Eastern U.P. farmland
Our campground was right on the St Mary's River with a great view of the river traffic. We've never seen sailboats here but there were eight or ten of them that day. I didn't get outside in time to take a picture of them all so got one of a single sailboat and a very small tugboat.
Sailboat and cute little tugboat with Canada in the background
We don't know if people try to sneak across the border on jet skis or in fishing boats but it seems like it would be awfully easy to do.
The rest of Wednesday was taken up by doing two weeks' worth of laundry so we didn't have time to do anything else.
We spent Thursday getting groceries and trying to find a way to repair the latest problem with the RV. I mentioned in Dayton that we'd lost two tanks of propane in a week which was really weird. When we got to the Soo Jim discovered both the tanks were empty again. These are tanks that have lasted us an entire four-month trip so we definitely have a leak. One of our neighbors knocked on the door and told us he smelled propane, too. Jim can smell it occasionally near the door side tank but not on the other side. He's tested every line and connection he can find but we still don't know where it's leaking. The Soo is so small we couldn't find anyone to work on it so we'll just leave the door side tank turned off until we get home. We'll add it to the list of things that will undoubtedly go wrong between now and then.
Mesabi Miner - 1000-foot laker
Thursday's pictures are of river traffic. This freighter is one of the 1000-ft lakers as it heads into the canal between the river's U.S. side and Sugar Island. If you can enlarge the picture, ahead of the bow you can barely see the Sugar Island Ferry's dock. The ferry, which runs back and forth every hour, cannot be replaced by a bridge over the canal because it's impossible to build one high enough for the wheelhouses on the freighters to get underneath. The lakers spend their entire lives on the Great Lakes because they're too long to get through the locks around Niagara. The ocean freighters are 730' or less so they can get through.
Another sight which was new to us.....a tugboat pushing a very strange-looking barge.
The reunion took up Friday, Saturday and most of Sunday. Nothing is ever planned for Sunday because people are leaving but we got lucky and caught up with some who weren't leaving until later so we got to visit with them more. The reunion was the biggest since our first one in 1987......73 people (including seven under ten years old). It was a wonderful event, enjoyed by one and all, with the group voting to do it in the Soo again in 2019. (We do this every two years but it's usually in Jefferson City, Tennessee, which is much easier for most of us to get to, however, the family got its start in the Soo.)
Today we were supposed to move 130 miles west to a new campground near Munising. Fortunately I googled it to check on directions before setting off. Instead of directions I found a mass of appalling reviews which were written after I made reservations in early May. The campground we were going to doesn't even exist! It was a new place, scheduled to open in May, but it never got built. It's just a mud hole. The owner kept taking reservations even though he knew he couldn't keep them. The other people got emails that their reservations were cancelled, but we heard nothing until a call at 3:30 this afternoon when he gave me a lame story about changing computer systems and losing our reservation. I called lots of places in the area this morning and finally found something 60 miles from where we needed to be which means an extra 120 miles of driving tomorrow to do our Pictured Rocks Boat Cruise. We're not happy about it, but at least we're not on the side of the road. This was the first time I'd taken a chance on a new place. It will certainly be the last.
We're now in Ishpeming, about 15 miles west of Marquette, Michigan. The campground is nice enough but it has unusable wifi. That's one of our pet peeves about campgrounds.....saying they have wifi (and charging more because of it) but when you get there you find out it only works in the office or when the other 120 people aren't using it. That's today's excuse....not enough IP addresses for so many users so you just have to keep trying and trying and trying until someone gets off his computer and it opens up. We've been trying intermittently for five hours and it hasn't worked yet. We do have a hotspot, which is what I'm using to do this, but Verizon's unlimited data isn't really unlimited so we don't want to over-use it and get our speed throttled back during this month. If cutting speed back means going from 4G to 3G, we can't handle that. We experienced the wonders of 3G in areas around the Soo and it didn't work at all.
The drive was beautiful and uneventful which was appreciated after the way the day started. In addition to the campground fiasco, we almost lost a cat. While at the dump station on our way out of our last campground, I checked Goblin's carrier and found he'd had his usual traveling-anxiety attack and needed his travel-pad replaced. While I was getting a new one into his carrier....and he was obviously out of it....he headed for the rarely-ever-open front window and was on his way out when I grabbed his tail and hauled him back inside. It was entirely my fault it happened. I was very glad his tail was both handy and strong.
Hwy 28 between the Soo and Munising. This is prime moose country so we've got our fingers crossed we'll finally see one. Jim is having a time dealing with all this traffic. :-D
Munising with billows of Lake Superior fog hiding how high the hills are right at the lake. The lake is just a block or two to the right.
Lake Superior fog is a very common occurrence. We're hoping our boat cruise won't be fogged out tomorrow. The drive between Munising and Marquette has fantastic views of the lake so we have an extra reason for hoping the fog won't be too heavy.
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