Vacation, Day 7

Day 7, and another big day.

We got up this morning with big intentions.  First off was the continental breakfast in the lobby of the motel. It consisted of various cereals, toast, English muffins, bagels, apples and oranges.  Your usual fare...

So the Schmitz Mobile Chaos Unit piled into the RamVan (it's a gold Dodge Caravan... the Rams wear blue and gold... football season is fast approaching and I'm excited... okay?) and headed for the Miners Falls and the Miners Castle for our first hikes of the day to warm up for the "big one".

Momma and Caleb early on the hike to Miners Falls.

Momma and the critters sitting on some fascinating tree roots.

Momma and Caleb on the overlook platform as we reached Miners Falls.

and...  wait for it...   Miners Falls.

The varmints posing for a shot.

More fascinating tree roots.  You might be surprised by the tree roots that actually qualify as fascinating in these parts!

Here's the family on the overlook at Miners Castle.

The boys in an actual sweet moment...  they were bribed...

After the Miners "stuff" tour/hike, we headed for a somewhat lengthy drive to another area which has a the Au Sable lighthouse.  It's a 1.5 mile hike, each direction. Crazy to take two little boys on that kind of hike?  Possibly. Are there bears up here? Yes. There are.  In fact, we had one run across the road after lunch as we were driving to the lighthouse hike. I would say that the bear was maybe an 1/8 mile in front of us but there was no mistake once it started moving from the side of the road to the forest on the other side.  We tried to get a photo for proof, but alas, he was disappeared into the forest by the time we got up there.


Lunch, by the way, was at this delightful little place called the Bear Trap.  It's not much to look at but who cares about that kind of stuff.  The sign said they served authentic pasties.  What are pasties?  They were common food for the miners/loggers back in the day.  They're carrots, potatoes, rutabega, onion, and hamburger (probably something else that I'm forgetting...) cooked inside of a pie crust.  Kind of a pot-pie except not cooked in a pot.  Momma ordered that and it was fantastic!  I had a the Michigan/Wisconsin burger that was a hamburger and a brat pattie served in a mushroom and swiss style.  Also fantastic and quite honestly, a little bigger than I needed, but I took one for the team and ate the whole stinkin' thing.


Good thing too, the upcoming hike proved to be a little more than I was expecting.


Off we go...

This photo was one of the first of our hike to the light house.  It's of an old shipwreck.  One of many that are preserved along the beaches here.

The critters getting the sand out of their shoes after the 200' walk to the wreck and back.  Momma and daddy are preparing for a day of great drama...

The hike to...

The destination...

The sand dunes further East than we're planning to go.

The mobile chaos unit atop the light house.  They put us thru a lengthy tour of historical info that was both highly interesting and a little bit like torture to a fella with a not-so-good back before we were able to get out on the balcony shown here.

The "steps" from the lighthouse down to the beach.  They start off not so bad, but get a little treacherous towards the end, as Robby is finding out.  Dear ol' dad found the secret though.  You put your toes on the log while resting the heel of your foot on the cable for better stability.

Without adding about another 10 photos to this post, I found this one which does a pretty good job of showing the sand-to-pebbles-to-boulders that lined most of the length of the beach for our walk back.  There were other areas that were slightly more challenging/slippery/sharp/jagged/whatever else, but all-in-all, it was a FUN hike back to the RamVan.

Another shipwreck.  The things sticking up are the steel pegs that were used to hold the deck to the bracing underneath.  You're pretty much seeing the bracing underneath as the decking is gone.

The varmints and their well-packed bellies from our visit to the Bear Trap!

Sort of blurry, but the little bit of trees that you can see in the far background of the photo is where the lighthouse was and where we started our journey on the beach.  Much to the chagrin of the critters, we were only about 3/4 of the way back at this point.

As I've said, it was a great hike back.  We were all tired and thirsty by the time we hit the RamVan so we drank up and headed back to the motel.

Once there, we waited all but about 10 minutes to head to the "Dogpatch" restaurant for supper.  They have a seafood buffet that was pretty good.  We may be going there for breakfast in the morning as well since the lock on the "front" of our room didn't work when we got back tonight and the owner said he would send us up there for a free breakfast in the morning due to the fact that he couldn't get the lock fixed tonight and the other fact that we now have the grueling task of walk around the side of the building to the lakeside door to get into our room.  It's rough...  :-)

After dinner, Robby and I got our swimsuits on to go get into Lake Superior for a walk... it's too dang chilly to swim.  It hasn't hit 80 degrees for us yet and the water is a little less than desirable swimming temps for a man in his early 40's.

Regardless, we went in for a wade, and got about 15 feet out into the lake, roughly 20 feet from the steps leading down to it, when I spotted a snake in the water coming out from under a log.

Swimming excursion, over.

We decided that football was in our near future and so it was.  We played for a while, just the two of us, until Robby spotted a sturdy young lad roughing up his older sister.  He asked me if he could invite that kiddo to play with us.  Sure, why not.  So we played for a while until he had to go.

Later on while watching the sunset, the lad and his sisters came back outside, quite wildly and Robby and him started another game of football, sans me at QB.  It was great watching them play.  Jack is 10 years old and really a great kid from what I could tell.  Great family in general from my all too brief conversation with his mom that evening.

Robby and Jack set a time for 8am to get together and play one last time until we must part.  We'll see if it happens but it's great to see Robby collecting temporary summer friends and piles of great memories.  Turns out, he's a great kiddo too!!