.
This photo alone is an invitation to come back and see what life is like here.
We piled back into the van, crossed into Superior and checked Wisconsin off of our list of states visited. Today’s mission was to drive across Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore on Lake Superior. This was by far the hardest day of driving for me. The 55 mph limit on the bullet straight and flat Route 28 was annoying enough, but what really drove me nuts was the behavior of the other drivers. This being a sunny Saturday morning, the road was fairly busy in both directions. Drivers with Michigan plates seemed content to cruise the road at 55 or 56 mph. Coming from the west where we had been driving curvier, more technical roads with speed limits of 80 mph, my right foot was feeling a bit twitchy at 55. When I couldn’t take it any more and found some clear space to pass, the driver of the passed car would invariably speed up and tailgate me, just feet off of my bumper. Not until I deposited a little more diesel smoke in their grill at 70 mph did they lose the nerve to keep going and backed off. This happened with about 90% of the cars I passed. I deduced that the local drivers probably knew that there were speed traps all over this road and that’s why they kept their speed in check and then hid behind the faster cars when they could. So I set the cruise at 64 and waited for the eventual ambush. It never came. I saw one police vehicle on the entire 300 mile transit.
There was a lot of classic metal on the road this morning.
The ski capital of the midwest has a 400 ft. vertical drop. In high school, we drove out here for a race at a nearby ski area called Indian Head. I remember that the lodge was at the top of the mountain and you skied down a bluff and took the lift back to the top.
We stopped at the USFS/NPS Visitor center in Munising to pick up a map of the park. Like the rest of the parks we had visited, this was designed as a drive-through experience with stops to get out and see specific sights and features. It was getting late, so we decided to forego seeing the actual “pictured rocks” so we could get to what we really wanted to see: the Grand Sable Dunes on the eastern edge of the park. We stopped in at some of the park’s lakeside campsites along the way to see if we might get lucky and, not surprisingly, found them completely full. Our back pocket plan was to continue east and find a state park or USFS campground once we had seen the dunes.
The dunes were spectacular in the evening light. A strong southerly was blowing and we spent a fair amount of time getting sandblasted as we climbed up and over the shifting hills. We walked the guided trail and also did some additional exploring, taking our time and enjoying the exercise after a long day in the van. We hosed the sand off of our legs in the parking lot, but there was no doubt that grains were going to be carried on our bodies as far as we were going in the next couple of days.
The dunes here eat trees. These are the tops of full-grown trees. As blowing sand accumulates against the trunks, the trees eventually get buried.
On top of the dunes looking at Lake Superior.
Okay kids, give me the "Tourist Brochure" pose. Got it!
Running down the dunes and into the wind toward Grand Sable Lake.
The forest at the base of the dunes is lush. In the winter these trails are used for nordic skiing.
Where we were going to wind up tonight, however, was still a bit unclear. The ranger at the visitor center suggested continuing east on H-58 to Muskellonge Lake State Park if all of the in-park sites were full. H-58 was the nice paved road that wound through the park, so we eased the van back onto the tarmac and snaked along the lakeshore. A couple of miles east of the small village of Grand Marais, the road turned to sandy dirt, which wasn’t so bad until it became washboarded sandy dirt. I slowed down and looked for the smooth parts, but the rocking and bucking of the van only got worse. So I hit the accelerator until the bumping became buzzing. We spent the next 15 miles gritting our teeth against the vibrations of this giant rumble strip.
It was enough to knock your fillings out. I'm pretty sure that all of the parts are still on the van.
The campground was packed, but there were a few sites available, so we stuffed the van into our assigned slot and pulled out the basics: tent, pads, cot, pillows, sleeping bags and the last of our marshmallows and graham crackers. The kids went off to take showers to remove some of the fine dune sand from their bodies while I cooked a quick dinner on the stove out of the back of the van. When the last s’more had been eaten and the empty graham cracker box had gone up in flames, it was time to call it a night. We knew that this was probably going to be our last night in the tent for a while.
