Friday - another long travel day with few rewards
Mackinaw
City, MI to Northern Comfort B & B, Embarrass, MN
505
miles
9
hours’ seat time
1
time zone change
Two
afternoons in a row we ran into massive thunderstorms with rain pelleting our
windowshield to the point of running hazard lights and *thinking* about pulling over.
Judd
found a B & B on line near our desired tomorrow-destination so he
booked it. The innkeeper called to remind us that there were no dinner
options once we got that far out of town. So we stopped in Duluth about 6pm and
had dinner at the Scenic Cafe overlooking the superior side of Lake Superior.
The restaurant had a big garden out front featuring mostly green tomatoes. A
campfire was going with white Adirondack chairs all around but too warm for
anyone to be sitting there. We did try a selfie with Lake Superior in the
background. The B & B was warm and
inviting—we just didn’t feel like schmoozing with the other guests in the
gazebo, so went straight up to our room for the night.
Saturday am
23.2
miles
22
minutes
Birch
Point Marina Ferry to a camp on an island on Vermillion Lake, MN
When
we had contacted Susan about visiting her in Iowa on a certain weekend, she
said she wasn’t going to be in Iowa but at a camp in northern Minnesota. We
figured out that when we weren’t going to re-enact the Oregon Trail via
Independence, Missouri, we could just as well drive a few hours north as a few
hours south. So, Susan’s rental lady met us at the marina and ferried us to her
family camp out on the island. Susan and Kaiko awaited
us with and family and friends for their last day at camp.
The
“camp” was really a lodge, 2 parts log cabin and 1 part finished off house with at least 3 stone
fireplaces with wood stoves in the great room the dining room and the master
bedroom suite, PLUS a wood-burning
kitchen oven. Every room had at least 2 gas lamps. The pre-college-agers swam,
canoed, row-boated, camp–fired, made us lunch, played Clue and Yahtzee….it was
the real deal. We had a wonderful, full
visit.
Four of the eight of us received
bites?stings? from the whatever-s that swarmed the 3rd plank on the
dock. We saw lures the size of your forearm hanging on the camp boat dock and figured out what the heck kind of fish goes for a lure that size: a muskie. We googled up pics (you should too) and they look the size of a beluga whale. This did freak out the swimmers a bit but we heard they were bottom dwellers. The other disturbance were the mini-lobster size crayfish crawling on the rocks right at water's edge. *Someone* caught enough crayfish to boil, peel and eat as lobster hors d'oeuvres. *Someone* else wouldn't go swimming unless they could jump off a boat out in the middle of the cove to avoid toe pinching. *No one* had nightmares of crayfish picking an entire skeleton clean.
Sunday am
233 miles
All were ready
and rearing to depart by 9am after a breakfast of scrambled cheesy eggs and
banana bread baked, impressively, by me, in the wood-stoked kitchen oven the evening before. Every
time I wiped a counter or table, there was another sprinkling of mouse poop.
Never saw a mouse, but the poop appeared magically, as if falling from
the rafters. The "ferry" arrived close to noonish and we all began our 4.5 hr
ride to Minneapolis (JT and me) vs. 9.5 hr ride (Susan et al) back to
Coralville, IA……. Notwithstanding the construction delays, torrents of rain and
accident delays, it was a great commute to the next destination: Peace Corps
buddy, Miles’ home.
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