On leaving Michigan

A week ago we left the upper peninsula of Michigan, and I really thought we'd be done with lower Michigan in two days. Well, I was wrong. We spent a full week peeking at lakes on both sides, Huron and Michigan.

I had always thought the popular western side, along Lake Michigan, was pricey and crowded and overrated. Of course, that was based on one quick drive thirty years ago on a beautiful sunny Sunday. This time, I took my time. And it was crowded, if the day was a sunny weekend, and who could blame all those people for wanting some of that sandy dune shoreline, with water that is at times warm enough to swim?

The towns are quaint and full of flowers. At least ten towns along the shore plant petunia borders along the curbs from one end of town to the other. Then they water and weed all those beds. It seemed worth it to me.

But the most amazing feature of the shoreline are the dunes.  Formed by sand blowing from prevailing southeasterly winds, the dunes shift and mound and grow, advance and retreat, trap inland lakes and then reclaim the lakes back into Lake Michigan.  In Sleeping Bear Dunes, a man named Pierce Stocking, a lumberman who loved the dunes, decided to share them with the world.  He thought if he built a road through the dunes, then we could all stand on top of 200 foot mountains of sand and share in the exhilaration of the blue waters and the wind blowing our faces.  And he did it.  Now a National Seashore, the Sleeping Bear Dunes are accessible to everyone, and Pierce Stocking Drive is the highlight. 

Thank you, Mr. Stocking.

To all my friends back home, from Alpena, MI, where everything is squishy today

We have received your kind shipment of hot and humid air ( Detroit 94/75, Minneapolis 97/80) and it has made us so homesick for Houston (93/78) that we are thinking about turning to the south where a/c is considered a necessity. Besides, we don’t want to miss the tropical storm season.

Taking its cue from the rising outside temps, our frig went on the fritz (50 is the best it gets right now) and tomorrow we will be getting a new circuit board.  Hopefully my watermelon will be cool enough to eat again before we get too far south (where people know watermelons are supposed to be icy cold).  We plan to hug the shore of Lake Michigan as close as we can for a few breezes before hitting the non-peninsula states to the south (Indianapolis (95/78). We might stop at a few places that advertise they are KOOL inside.

As you might gather from my jiggly bicycling movies in my photo albums Mr. Lincoln and I have logged a few bike miles this summer in Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota. They have glorious long bike paths here. But today, it was too muggy to bike. We ducked inside NOAA's shipwreck museum to watch movies about the Great Lakes storm of November 1913 when twelve ships disappeared to watery graves.  Made me shiver for a moment.

This weekend marked the 108th Chicago to Mackinac sailboat races. The 333-mile race from just off Navy Pier to Mackinac Island is the oldest annual freshwater distance race in the world. An estimated 3,500 crewmembers on 355 boats participated.  Last night a storm with 60 mph winds flipped one of the boats, and two crew members died.   To hear this on the news right after visiting the shipwreck museum brought an erie present day reality to history. Just the day before I had peered out into the water hoping to glimpse some of the boats.  It never occurred to me when I heard rain on the roof in the night that someone would die on the Lakes.



Looking at Huron today, who would ever think this pale blue wonder would wreak havoc?

Great Lakes weather is highly unpredictable.  Sailors leaving port in balmy seas can be confronted within hours by swells thirty feet high.  Unlike ocean swells of that size, these are not rolling but crashing swells, as in swamp and smash your boat. (It was a scary movie and even scarier present day reality; I am not going sailing out there, especially not on an off season November special).  

One more Great Lake amazing fact: did you know that if you spread the water of the Great Lakes over the whole US, we would be nine feet under water?  I'd like to do that this summer.  Pour some on the Southwest.  Pour some onTexas.  If we could just tip Superior on edge for about an hour.....

Who painted those rocks?

The simple answer is God did, but I will add a few details.

The cliffs are pre-Cambrian rock that was once the ocean floor of a tropical sea, and the layers are different sediment accumulations on that open floor. Then the oceans dried up and the glaciers came, carving the rock into these 200 foot cliffs and leaving behind Lake Superior.

Lake Superior is the largest freshwater lake in the world by volume and contains more water than all the other Great Lakes. If you emptied the other four Great Lakes into it, you would need three more Lake Eries to fill it up. It is 400 miles long, 160 miles wide, 1400 feet deep. And chilly. 40 degrees on average. Did I mention blue and clear?

Back to the painted rocks. The rocks are porous and small springs seep from them.  Iron, copper, and various other minerals in the water paint the scene.

Water carves the formations. Superior was balmy the day we took our tour, but when the winds shift from the north, watch out for 8 foot seas. In the winter, ice forms a fairy castle display and further erodes the rock as it thaws.

All this geological history led to a landscape so precious that the US made it into a National Park, one of the must-sees on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

A Lot to Love

I would never never never thought that I would love an automobile museum, but I truly loved the Gilmore in Hickory Corners, MI. What's not to love about a grassy knolled farm with a collection of relocated and restored barns? And a 1930's Shell Station?  Then there were the cars. The collection of shiny brass and nickel ornamented automobiles brought out the artist in me. I found I never took a full photo of an auto, because I was fixated with the shiny lights and ga ga fixtures. Barn after barn was filled with pristine autos from the earliest days of the auto to the cars of my first memories.  Just a yummy day.

Enjoy the photos.

https://picasaweb.google.com/margaret.lincoln/20110615MargaretSViewOfTheDayAtTheGilmore#