The plan was to drive to Munising, eat pasties for lunch, and hang around until our sunset cruise along the Pictured Rocks. The next day we would drive to the other end of the national lakeshore to visit an agate museum and see if we could find any agates ourselves before driving back to Ann Arbor.
We started the drive by crossing the Mackinac Bridge. It is the longest suspension bridge between anchorages in the Western Hemisphere and the world's 5th longest in total suspension if you know what those things mean. Sounds cool anyway. It's nicknames are Mighty Mac and Big Mac, and the bridge is actually depicted on our license plate. It was a fun way to start our morning.
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| Mackinac Island from the bridge |
After crossing the bridge, our drive took us west along the coast of Lake Michigan on the southern edge of the UP. The road lies right along the coast next to these narrow sandy beaches.
We stopped at a camp site that was literally only a few feet from this beach so we could snap some pictures. It was pretty cold and windy, but the clouds and the waves were quite beautiful.
As you can see, the wind was not nearly as kind to me as it was to Jake during our little photo shoot. My hair...blarg.
Eventually we turned away from the coast and drove through the center of the UP where we saw some picturesque farms and some gorgeous fall foliage.
When we finally arrived in Munising, we stopped in at Muldoon's Pasties for lunch. The UP is one of the few places in the US where you can get pasties, which are kind of like stew wrapped in a pastry crust. Yoopers (the nickname for people who live in the UP) love pasties, and they sell them all over as soon as you cross the bridge. We had looked up the best place in the UP to get pasties, and Muldoon's was the most highly recommended. It was lucky that the best pasties just happened to be in the city we were already visiting. The pasties at Muldoon's lived up to their reputation - they were delicious! I think we ate there for every meal while we were in Munising, and we took some for the road.
By the way, Yoopers have accents like people from Minnesota or Canada. They are very nice, and it was fun to listen to their conversations as we ate. They talked about hunting a lot if I remember correctly.
After a satisfying lunch, we spoke to an employee at Muldoon's who said she had heard they might not be doing the boat tours that evening because of the weather. So we headed over to the docks to find out what was going on.
Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore is a 15 mile stretch of the coast where the colorful sandstone cliffs have been sculpted into rock formations by the waves on Lake Superior. The boat tour of Pictured Rocks leaves from Munising bay and goes out on Lake Superior to take you past the rock formations, archways, and waterfalls created by the waves on the lake. A popular activity at Pictured Rocks is kayaking along the shore, but we had decided against that, fearing that in my pregnant state, I wouldn't be up to paddling all that way. Because a lot of the shoreline is cliffs, you can only get out at certain points, so we could have easily gotten into trouble if I had gotten too tired to paddle. Anyway, it's a good thing we decided against kayaking because the weather was terrible! I doubt anyone was even renting out kayaks that day.
We were planning to take the sunset cruise because the lighting at sunset is supposed to bring out the colors in the rocks. When we talked to someone at the tour desk, they said that our evening cruise hadn't officially been cancelled, but it could be because they were predicting ten foot waves out on the lake. So we decided to cancel our tour and reschedule for one in the morning, but that meant we needed to drive an hour to Grand Marais at the other end of the lakeshore to do our agate activities that evening. It definitely added driving time to our trip since we were planning on just stopping there on our way home, but we didn't think the boat tour would be very fun on those waves.
So we headed to Grand Marais to search for Lake Superior agates. Lake Superior agates have reddish-orange and white bands, and they wash up on the shores of the lake. Jake has been missing the rock hounding we were able to do back in Utah, so when I read about the Lake Superior agates around Grand Marais, I knew we had to stop in.
Our first stop was the Gitche Gumee Agate and History Museum. It is a small museum of agates and other rocks as well as some local Michgan history. We went in and looked around for quite a while before venturing out to look for agates on our own. My favorite exhibit was the fluorescent minerals, which displayed a bunch of boring-looking rocks until you turned the lights off and a UV lamp came on. Then it looked like the rocks had been painted with neon paint! It was pretty neat. I'm like a nine year-old.
Next we headed to the beach to search for agates! We didn't find any. :( But I did find a Petoskey stone, which is cool fossilized coral. It was pretty miserable searching because it was so cold and windy. It was raining off and on too, but we were able to go look while it had stopped for a few minutes. I was wearing my hoodie and one of Jake's hoodies. Needless to say, I looked like I was wearing big sack clothes - more ever-so-flattering photo ops! Don't worry, I won't torture you.
We took a few more pictures on our way back to Munising.
When we got back to Munising, we had to get a picture of this funny gift shop. They tried to make it look all German, but the funny part is that "gift" is German for poison. So the shop's name translates to "The Poison House." Hilarious! Jake said that's a mistake that a lot of missionaries make in the MTC by accidentally saying what means "the poison of the Holy Ghost." Funny.
The next morning we went back over to the docks to find out if our morning tour was going to happen. They decided to send it out, but they were predicting seven foot waves out on Lake Superior. We got in line, bundled up in layers to keep out the cold, so that we could get good seats on the boat. We had been planning to sit on top of the boat so that we could get good pictures, but after sitting out in the cold for so long, we decided it might be best to sit inside even if it meant our pictures would be taken through the window. Once on the boat, we discovered that the windows opened, so we were able to take photos without having the glass in them.
The bad news is, as soon as everyone was loaded up on the boat, they started making announcements about the rough water ahead. They said that if you don't like roller coasters or if you get sea sick, this would not be the cruise for you. They told us that the waves we could see in the bay were nothing like what we would experience once we got out on the lake. A lot of people got off the boat, but we decided to stick it out since we had driven so far to get there, and we knew it was unlikely we'd make the trip again. Once the boat took off, they started handing out bio hazard puke bags.
At the beginning of the tour, we learned a lot of fun facts about Lake Superior. It's the largest of the Great Lakes and the largest freshwater lake in the world by surface area. Lake Superior could hold the water of all the other Great Lakes plus some, and a swimming pool the size of the continental US would have to be four feet deep to hold all the water in Lake Superior. There have also been a very large number of shipwrecks in Lake Superior. One of the other boat tours you can take from Munising is on a glass-bottom boat that passes over some of the shipwrecks so you can see them beneath the water.
Anyway, the tour started out fun with the factoids and just a few bumps. Well, as we approached the edge of the bay, the water got more and more choppy. The waves got high, and the ride got rough. I started taking pictures, but Jake (Mr. Motion Sickness) got sick pretty fast and went outside at the back of the boat to get some air. With the window open to get some air, I was able to hold my composure to take pictures until the turn around point. By then I wasn't feeling great either, and I had to find a focal point to keep my attention so I wouldn't throw up.
There was a girl on our bench who had been throwing up into her puke bag the whole ride; she looked completely miserable. Someone else had brought a baby on the boat, and he was crying the whole time; I'm sure he was feeling sick. This made me think that the baby has her daddy's motion sickness because she was wiggling all over the place during the boat ride. Her wiggles made it feel like my stomach was rumbling, which just made me feel more sick as well. Then toward the end of the ride, the people in the row behind busted out their lunches, and the smell of bananas was nearly unbearable. In the end, both of us made it back without throwing up, so I guess we'll call it a success. Enjoy the pictures. They were hard earned.
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| Miner's Rock |
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| An archway |
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| Another archway |
After the boat ride, Jake and I were pretty worn out, but we still had to drive all the way home: 6 hours! We stopped at a waterfall on the way out of Munising before starting our long journey home.
I told Jake I would drive the country highways in the UP, but I wanted him to take over on the freeway just before the bridge. He slept through most of our drive down to the bridge, but after I woke him up, I decided I wanted to drive across the bridge. I thought it would be fun, and it was, but driving on that grate was a little slippery! Anyway, he drove us the rest of the way home. We stopped at an outlet mall a couple of hours from home to walk around a little (or buy baby clothes, I can't remember). Overall, it was really fun to see all the variety that Michigan has to offer, and I'm glad Jake and I got to spend some time together on our last little adventure alone!
