Tripometer – 1471 mi
Gas Gauge – 113.987
Location – Monocle Lake State Park, MI
Lodging – $16
We woke up early today to hit the road like honest-to-god tourists. We were still drinking coffee and wiping the sleep from our eyes when Ranger greeted us as pictured above. Apparently he had been making sweet, sweet love to the grill we had used to make chicken the night before. Before we could tour anything this morning we had to find some baby shampoo and wash the pup in a parking lot. Must have been a rather odd sight for the locals!
<cue Gordon Lightfoot>
Monocle Lake State Park surrounds a tiny lake just inland from Lake Superior.
‘The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down of the big lake they call Gitche Gumee’
The day was cloudy and rainy off and on with a fairly good fog in low areas.
‘When afternoon came it was freezin’ rain in the face of a hurricane West wind.’
We drove West and North all along the shores of Whitefish Bay to the Great Lakes Shipwreck museum on Whitefish Point.
‘The searchers all say they’d have made Whitefish Bay if they’d put fifteen more miles behind her.’
It was a nice little museum with several early maritime buildings – lighthouse, keepers house, Coast Guard lifeboat house, working foghorn, etc… But there was one major flaw.
‘And later that night when his lights went outta sight came the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’
The Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum is the proud owner of the bell from the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Conveniently for a small community organization, someone wrote a song that they’re allowed to use at will in their museum. And they played it over, and over, and over… Or maybe it was just in my head?
‘And all that remains is the faces and the names of the wives and the sons and the daughters.’
Later that afternoon, to purge the song from our weary heads, we took a hike to see Tahquamenon Falls — a 50’ tall fall running at 10,000gal/sec in the second largest state park in MI.