2000 Iconic Summer USA Road Trip!

ROADTRIP! TRIPDIARY SUMMER 2000

Author: Kay Ellen Gilmour, MD

The quintessential USA road trip on a small budget

DRIVE - FLORIDA to KENTUCKY

July 16 - We arrived home from our 2 weeks in Iceland and did the laundry. The next morning we drove from home to below Knoxville, Ky. this first day of the “Big Trip”. We’re off to pick up Sharon who is visiting with her brother and sister-in-law (Bill and Marilyn Feldkamp) in Berea.

The first excitement was a tremendous rainsquall just outside Lake City with horrific rain, lightning and thunder. Had to pull off for about 30 minutes as we couldn’t see where we were going. After that, the drive was long and uneventful. We just suddenly got very sleepy and tired at about 8 PM with the Iceland jet lag and had to stop.

KENTUCKY Berea

July 17 - Pulled into Berea in the early morning. Bill and Marilyn’s “old house” is very impressive. The grounds are beautiful with woods around the house set up on a hill off the road. The long gravel driveway winds up a cut field with the vegetable garden and greenhouse at the road. Marilyn has decorated the house beautifully with many family pictures and other homey touches. They will have a lot to move to the new home they have just purchased.

Terminal jet lag set in until Marilyn got back from work. We went to Berea to see the sights. The Berea College Campus is small and compact with 1500 students. There is no tuition charged. All students must work on the campus to pay their way. The school was started in the mid-19th century to give the poor of Appalachia a chance at higher education. The buildings are mostly brick and fit into the tree covered manicured lawns in a comfortable fashion. The town is cozy and friendly looking. Reminds me of Stetsonand Deland.

We went out into the suburbs to see the new house. It’s on a treeless lot but Bill will fix that quickly. The lot is one acre and you can already see the garden in progress in Bill’s head. The house itself is bright and airy and a very nice size and configuration for the two of them with the ability to have guests comfortably as well. They should be very happy there. Went to the Boone Hotel in town for supper and then crashed again early in the evening.

DRIVE - KENTUCKY to WISCONSIN

July 18 - Another long day of driving. Sharon is with us now and has the back seat with all the housekeeping duties. We are packed tightly but everyone has a comfortable space. Drove from Berea to Milwaukee in one day. The farms in Indiana were beautiful. Lots of corn but all in all, there wasn’t too much to see from the Interstate. We did get a glimpse of Chicago from the interminable Interstate Bypass. We were very lucky to be able to call ahead for rooms in Milwaukee as well as two nights in Door County. Got to bed very early again and slept to 4:30 AM.

The variety of trees was spectacular. The homes are of all different architectures but they go a lot for the Tudor look. They can grow gorgeous flowers in this cool climate as they do in England. Some of the front yards are as beautiful as any professional arboretum.

WISCONSIN

Milwaukee

July 19 –We were at the Zoo before they opened the gates. A clear sky day in the 60’s. The Zoo is located on low hills covered with trees with wide comfortable paths. There were many indoor exhibits that were more diverse and informative than any we had seen in any other Zoo. They have to have a lot of indoor winter accommodations for many of their animals even though they rotate them outdoors during the “heat” of the summer. There were so many children there. Little ones, holding hands with their partners. Mixed groups of elementary school agekids – blacks,whites and Asians. A very busy place by the time weleft atnoon.

We then drove to the Mitchell Park Arboretum. Had a picnic lunch in the park –burr!! Then went to visit the indoor exhibit – three glass domes built in the early 1900’s. One dome was of Tropical plants, one of desert plants and the third for “showy” flowers with placards of Georgia O’Keefe scattered throughout the garden. A delightful couple of hours.

We then drove down to the Michigan Lakefront. There was a huge marina of sailboats. In the sheltered bay behind the seawall, many small sailboats were successfully avoiding each other. We later learned that they haul the boats up onto the parking lots during the winter. Some of the largest yachts are left in the water and have some kind of bubbling device that keeps ice from forming next to them. We drove along Lake Drive – the beer barons built spectacular mansions along the riverfront. Fantastic homes with breathtaking grounds.

Manicured lawns with that soft lush green grass that calls out for you to roll aroundon it. Again the flower varieties werestunning.

We then pointed north and headed for the Peninsula of Door County. We now entered the real farm county of Wisconsin. Thousands upon thousands of corn plantings. Haven’t seen the two story farmhouses and red barns since I left our family farm in central New York. The barns have up to 8 silos and open corncribs as well. The other crop that is huge here is snap beans – both for an exportable cash crop and for crop rotation with the corn.

TwoRivers

We stopped in Two Rivers (the home of the first ice cream sundae). The gentleman that served us was talkative and filled us in on some of the local color. We learned that the local corn is grown for the dairy herds. They chop the whole thing up and put it in silos. This is mixed – 75% hay, 15% corn and the rest barley and oats. Winter-feed. They get little snow here due to the effects of the Lake. Does get down to 20 below on occasions. Kids still go to school – only close school for heavy snow if the plows can’t clear it by morning.

Charlton Heston’s wife was born and raised in this town. He drops by now and then but we didn’t get to see him to discuss the finer points of the National Rifle Association’s stand on hand gun control. Got the impression that our tour guide thinks very highly of the man so we did not get into the issues of gun control with him either.

DoorCountyPeninsula-EggHarbor

At last we found our way to Egg Harbor, our home for two nights in Door County Peninsula with Green Bay on the west and Lake Michigan on the east. Had a too large meal at a local “fine” restaurant. It’s a bar and also has to be where the Moose or

Kiwanis meets for lunch. Good food – Orange Roughy. Ran out the highway to catch the dying light for a picture of a particularly attractive farm and then fell into our motel on Green Bay. We did go out to the end of the yard to look over the water. Waves on the Bay, heavy clouds overhanging the water, temperature in the 50’s and a brisk breeze sent us indoors. It’s 10:30 – the latest we’ve manage to stay up so far. It’s been 4 long days on the road and I’m looking forward to two days of quiet puttering aroundon this finger of land.

July 20 - Up for breakfast in our room. We were off at 8AM as usual. It was a cool overcast day with temperatures in the high 60’s all day. Had scattered showers as well. Went North on the peninsula to the strait dividing the tip of the peninsula with an off shore island. The strait is called Death’s Door as so many ships have wrecked trying to get through there.

They run a car ferry every 30 minutes during the day in summer. In the winter, they run one icebreaker a day carrying 6 cars only. The 600 year-round residents have to plan carefully for those trips to town.

The water in Green Bay really IS GREEN – and crystal clear. It’s hard to believe that there is still pollution from industry still lurking about.

We drove up the west side and down the east stopping at a couple State Parks along the way. We were not very impressed by Door County. The towns have 100 – 200 residents all of whom are running establishments catering to the tourists. Small scale Gatlinburg. If you don’t want to play golf or go shopping in arts and crafts shops or antique hopping – not much else to do. The coast is pretty but hard to get to in most places either due to the lack of roads to the shore or because the shoreline is privately owned and out of bounds according to all the “Keep Out” signs.

We did enjoy seeing a couple of lighthouses – one of which we walked to over a “causeway” of large stones that goes under water with a good Nor’easter. Lighthouses today are all automatic and run on electricity. There is only one lighthouse keeper left at the oldest lighthouse in the USA in Boston.

When we were able to get to the shore away from tourist areas, we saw several of the local fishing boats. They’re called gill boats. They are about 35 feet long. From the side, they look like a cigar with a short square bump on the stern that serves as the wheelhouse. There is no deck –all the work goes on inside the structure from a door that when closed is flush with the back of the boat. With that door opened, the back end of the boat opens to put the gill nets out and bring them in.

They go out 5 to 10 miles to put out their nets close to the bottom. They go back 3 – 5 days later to haul the nets and pull in the white fish for which they are famous. It looked cold and dangerous with the relatively mild summer weather and lake conditions. Can’t imagine what it’s like in the colder times of the year.

Had wonderful berries – raspberries and cherries right out of the field. Ate our fill. Didn’t care for the wines they make with fruits – lots of wineries specializing in cherry wine. Too fruity with an aftertaste.

We have decided to leave here tomorrow morning and make our way to Madison, the capitol. We’ve seen about every square inch of Door County and it’s time to move on.

GreenBay

July 21 - We left Egg Harbor early and drove directly to Green Bay. Once you get out of the tourist area on the Peninsula, the farms take over again. Cows all over the place. One dairy farm after the other.

Everywhere we have been in rural Wisconsin, we see a LOT of German names on the mailboxes. The Germans, Swiss, and other Teutonic peoples settled this state in the 1800’s when they came in droves to escape the depression in Europe. In keeping with our prejudices about the Germanic cultures, we consistently have seen absolutely pristine farms and small town neighborhoods. There is obviously a major culture of cleanliness next to godliness with flowers and beautiful landscaping thrown in. It’s really hard to have a clean dairy farm but they are – one after the other. If pride is a sin – I say more power to these folks – and am sure their sins of pride in their surroundings and home sites will be forgiven easily.

We stayed in Green Bay long enough to see the football stadium and some of the downtown. Small town without any outwardly remarkable features. Not everything in town is the football colors of green and gold – but almost.

FondduLac

On to Fond du Lac – literally – at the end of the lake. This beautiful little town lies at the end of Lake Winnebago. 80 miles around and big enough to have white caps even with a mild breeze. The temperature had soared to 68 so we picnicked at the lake edge with only one heavy sweater. Took in the sights – Lighthouse, Spanish American War Memorial, churches and then took a audiotape tour out into the countryside to the Horicon MarshWildlife Refuge.

HoriconMarshWildlifeRefuge

There are several thousand acres of marsh, which act as a sanctuary for Canadian geese during their migration in the spring and the fall. We drove out on an old dike where you could see an endless vista of cattails – the largest cattail marsh in the world. This was our first chance to get out into the “wilderness” of this beautiful state and we were very happy to be there away from all those darned tourists. We saw bunny rabbits, mice, voles, musk rats, deer and birds of all kinds – white pelicans, great blue herons, robins, swallows, and of course – explosions of wild flowers. A delightful afternoon.

Dinner was at a family restaurant with huge Friday four course meals for $6.00. Called ahead to get this Motel in the capitol, Madison so that I could have an Internet port in the room. Now if I can only figure out how to use it -----

FrankLloydHouse

July 22 - Our goal for the day was The Dells. The name serves for both the name of a city and the formation of sandstone rock that forms the banks of the Wisconsin River in the area. On the way from Madison to The Dells, we stopped at the sight of Frank Lloyd Wright’s home. His grandparents had land there from the early 1800’s when they came from Wales. He built his personal home, Taliesin, in the side of a high bluff overlooking a beautiful valley.

We couldn’t stay long enough for the several hours’ tour but did go through the small visitor’s center with exhibits. Did a bit of shopping as well. Christmas will be here before you know it.

Close by was a house we had read about in the AAA magazine. It is unique and huge with architecture build into the rocks and a unique glass corridor built out 50 feet into space over the valley below. We really wanted to see this house but apparently the current owners didn’t have the courage of their convictions that the house would serve as an attraction on its own so they really hokyed the place up with awful side attractions that you couldn’t avoid. We were horrified by the gaudiness of the place andran fromthe site as quickly as possible.

WisconsinDells

Made it to the Dells in time to get tickets for the boat tours of the river below and then above the dam. The glaciers a few million years ago were in this area that had previously been a shallow sea. There were massive sandstone deposits laid down. The glacier scraped most of this sediment away but spared a long strip of land in the middle. This then eroded with waters of the Wisconsin River and left the exposed banks as bizarre sandstone cliffs on both sides of the river for several miles. The cliffs then suddenly stop and the shoreline is flat again just as in all the other rivers in the region. We enjoyed the boat ride and the short walks they had us take from the boat. The town however is three Gatlinburgs rolled into one –thousands of people roaming the streets eating ice cream and shopping in tee shirt stores. We left.

There was no place in the inn for miles around this most popular tourist area so we ended up staying in a truck stop motel. Really nothing fancy – but after Iceland, indoor plumbing rates at least 3 stars inour categorizationof facilities

Elroy-SpartaStateBikeTrail

July 23 - Got to the bike trail head at 9 AM and headed off on our 32 mile bike trip. The trail follows an old train right-of-way improved by the Rails-To-Trails Association. Neither Lois nor I have ridden a bike more than a couple miles in the past few years. Oh well. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Sharon drove the car ahead and met us at the small towns along the way. The first 9 miles were a steady uphill grade – just enough to make your legs holler. The weather was perfect. Temperatures in the low 70’s, beautiful blue sky with puffy white clouds, the smell of new mown hay, birds singing in the fields and groves of trees along the trail, Amish farms with the buggies at the doors, deer, cows and horses everywhere. It was a perfect day.

There are three tunnels on the route left over from the old train days. The first and second were ¼ mile long and the third was ¾ mile long. You were required to walk through which only made sense as it was pitch black and you’d have killed each other coming and going if riding. Most everyone including us had flashlights. Finished in 6 hours with a break for a picnic lunch and a couple of cold drink breaks and then drove into Lacrosse. Spent the evening trying to get the pictures onto the Internet for the family. It seems to be working. To bed earlier than usual. Seem to be tired for some reason. Maybe it’s from trying to eat and type standing up.

LoopDriveIntoIowa River Locks

July 24 - Took US 53 South down the Mississippi River. What a surprise we had when just on happenstance we had stopped at a dam and lock to see how they worked. In came the Mississippi Queen on her yearly trip from New Orleans to the Upper Mississippi for the summer. She almost filled the 600-foot lock. The calliope was playing as she left the lock. It took about 45 minutes to get her through. The whole neighborhood turned out for the event - families with children,

grandparents with folding chairs and every tourist passing by at the time. The railroad runs right along the river. The train tooted it’s welcome and all the trucks on the highway sounded their horns in salute. We even had a bald eagle fly overhead. A very festiveoccasion.

There are 29 locks between St. Louis and St. Paul. The waters between the locks/dams are called pools. The level of water in the pools stays almost the same throughout the year. The total drop from the Upper to the Lower Mississippi is over 400feet. Lock #8 where wesaw the Queen has only an 11-foot drop.

We stopped at the next lock, #9, as there appeared to be a barge coming towards it. Turned out it was a barge group with three barges carrying diesel fuel and the massive, extremely powerful pushing tug. The combination was over 1400 feet long and too long to get into the 600-foot lock. So they pushed the first two barges into the lock and decoupled them from the remaining combination. The tug and its connected barge then pulled into the lock snuggled up next to the decoupled pair. They strapped the two segments side to side. The back doors closed and the water level rose. When they opened the front doors, the combination moved forward. When the front two barges were out of the lock – they attached them to the concrete wall extending beyond the lock. The tug and first barge unhooked

their side-to-side coupling. With only inches between the lock and the tug on one side and the free barges on the other the captain backed the tug back into the lock. He then pivoted across the lock to position behind the front barges. They recoupled them end-to-end again and off they went – to the next lock where they would start the whole process again. That explains why it takes 5 days to make thetrip.

Each of the three barges carried as much fuel as 870 fuel tanker trucks. They gave the number that a barge combination ¼ mile in length would carry as much cargo as 18-wheelers lined up for 11.5 miles bumper to bumper.

The barges primarily carry fuel products, fertilizers, and chemicals from south to north and grain, corn, and soybeans to the south. A lot of the corn goes all the way down the Mississippi to New Orleans to be exported out of the country. What stays in this country is used for cow feed and for products made from corn. Very little of it is sweet corn for table corn.

PrairieduChien

We went down to Prairie du Chien where we found a wonderful state park. The park is on a high bluff overlooking the confluence of the Wisconsin River and the Mississippi. A beautiful vista.

Into Iowa

Crossed the Mississippi and drove into Iowa. Turned south again and drove along the high bluffs. Tremendous views of the massive river for miles and miles. We were then turned inland on a road marked on the map as “scenic”. That was an understatement of great magnitude. None of us had ever seen that sweep of farmland.

The hills were rolling so we would get up on a crest of a hill and be able to see for mile in all directions. What we saw was a sea of neatly arranged cornfields. Those sections that were cut were done so on the contours of the hills producing a tableau of greens and golden yellows with white farmhouses and red barns jutting up out of the waving stalks. A glorious sight.

Lacrosse

At Dubuque, Iowa, we crossed the Mississippi back into Wisconsin. In this area along the river, the road ran up to the high bluffs and then plunged back to river level over and over again. There was also more forest then farming. Talked with a couple of local men to learn more about the area.

They still milk the cows twice a day as we did on my grandfather’s dairy farm in Central New York. But instead of the farmer having to transport his milk to a central milk station, tank trucks come to the farm every other day to pick up the milk. There has been consolidation of dairy farming with Land-o-Lakes and Foremost having contracts with various farms for their milk.

The corn has to be cut at maturity. There would not be enough barges to carry it all away at once. We learned that there had been a white sand mining operation in Iowa near the river. The mine stretched back for miles into the hills. Those mines maintained a constant temperature and humidity. They are NOW used to store the corn and soybeans between harvesting and shipping. Clever.

This was a long day with many firsts in our books of experiences. Just what I’d hoped for in making this trip. It’s so exciting to see our fellow citizens working and playing so hard with skills and ways of life we have never noted before. The people we have met are very friendly and gregarious. They are anxious to tell us about their lives. They are also incredulous that we from Florida are here for vacation. “Why are you here?" is a universal response to our answer concerning our home state. We must admit, we have not seen any other licenses other than Wisconsin, Minnesota, or Iowa. There really is not much to do here other than to take in the sights. But what sights there are!! Overnight in Lacrosse.

LoopDriveintoMinnesota

July 25 - Started from Lacrosse in the rain. First bad weather we’ve seen. Within an hour, it had cleared and by the late afternoon it was actually hot. The temperature got into the mid 80’s.

Stopped in a tiny town at the local diner/market to get a coke. There were 8 men and women sitting around a kitchen-type table drinking coffee and discussing the news of the day - the arrival of the Mississippi Queen into Lacrosse the day before. There was a great deal of vocal disappointment with her failure to play the calliope

all the way into port. “Things just aren’t done like they were in the old days!” Ever thus. Didn’t get to stay long enough to hear their opinion of the current behavior of today’s children.

TrempealeauNationalWildlifeRefuge

The high point of the day was a visit to the Trempealeau National Wildlife Refuge. Established in 1936, it is 5700 acres of hardwoods, marsh and real wild prairie. We saw deer, rabbits, skunk, wading birds, songbirds, red headed woodpeckers, and hawks. We had the place to ourselves most of the time.

The smell of the wildflowers and the songs of the birds in the prairie grasses were restful and relaxing. A very peaceful place.

The rest of the day was not much. We drove up the two-lane road on the Wisconsin side of the Mississippi and then crossed the river and drove back down the Minnesota side. We were on a low ridge on both sides with 500-foot bluffs above us. The views were occasionally good but a lot of the time we couldn’t see too much. There were a few little towns along the way. Stockholm with a population of 89 was one of them.

I did have a chance to meet a very nice young man named D.L. Nazch. He was a redhead with a little gap between his front teeth and a nice Midwestern twang in his voice. He was also a Wisconsin Highway Patrolman. Once we got past the formalities of the warning ticket for my doing 65 in a 55-mile an hour zone, we got out the Wisconsin map and he helped us map out our route up to Lake Pepin. Sweet fellow for not giving me a real ticket.

LakePepin

Lake Pepin is NOT a lake. It’s just a very wide place in the river – 23 miles long and 2 to 3 miles across. There are islands in the river all along the way. Some are wide enough to have a causeway leading to them so that a few homes can be built. Wonder what happens to them when the river floods?

Early dinner at a local steak house buffet that will never compete with or cause concern at Ruth Chris’ steak House. Lois and Sharon are off doing a monumental laundry. I’m getting the pictures together and listening to news of the tragic Air France Concord crash. All for tonight.

MINNESOTA

Countryside&SmallTowns

July 26 - We left Lacrosse in a driving rainstorm. Last night there were severe storms in the Milwaukee area with tornadoes. We crossed the Mississippi at Lacrosse and left Wisconsin behind. It is a beautiful state and we thoroughly enjoyed our stay.

We went south and west to the small town of Harmony. We went there as we had read it was Amish Country. We stopped at the Visitor’s Center and got a map of the area. Before driving out into the country, we shopped at a couple of stores selling Amish goods. We got a picture to add to our travel wall at home and a couple souvenirs.

Then we headed off to see some Amish farms. We didn’t. No matter which way we turned or whichever direction we went, we ended up back in Harmony. It was like the movie “Groundhog Day”. We couldn’t get out of the loop. We glimpsed one man in a buggy and the back end of an Amish clad woman in front of a house but no farmhouses, barns or fields. We were in hysterics after an hour.

There are only 139 people in Harmony and we saw every one of them unless they were Amish. We figured the locals had seen our distinctive car going in and out of townso many times that they would think wewere casing thebank.

We were out in the countryside and came upon a John Deere sales lot. I found a fellow that was washing a tractor in a shed andasked him to take me for a tour of the equipment. He gladly complied and I learned about the monster combines, planters, gravity wagons, combine attachments for grain, beans and corn harvesting. A farmer, who Sharon correctly said looked more like a banker, drove up and just couldn’t stand it. He had to ask what 3 women with bikes on the back of their car were doing looking over the big rigs. He was very gracious and took the time to tell us a lot about corn growing. This included the difference between the types of corn to plant, the uses for corn, when to plant, when to harvest, how to harvest for feed or for getting the corn off the husks.

Later as we drove towards St. Paul, I saw some men in a large parking area with the large short metal round storage sheds we had seen for days. Not the tall silos – much shorter and fatter. With nothing ventured, nothing gained; I stopped and asked if they would teach me about the sheds. There were three men in their 50’s.

Two probably brothers and they took to their teaching with gusto. Learned how the combine takes the kernels off the husks, drying to 13% water content, heating the corn bins in summer and cooling in winter to avoid condensation, storage of the kernels, pricing, corn futures, size of farms, transport to the Mississippi, the difference between storage in the silos and in the bins, and the average production on their farms. They get about 150 bushels an acre. One of their farms was 2000 acres. Of course, their first question was what we were doing in this area. The locals can’t believe we are actually just driving around the countryside on a vacation.

In the mid-afternoon, it was time to get back on the Interstate and head north towards St. Paul. This required taking the beltway around Minneapolis. Word to the wise – never try this in evening rush hour traffic with a full bladder after drinking two diet cokes in a row.

We have seen very clever traffic control in all the big citybeltways. The traffic that is trying to get onto the Interstate is held by a red light on the access ramp. Some sensor on the Interstate checks the distance between cars and when there would be a break for the merging car, the light turns green and the car is released to blend onto the oncoming traffic. Seems to work very well. Didn’t see many people jumping the gunand running the lights.

We are in the Day’s Inn in Monticello tonight. The plan is to tour places in St. Cloud tomorrow. No other farmer interviews plannedfor the immediate future.

SaintCloud

July 27 - It was hot today and humid. Temperatures got into the mid 80’s. The natives liked to tell us that it really gets hot in August. But their eyes light up when they tell you how cold it gets in winter. There is great pride in the fact that they survive the winters here.

Saint Cloud is a lovely city of 50,000 folks about 60 miles west of Minneapolis. We’re staying three nights in Monticello – about halfway in between.

Onceagain, we’re ontheMississippiRiver. It seems to befollowing us.

Saint Cloud was founded in the mid 1800’s like most every other city in this part of the country. Another standard feature of all communities in Wisconsin and Minnesota, no matter what their size, is the presence of lovely small to huge public parks.

They have manicured lawns, picnic tables, trees, walkways and whatever other amenities that size allows.

One of the parks in Saint Cloud was started in the mid-1900s by the city as a garden along the river. In 1992, one of the industrial barons in this area donated land, rosebushes, fountains, iron works and yearly monies to extend the garden above the river to just across the street from his palatial home. His wife has had multiple sclerosis for years and is now restricted to the glass enclosed summerhouse on the lawn of the home overlooking this new expanded public garden. The result is a two-block long formal flowering piece of Paradise. It is surely the most magnificent formal garden I’ve seen since Butchert Gardens in Victoria, British Columbia.

After a couple hours oohing and aahing among the posies, we went to visit the two centers of higher education on the outskirts of town. One is the College of St. Benedict for girls and the other St. John’s University for boys. They are both splendid campuses with large grounds. They share faculty but the girls live on one campus and the boys on the other – about 10 miles apart. The nuns, priests and monks keep a close eye on everything. The Benedictine Monks established and administer St. John’s University. The nuns of The Order of St. Benedict run the girl’s school.

This huge Abbey on the St. John’s campus is where the monks gather three times daily for communal prayer. The public is welcomed to join them. The parish has its own sanctuary which is a large space under the Abbey. for daily communal prayer. The public is welcomed to join them. The parish has its own sanctuary which is a large space under the Abbey.

St. John’s has one of the most extensive collections of ancient manuscripts in North America in the Hill Monastic Manuscript Library. The monks are in charge of this institution that cooperates with other Universities around the world to catalog, microfilm, and store these precious documents. It was a moving experience to view some of these antiquities.

SherburneNationalWildlifeRefuge

We left St. Cloud and in the early evening drove a couple miles from our motel to the Sherburne National Wildlife Refuge. It had a 7 miles one way loop road around the prairie grasslands, ponds, and forest. We absolutely could not get out of the car due to the hordes of deer flies and huge horse flies that we know from experience bite like fire. They threw themselves against the windows trying to get in. Hitchcock should be alive to make a movie on this phenomenon. It was a pretty place to spend the evening andwe saw many beautiful birds.

Another gourmet meal at Perkin’s Family Restaurant and off to bed.

July 28 - The people of this area say they have two seasons – Winter and Road Work. That’s for certain!! We have never seen such bottlenecks and complete confusion on major roadways ever. To avoid that chaos, we decided to take the back roads towards the Mall and took a couple hours to visit

TheMinnesotaLandscapeArboretum.

We know you’re getting tired of garden stories, but each place has been very distinctive in size, formality of presentation and the types of botanypresented.

This place had a 3-mile drive through. Their most outstanding features were the great variety of different species of trees and the rose garden. Adjacent to the main building was a formal garden. In that garden was an area of Dahlia plantings that blew our socks off. Those flowers were as big as dinner plates and of every color but black. Fabulous! Also had an interesting bathroom experience. Ask in person someday.

The nice retiree who manned the front gate asked where we were from. When we answered Florida, guess what he asked? Right!! “What are you doing up here?” We said we were enjoying his beautiful state. He gave us a cute, devilish grinand invited us to “winter over with us once or twice”.

Thenit was off to the Mall Of America. YES – itis HUGE!! MallofAmerica

Opened in 1992, it covers 78 acres, has 520 stores (we missed going into one or two), with 12,000 employees and 2.5 million square feet of retail stores. In the middle of the four-story complex is an amusement park with a full sized ferris wheel, a roller coaster, and several other horrible looking rides. Not the place to visit after partaking of any of the forty some places to eat.

We shopped till we dropped. Then with feet ablaze, we retired to one of the movies houses in the Mall to see “The Patriot”. They were preparing the populous for the winter by airconditioning down to the 50’s. Never been so cold in a movie in my life. Pretty good movie though. Ate at a fast food emporium and then drove back out to the boondocks for the night.

July 29 - If we hadn’t had the GPS system in the car, we would still be looking for the cathedral. The main roads are all under repair so you are detoured all over the place. With the direction finder, we just kept reentering the coordinates and by golly – it got us there. And were we ever glad.

St.Paul’sCathedral

It is a spectacular monumental structure of external granite and internal travertine marble based on the design of St. Peter’s in Rome. It seats 3000. As the Mother Church of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, it is recognized by the Holy Seeas the bishop’s official church and it holds the cathedra, or bishop’s chair.

As soon as we arrived, the organ began to fill the vault with music. Heavenly! Then we noticed people being escorted into the sanctuary for a wedding. We stayed long enough to see her come downthe aisle and then slipped out.

BusTourTwinCities

Back to the Mall for a quick lunch and then we took an escorted bus tour of the Twin Cities. The lady that drove and narrated is a native with generational roots back to the original settlers. She was witty and wise and took us for a three hour tour of both cities including historical sites, parks, beautiful neighborhoods with stately mansions, State government buildings including the capitol, Jesse Ventura’s governor’s residence, the campus of Minnesota University (45,000 students – The Gophers), the Mississippi riverside, and the old industrial areas of Minneapolis where Gold Medal Flour, Pillsbury, and General Mills began. The fathers of the cities decided in the early 1800’s that no one would be allowed to build any structures on the lakeshores.

This has allowed them to have parks around the many lakes for the free recreation of the people. Each of the big lakes has TWO paths around. The inner path is for foot travel and the outer path is for wheeled traffic one way on roller-bladesor bikes.

There were so many people out enjoying a Saturday in the sunshine. She told us it is below freezing consistently between January and the first of April. That’s why the lakes all freeze for skating and ice fishing. They make the most of it – but BURRRRRR.

Sharon and Lois took me out for Birthday dinner. Had the state fish – Walleye Perch. Delicious. A must try if available in the south.

Sharon has gone to her room very early, as she will be up at 4 AM to go to the airport. She is flying to Atlanta to meet her sister and niece for a visit before returning to Jacksonville. Lois and I will continue west as we head for North Dakota.

NORTH DAKOTA

July 30 - To get to North Dakota, leave the Minneapolis bedroom community of Monticello, turn west on I-94 and keep driving the rest of the day. As we moved west through Minnesota, the land became hillier. When we got to Otter Tail County, there were fewer and fewer cornfields and more and more grain. We entered NorthDakota at Fargo as wecrossedthe Red River.

The Red River Valley of song fame is there and extends for milesto the west. They grow barley, oats, dry edible beans, durum wheat, winter wheat, and sunflowers. The fields of sunflowers are brilliant in the wide-open blue-sky country.

The land is obviously less arable as the farms are further and further apart the further west we go. It’s drier and there are stretches of open pasture and small lakes taking up the land. The farm homes and barns are not as large and prosperous looking either. There are more beef cattle and no signs of milking. The farmhouses do not have the acre or more of mowed, manicured lawns that we saw throughout Wisconsin and Minnesota. Is this the result of a lack of leisure for its care or lack of cultural importance of this type of landscaping?

We have also left the land of the rural skyscrapers of silos attached to the barns. In their place are gigantic, freestanding grain elevators. They can be seen for miles and fill the horizon. Trains of great length race the automobiles on parallel track off in the distance as they carry the grains from the elevators to the big rivers to be loaded on barges. From there, most of the grains end up in the distribution centers of the Mississippi RiverBasin

We stopped in Jamestown to see the Bison. They’re a tourist attraction – not free roaming. One of them was all white. Strange looking beast with a brown calf of her own. We had our picture taken with a massive statue of a Bison just like the tourists we are.

The further west we go, the hotter it gets. A fellow we talked to at Jamestown was traveling from Idaho towards Minnesota. He snickered slightly when he informed us that it was 105 degrees around Teddy Roosevelt National Park where we will be hiking and biking over the next few days.

Andwethoughtwewere leavingFlorida to get awayfromthesummer heat!

Lois read aloud many miles and helped the time move along through the hours of travel on the Interstate. Poetry and literary criticism. We turned north at the Capital, Bismarck and have stopped for the night at Washburn.

I had the time to reflect on the constant question asked of us by the locals as to why we were in their part of the country. I believe this is simply a case of what we all do in failing to see the details of our surroundings after experiencing them for a while. In the case of this farming country, these fine folks exposure to the land has been for decades and generations. This is not an example of familiarity breeding contempt but rather breedingcomplacence.

What do we see with our unaccustomed eye as we drive for miles and miles through the countryside that they understandably no longer note? We note that there are multiple variations in the silos with some a deep metallic blue with Old Glory on the side, some with blue and white-checkered bands around the top, and white ones with red stripes over the top.

We see the beauty and distinctness of the hues and depth of the colors green and gold in the crops, the symmetry of the contour plowing and plantings, the ingeniousness and massiveness of their farm machines, the special, hard won, knowledge of crop and livestock management, weather, economics, and the manner of using the roads and great rivers to move their products to market, the clarity of the air, the immensity of the sky, the smell of new-mown hay, the deer and rabbits in the mornings, the plenty and simple loveliness of the churches, the symbols in the communities of the heritages of those who came to settle the land, the love of our Country shown with the Stars and Stripes flying in the farmhouse front yards, the accents and friendly ways of the people who gladly talked to strangers about their lives, and everywhere – the flowers, the flowers, and the flowers.

We will move on to visit a replica of Fort Mandan tomorrow. Lewis and Clark wintered here in this area in 1804 before pushing on along the Missouri towards the west coast. Perhaps it will be cooler tomorrow.

FortMandan

July 31 - When Lewis and Clark returned from the Pacific Coast to civilization in the East, they occasionally divided their party in order to more thoroughly explore the territory. They almost missed rejoining at Yellowstone as one of the parties had pushed ahead early and hastily to escape the mosquitoes that were bedeviling them. Unfortunately for us, many of those nasty critters’ progeny awaited us at Fort Mandan this morning. Let’s all give three Hip, Hip, Hoorays for Deet Bug Spray. We escaped with our lives and blood intact.

The Fort replica shows how small it was – about the size of our house. Small, lowceilinged rooms accommodated the men for four months of brutal winter weather. There were 33 of them and one dog. Each room had a fireplace so perhaps they were able to stay warm.

We decided we could make as good time traveling the state road 200 as the frost heaved I-94 so we turned west again on the back roads. As another example of the seriousness of the winter weather, there are road signs reminding the residents that the emergency phone number to call in case they’re stranded in the car is printed on their driver’s license.

This part of the country was not the bottom of an ancient sea. Rather, it was marsh and near tropical swamps after the retreat of the glaciers. There is resultant coal under most of North Dakota. They have done strip mining here in the misection, but a law was passed by the state mandating that the pits be smoothed and replanted so there are no scars upon the land. There are hugecoal powered electrical generating plants in the area of Washburn attesting to the fact that coal is still plentiful in thearea.

There are also a few of the oil pumps that look like the bird dipping its head into water. There has been a small oil industry here for most of the 1900’s.

The topography around Washburn is that of peculiar cone-shaped mounded hills. Lois and I dubbed them the Dolly Parton Hills. These make it difficult to farm much of that area. As we moved west, the land flattened out again and rose to a plateau. The crops there were all manner of wheat and hay. A wonderful juxtaposition of green and yellow colors. There were fields of sunflowers again –they harvest the seeds for oils and foreating.

Much like the Grand Canyon, the flat plateau suddenly opened into a wide, sculptured, multihued landscape of deep canyons and interspersed tableland. The Little Missouri River has been very busy carving out this land for millennia. We had reached the Bad Lands of North Dakota. This place is NOT on the way to anywhere else. You really have to make an effort to get to the western border of North Dakota.

Medora

We’re staying in the town of Medora. It’s a tourist town of modest proportions and a serious lack of hokum. Most of the license plates are from North and South Dakota, Montana, and Saskatchewan. There is some non-profit organization that runs most of the concession places in town. There are also businesses that advertise that they are privately run. This is advertised in a strident tone that immediately tells the visitor that there is friction between these two groups. We never did get to the bottom of this, as both sides were reticent to clarify the situation.

The park was the inspired idea of Teddy Roosevelt, our 26th President. He lived here as a young rancher in the 1880’s. In just a few short years, he saw the dramatic degradation in the land and wild animals caused by westward expansion. As President, he got through Congress several seminal acts of legislation that

sparked the concept of National Parks and wildlife sanctuaries. This Park is dedicated to his efforts at conservation.

It is strangely divided into two sections that are separated by some 60 miles of private lands. We are presently staying in the South Unit in the Bad Lands Motel.

TeddyRooseveltPark–SouthUnit

We arrived at noon, went to the visitor’s center for literature and maps and headed out onto the 30-mile loop road to scout out the place for later, cooler hiking and picture taking. We did strike out on one self-guided trail just as the thermometer read 101 degrees. We plan to be up before dawn tomorrow to get an earlierstart.

Will describe the land more tomorrow. Today, I must report that we had unbelievable luck in sighting animals and birds.

Of course, we saw hundreds of Bison. We saw several prong horn antelope in the distance. Two female wild turkeys with their 7 chicks walked right in front of our car. Two King Birds were harassing them. There are several small herds of wild horses inthe Park. We saw a couple dozen mares and a few stallions.

Then, there was the coyote. We spotted her walking along a ridge. Followed her around the ridge and found her luxuriating in the prairie grasses above a prairie dog colony. We watched for 30 minutes but all she did was groom and intermittently doze. She was waiting for the right time to go down to hunt.

Also watching her was a PB“ crew photographing a special “Any Wild Place” which will feature this Park. The segment is to air in late November. If a man and woman riding horses waves at passersby in the show – they were waving at us.

We left our dozing coyote and drove on. Suddenly, out of the grass to our right ran a badger. A real, live badger. We had never seen this secretive animal before. He also was heading for a prairie dog village across the street. Those cute little guys are on everyone’s menu.

The badger stopped some 50 feet from us and began furiously digging into a prairiedog hole. No luck – so far. Hewanderedout of sight.

We decided to go back to our coyote. We found her still lying about in the grass where we had left her an hour before. After a few more minutes, we decided that watching a coyote sleep had lost its appeal so headed back to dinner, a Laundromat, and an early night’s sleep.

On the way, we saw the same badger and he saw us. He rested on a rock and just stared at us for a few moments and disappeared again. Was there long enough for me to get a picture!

Amostsatisfactory dayinthe park!

August 1 - We entered the South Unit again in the early morning with Barber’s Adagio for Strings playing on the CD. The early morning soft golden light and the colors in the rocks and vegetation go very well with classical music. Saw the badger again and it was apparent that it was a she, not a he. This time she was with her two almost fullygrown babies. The babies saw us and hightailed it back to the den with Mom in hot pursuit but keeping a wary eye on us. Ate our breakfastinthe car on anoverlook andthenset out for a hike.

Lois has just astounded me. She seems to have lost all anxieties about being in wild spaces. We had many trails to choose from – most unmarked. We forded the Little Missouri River and simply headed out into the countryside – on no particular trail. We did look back for a landmark to shoot for and then struck out for the canyons. We were out for the entire morning climbing up slopes of people trails and animal paths. The only other people we saw were on horseback. There were no other hikers for the 4 to 5 hours we were out and about.

On the way back, we headed up over an unmarked ridge and down a ravine making for our assigned landmark on the horizon. Reached the river too far north and had to bushwhack along the edge until we could find a safe place to ford. The river in that area is about 2 to 4 feet deep in the middle and 30 feet wide. We found a shallow spot with stones and only got a little wet. This was not exactly a wilderness experience, but it was the first time we have gone out into unknown country and tracked about without known paths to follow. Lois was the one egging us on most of the time.

The river erosion has uncovered various layers of sediments in the canyons. The light gray is clay, the dark gray is volcanic ash from Montana and Wyoming, the black is coal, the yellow is another form of clay, and the red is clay, called clinker, that has been baked to a color and consistency of roof tiles by the fires that ignite and burn within the coal layers. There have been no underground fires here in about 20 years but the last one here had been burning since the first settlers arrived. The fires start with lightning as the exposed coal seams are right on the surface in the canyons.

We had lunch from the car at an overlook. Got the chairs and table out for the first time. Very successful. Headed for town for the afternoon, as it’s too hot to stay out in the park at midday. Got some ice cream and looked in a few shops. Went

to the Visitor’s Center for a Ranger Talk on pronghorn sheep. After hitting the camp store for groceries, we went back into the park for the evening. Found a tree shaded picnic area all to ourselves and got out the chairs again. “at out and read our books and “rested our eyes” for a couple hours. We were observed closely by a colony of Prairie Dogs. Four wild turkeys wandered through and chipmunks munched flowers around the tables. We ate our dinner and headed out for evening wildlife and lighting.

The evening light was perfect for photography. Took more pictures than I should have as it takes so long to get them onto the Web site. The highlight of the evening was the appearance of more than 100 Bison who made us park on the back road as they passed. They make all kinds of grunting, groaning, and crooning sounds to one another as they move along. The males are beginning the rut season. It’s never a good time to get close to a male Bison, but particularly not now.

We left the park after sunset to the magnificent voice of Kiri Te Kanawa singing Puccini arias. What a day!

August 2 - The Trip meter hit 4000 miles today. Beautiful weather and lots of wildlife sightings. It has been in the highs 80’s in the afternoons with no more 100degree weather.

We ate in the car again this morning and at noon. Took a walk along John’s Creek. This was intended as a valley walk. Again, however, Lois was pointing out animal trails to follow and leading up and over ridges and into side canyons for exploration. I even left her to go to an overlook for a photograph and when I bushwhacked back down, I came upon her, not watching anxiously up the trail to catch sight of me, but with her back to the trail watching some dung beetles at work. Where did I leave the real Lois Gray?

At our usual fore’ into town at noon, I learned there was a fast Internet access line at the local library. They had Internet but I could not hook up my laptop. Just got my E-Mail.

While we were in the library, it was announced that there was a massive storm coming from the north with 70 mile per hour winds and 2-inch hail. The tent campers were being told to evacuate to safety. One of the posted safe harbors for

“Severe Weather” was the library so we just stayed put. The rain came in buckets but the hail and high winds got left behind. Just fine with us.

We ate at the local Mexican restaurant (Don’t worry, La Napolera) and headed back into the park for the evening. The rain had brought out even more animals than usual. Saw a 4-prong mule deer buck and several does. A grouse with chicks was along the road foraging briskly.

We came upon a herd of perhaps 100 Bison walking down the road. There was a car from Minnesota in front of us with his reverse lights on. A bluff wall on the left and a steep drop off on the right hemmed in the road at that point. The Bison were heading right for his car and this guy was backing up the road as fast as they were advancing. We pulled over in the left lane and he backed right past us. He and his two female passengers looked pretty shaken. We sat still and let the animals mill past us. When last we saw, the fellow was still backing up and the Bison were still making their stately way up the road in his general direction.

We met a second herd of about 60 Bison settling in for the night on both sides of the road while some of them just stood in the road. We had to move very slowly through them, at time nudging some of the bulls, but no one butted or kicked the car. We hung around a little while to see if the Minnesota guy showed up as we couldn’t wait to see what he’d do about this situation. But we think he turned around finally and fled the park.

He will have many stories to tell about the fierce Bison he narrowly escaped in Teddy Roosevelt National Park.

Saw one last coyote as we drove out after sunset. The sunsets here are marvelous and prolonged. Gets dark after 8:30.

Up early tomorrow to head to the North Unit of this great National Park. Too bad it’s so far from everything else in the world. But, on second thought – it’s been great having the whole place to ourselves – literally.

Teddy

RooseveltNP–NorthUnit

August 3 - We left this morning in very dense fog. Then we ran into the usual roadwork complete with the lines of traffic that must follow a lead car. Lois read me sections of Milton’s “Paradise Lost”. A somewhat tense couple of hours but we arrived in good order.

The North Unit is “only” 24,000 acres whereas the South Unit is 46,000 acres. The road into the North Unit is 14 miles long and not a loop. We drove the whole route and familiarized ourselves with the areas of geological, botanical, and wildlife interest for further exploration. The road starts at the Visitor’s Center at the level of the Little Missouri River. It winds through a series of canyons and low river bluffs for a few miles and then climbs steadily upward to the high plateau of prairie grassland that offers panoramic views of the river valley below.

We learned there would be a Ranger led talk at 2:00 so we went to the Picnic area to meet him and had our lunch. Lois sprayed the tick repellant on everything in the Park including our clothes. They have had Lyme Disease reported here.

Our leader was a fellow named John Heiser. He is a seasonal ranger who has a cattle ranch within 20 miles of here. He has been doing this work in the Park for over 25years and was very knowledgeable and outgoing.

Our hiking group included 12 boys of Cub and Boy Scout age and their two leaders plus Lois and I. The boys were fun to have along. We had told John about the Icelandic horses as he had told us he was an avid horseman. One of the youngest boys then announced he was from an area of Northeast North Dakota where there was a large Icelandic immigrant population of which he was a descendent. His next-door neighbors raiseIcelandichorses!!

John took us up and down bluffs at a breakneck pace to finally arrive at a spring watering tub that the park maintains for the Bison. It was in need of some clearing so with the help of the boys, he got the water flowing again. John was particularly good with the boys and had them eating out of his hand to be helpful and to learn from him the secrets of the surroundingterritory.

Both the North and South units of the Park are entirely fenced. This is to keep the local cattle off the park grounds and to keep the Bison, wild horses in the South and the long-horned cattle in the North within the park. One of John’s jobs is to round up and return Bison that have “broken out”. He is an expert rider and always “gets his man” or beast in this case.

We saw lots of Bison again today but no other animals. Too hot in the mid-day and we were too tired to stay in the Park until dusk.

We’re in a little motel in the town of Watford City, which is 15 miles further north from the Park. Ate at Ginny’s Burger Ranch – full course meal for $3.50. The manager at the motel let Lois use the washers in the motel so we have clean clothes. I gave moral support each time Lois returned to the room from her washing duties but otherwise watched the Republican Convention. G.W. Bush gave a rather effective acceptance speech tonight. Looks like Mr. Gore has his hands full.

To bed. We plan to spend the entire day in the Park tomorrow without the usual race for air conditioning at mid-day. Will get out the cooking gear and have a “home cooked” dinner tomorrow night in the Park. Can’t wait.

August 4 - We overslept and didn’t get into the North Unit until after 8:00. The light was a bit high but still OK for photos. Saw a large mule deer buck first thing.

There were Rangers at the entrance gate with shotguns looking anxiously busy. Seems a whole herd of Bison made a great escape last night and were now wading happily in the Little Missouri River moving towards private land. The big round up was to begin. They pepper the bulls’ bottoms with shot to get their attention. The Bison hide is ¼ to ½ inch thick so the buckshot just stings and doesn’t wound them. The hide is so thick that a coyote can’t chew throughit.

The natural predators of the Bison used to be the wolf packs and the Grizzly. No longer. So the herds just grow and grow. They round them up every couple of years and give some to the local Indian tribes. They raise some and eat some. One cow returned to the Park two times from 25 miles away so they just gave up and let her stay.

North Dakota was hit badly by the Depression and the severe droughts of the 1930’s. Many small ranches failed. Consequently, there are projects here by the Civilian Conservation Corps ( the CCC) that the unemployed of this area built with FDR’s work program. How many times have we seen massive park work projects that were the result of that terrible timein our history?

Seventy years later, many of these building efforts of structures and roads are in needof repair. We’ll see whatthe next Federal Administrationdoes inthat regard.

Lois and I took a three-hour hike this morning. It was a fabulous hike as it first took us through a self-guided walk through a ravine. There we could easily see the unique geology of this Park with the erosion that uncovers the multi-layered examples of sedimentary rock. The interpretive section completed, the trail climbed a steep grade up onto the grassland plateaus. From there, we had splendid vistas of the Little Missouri Valley to the east and in the opposite

direction, the tops of the other plateaus marching off to the West. The wind was brisk from the Southeast and cooled us down a bit. When we got into small stands of trees on the north facing slopes, we thought we’d be cooler. Not so. It was much better in the sun on the ridges with the breeze.

Along the way, we encountered a solitary Bison bull lying down and chewing his cud right next to the trail. He was very interested in us as we approached. To avoid him, we climbed a bluff and walked along a narrow edge directly above him. Looking downon him fromabout 30 feet,we felt secure .

Later on the walk, we were on a plateau high above the Bison and watched as a man and woman marched happily up the trail in his direction. It was funny to see the lady come to a screeching halt and the man behind run up her back as she spotted the beast. They saw the same ridge we had seen and tentatively climbed above to take a picture.

It was amazing that even though we were at least ½ mile away and several hundred feet above, we could hear the man’s voice though we couldn’t make out any words. As we could hear him, I figured they could hear me. So when they turned around to retrace the trail, I hollered, “Go left. Go up”! My voice echoed back off the distant canyon walls. They stopped in their tracks. I yelled the same command again. They hesitated and looking around for the source of the directions. Finding none, they still decided to follow the advice of the celestial guide and finding the upper path we had successfully taken. With no further encouragement, they made their way safely along the ridge and continued forward on the trail.

Next, we met a group of young people who were doing trail work. They belong to a volunteer group of teenagers that do this work in our National Parks in the summer. The leader was a girl in her early twenties with pierced body parts everywhere. She was very gracious to thank us for our vocal appreciation of the trail’s beauty and their hard work in keeping it that way. American parents, take heart. Even the body-pierced are good kids.

I am writing this after lunch in the picnic area. These folding chairs are great! Lois is reading the Virginian and has found a reference to the town of Medora where we just stayed. The book was written in 1902. The reference was to a railroad trip to Montana with a stopover at Medora.

A ranger came by as we took our leisure. He asked where we had hiked and we told him the Coulee Cap Rock Trail. He remarked that a couple from Canada had had to turn back from that trail because a bull Bison blocked the way. He noted that there was another couple that had successfully made the trek as they had just come off the far end of the trail. He said the two couples were talking and laughing about something. We told him how we had negotiated around the bull and our long distance encouragement of the second couple. He laughed and remarked that that was probably what they were discussing. He left to do more of his rounds.

A few minutes later, a couple drove into the picnic area, hopped out of their car and asked if we were the ones who had “helped us out on the trail earlier in the day”. The ranger had sought them out and told them where we were. They thought the whole incident was a hoot and were amazed that they could so clearly hear me over such a long distance. They spent a few minutes with us as we exchanged itineraries. They were from D.C. and were out for 8 weeks all the way to the Pacific coast.

We packed up after a couple hours and decided it was too hot to spend the rest of the afternoon in the park. It was way too hot to cook out. That will have to wait until we get back to the east and cooler climes.

The thermometer in the car that reads the outside temperature told us we were right. It was 100 degrees. At 5:30 P.M.

We drove around to air-condition ourselves and then stopped for a last couple views before leaving the park for good. We were able to see the small herd of long-horned steers. They were at a distance moving slowly single file to higher night grazing. Strangely, scores of Bisonwere following in their wake.

Tomorrow – to the International Peace Park at the Canadian border.

InternationalPeaceGarden

August 5 - Went back to Ginny’s Burger Barn for a “full breakfast”. We had a really tasty, greasy breakfast. For the most part, we have been eating healthy low fat fare. So this suddenindiscretiontalked back for hours.

The northwest corner of North Dakota is isolated by the Missouri River to the east and the Little Missouri River to the south. The isolation is due to the fact that there is only one bridge to cross going east or one going south. We turned east and headed for the International Peace Garden along the Canadian border.

The drive was uneventful. The farms are wide spread. We did once again saw countless acres of sunflowers. All their bright faces looked to the sun in the morning eastern sky.

Once we crossed the Mouse River, there were small kettles on both sides of the road. As we moved east, these collections of water became bigger and filled with thousands of ducks.

Whenever we crossed the borders of an Indian reservation, the agriculture stopped and casinos popped up. The housing was poorer and there were the ubiquitous cannibalized car carcasses in the yards. In general, a less outwardly affluent way of life than the surrounding countryside.

In the distance, we could see the sudden outcropping of the very low line of hills named the Turtle Mountains. We drove up into them and got into very dull woodlands. This was supposed to be a scenic drive but paled in comparison to the flatter cropland.

The Peace Garden entrance lies on the border between a Canadian and a USA border patrol stations placed about 100 yards apart. One can get to the Garden without inspection, but will have to go through customs when leaving. The tourist brochure tells you this after you get into the grounds. Further, it states that a thorough inspection of a vehicle is done not on a level of suspicion but rather on a numerical basis. We were horrified at the thought of having to empty out our car and the topper and then put it all back. Lois suggested if they pulled us over, we might ask if we could go around and get another number. That one might have resulted in a strip search.

The Garden was dedicated in 1932 but was only fully developed in the 1960’s. It is over 2000 acres of formal display and natural habitat. In the spring, they plant 100,000 annuals so the grounds are quite beautiful. The CCC was involved in the original construction. In the museum, they have exhibits chronicling the experiences of some of the men who workedhere for years.

The “boys” were allowed to work for the CCC between the ages of 17 and 24. They received $30 a month of which $25 was sent to their folks at home. They received food and shelter and the other $5 for a month’s work and according to the testimonials, were thrilled to get it. Those were desperate times.

There is a sports center on the USA side. Kids from both countries pay about $250 to come to this first class complex for one week of instruction in the sport of their choice. They live in dormitories and get their food as well. It would seem a marvelous opportunity for these children who are so spread out and isolated to get together for a summer outing.

We spent a couple hours touring the gardens and driving around periphery roads in both countries enjoying the natural landscape. Then we made our way successfully by the USA Immigration station without incident and started our hunt for a place to stay.

We passed up the truck stop. We weren’t sure the Visa would work to rent a room by the hour. Finally found a nice little Mom and Pop Motel in Rolla, N.D. and turned in.

August 6 - We left early in the fog to continue east on a good, straight two-lane road. It was 55 miles and one hour later before we saw another human being. The farmers sleep inon Sundays. We did see thousands of small dark birds on the wet road and ducks in the small waterways next to the road. I finally got tired of playing dodge-um with the birds and just drove on at a steady pace. They were wily and I didn’t leave any carcasses on the N.D. highway. I then began to see very strange dark small shapes waddling across the light colored concrete. I finally stopped and we piled out to identify the creatures. Getting out the reptile and amphibian book, we discovered that we were dealing with the tiger gray salamander. They’re 8 inches long, striped, stout, slippery, and slow. Couldn’t resist, “ Why does the salamander cross the road?” No answer wasevident.

We were looking for a place to have our usual picnic breakfast of cereal and juice when we came across the Icelandic Heritage State Park. We didn’t stay to enjoy the park but did take time to talk with the young lady “manning” the tollbooth. She confirmed that there is a significant immigrant population of Icelandic heritage. Her grandparents are Icelandic. She had taken her first trip to Iceland with them in May of this year. She was very pretty with the clear skin, blue eyes, and blond hair we saw in all the Scandinavian population in the home country. As is common in the youth here, she was very assured, mature in speech and demeanor, and polite. As we drove off, she was thanking us for stopping at her park.

Speaking of complexions – the natives of this area age very gracefully. There is no sun damage of skin at these latitudes. The smokers don’t do as well as would be predicted.

We chose Baudette as an overnight as it is near Lake of the Woods. We thought there would be a lot for us to do there. We were wrong.

We drove out into the countryside to bird watch. Sometime during the day we had moved from open farmland into the edges of the Boreal Forest. The lines of trees kept us from seeing any birds from the car and the mosquitoes were so fierce we couldn’t get out to wander around.

LakeoftheWoods

So we drove to a state park on the Lake of the Woods. We were able to lather up with Deet and take a short walk along the slim rocky beach. The Lake is 80 miles long by 50 miles wide and large enough to give the feeling of being on the shore of an ocean. Missing was the smell of salt. There were small waves and a steady breeze that made for a pleasant evening. We enjoyed seeing gulls, white pelicans and small shore birds. The sandstone pebbles and stones are polished smooth as silk by the action of water over the millennia. A big storm came up and we had to abandon the out of doors and head in for thenight.

VoyageurNP

August 7 - This was a disappointing day. The weather was bad with rain off and on all day. Thelackof sun always lowers thespirits. Thetripodometer hit 5000 miles.

We went to two different Ranger Information Centers to see if we could get a guided boat ride out into the park. No such luck. There is no failure of truth in advertising for this National Park. They advertise themselves as a water park and that they are. If you can’t or don’t want to get out in a canoe or powerboat, there really isn’t anything to do.

There are only 20 miles of hiking trails and most of them are on islands that you can get to only with a boat. We discussed renting a canoe but the weather was so bad, we thought that was silly. So we went back to International Falls and had a nice dinner and an early night.

BoiseCascadePaperMillandVoyageursNP

August 8 - It continued to rain in the morning. We called and got a reservation to take a tour of the Boise Cascade paper mill in International Falls. Strangely, it was a wonderful time. It is a huge 58-acre building with massive machines producing paper products at an unbelievable speed. The place was immaculate. You could eat off the floor. It was loud and we were required to wear earplugs. Too many facts to enumerate but the whole process from forest to distribution involves a series of complex stages requiring great quantities of specialized knowledge and skills so foreign to a person educated in the world of medicine. We saw the entire chain of events from the trucks delivering cut timber to the lifts placing the finished product onto railroad cars that were pushed inside the plant for loading.

We left town and stopped at a third Ranger Station for the National Park at Ash River to see if we could learn any more about the Voyageurs – the actual French boatmen that led the beaver pelt trade in the Great Lakes area.

On the way, we had another first sighting – a mink. It scurried across the road right infront of us so we got a goodlook at the dark,sleek,very fast weasel.

It was still raining so we were pleased to find this station to be rustic, warm and inviting. A delightful older Ranger who was interested in our questions greeted us.

He was cute as he didn’t know any of the answers but after he set us up with some interesting videos, he got out some books and looked up the information for us.

One of the videos was on the history of the logging industry in the great northwest. The men cut and stored the trees in the winter. After the thaw, they ran the logs into the rivers and shepherded them to the mills. The same men that cut the trees in the winter worked the mills in the spring and summer. The video had marvelous footage of the logging camps and men at work in the 1930’s. This was another way of life that only immigrants who were escaping some other form of hardship would chose.

Also with the help of the videos and our industrious Ranger, we learned that the voyageurs built and used different sized canoes (from 12 to 40 feet long) depending on whether they were in the Great Lakes or beyond the Great Portage below Fort Williamon the western shoreof Lake Superior.

The Indians trapped the beaver, not the whites. The voyageurs to the west of the Great Portage traded beads, rifles, and other goods for the pelts. They then rowed the furs back to the Great Portage and met there with the voyageurs that had rowed across Lake Superior from Madison in the east. Those men brought with them fresh supplies for Indian trade. The exchange was made and both parties turned about and began the process all over again.

The fur trade was seasonal, dangerous, physically demanding, and profitable. It only fell by the wayside when the 100-year demand for beaver pelts for men’s and ladies’ hats in Europe and the American colonies finally lost its fever pitch.

We ate lunch and left the Park. Still raining, only harder with heavy winds. Lois read aloud and I kept the car on the road. We had heard about the probable recall of the Firestone tires we have on this car and had some misgivings in the very bad weather running with the heavily laden logging trucks.

SoudanIronOreMineTour

We got to the town of Soudan in time to take an underground tour of an iron ore mine. It was closed in 1962 and was given to the State Park system. They now run tours for the public.

This mine started putting out iron ore in 1910. At its peak, this highest-grade ore was used in every smelter in the USA. When the Germans developed the blast furnace, the need for this particular ore was lost and the mine finally closed.

After an unsettling short film and introductory remarks by the guide, we gathered our courage and went down 2300 feet into the mine in the same small loud, shaking, rapidly dropping elevator car that took the men to work. The car is on a cable that lowers it on a 70% angle. We were laying slightly backwards on a railroad- like track rather than going straight down in free space. They alluded to some “problems” they had had when they first tried the straight down approach. There are times in one’s life when questions are not asked as there are no answers that would be of any reassurance. We were assured that if the cable broke, the car would only fall 6 feet before the safety hooks would stop it. We had 10 people in the car and were very close over the three minutes it takes to drop to the 27th level.

Then we got into the rail cars that had in the past hauled the ore, and were pulled through the tunnels for ¾ mile into the core of the mine. There are 58 miles of tunnel down there.

The temperature was 50 degrees and it was damp. The tunnels were well lighted so it wasn’t scary. They did turn the lights off a couple times and it was indeed VERY dark. They showed us how little light one gets from a candle on a hard hat as the men had to work with in the early years.

Our guide had worked the mine, as had his grandfather before him. He had loved his work and it showed in his narration. They had manikins “working” in the mine to show what equipment they used. The tour was very well done and instructional.

Another unique feature of this mine was the fact that is was a very safe environment with only 13 deaths in the 80 years of operation. That helped somewhat in relieving the creeping claustrophobia.

When we came out of the mine, the sky was blue!! We are in Ely tonight and hoping that the weather holds tomorrow to go to the International Wolf Center here in town.

ElyandTheInternationalWolfCenter

August 9 - Ely is “The Gateway to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness”. It is a small town with more canoe outfitting stores than homes. It really is a major resort area for those who want to spend some time at a lake camp and/or canoeing in the wilderness park. It is not a place to hike.

We felt tired so we slept in today. The Wolf Center wasn’t open until 9:30 anyway. Did some grocery shopping and tried to find a motel for the night. We were turned out of last night’s Super 8, as they were full for the rest of the week. It turns out that they are having a huge softball tourney and all the places in town are booked through the weekend. We went to the Chamber of Commerce and the nice lady there called a few places and found us a two bedroom, housekeeping unit at a resort on the outskirts of town.

We also spent the morning calling all over the place trying to find out what to do about our recalled tires. There is no place in Ely that sells tires. We contacted a store in Virginia (the town, not the state) and they will be ordering a set for us. We will have to drive down there tomorrow to have them changed.

We made it to the Wolf Center shortly after opening. They had been hand raising two adorable Arctic Wolf cubs and today was the day they released them into the enclosure with their 3 resident adults.

All of them were having a great time getting to know one another. The lady that had hand raised the adults 7 and 8 years ago, also hand fed these cubs. She was in the enclosure with them all – rubbing tummies and scratching ears and making sure that there was no aggression towards the newcomers. All their wolves there were born in captivity.

There are many, many free wolves in this part of the country. The local farmers are compensated for any livestock they lose due to predation. The wolf advocates are trying to work with the stockmen to develop habits that will cut back on even these few incidents of predation such as not leaving dead carcasses out in the fields to attract the wolf. Burnor bury is the rule.

The Center is a non-profit private organization that works with other environmental groups to help preserve the wolf. The Center is very large and true to the log cabin north woods architecture. They had a large hall with exhibits concerning the history of the wolf and man through worldwide literature.

The wolves have an acre or more of wooded land to wander and can den if they wish. We were lucky that the wolves were hanging around with their human friend close to the viewing area as we had a long time to watch them all at play and at rest. We didn’t get to see them eat as they only feed them once a week, on Saturday nights. Wolves gorge and fast in the wild as they only get prey on average once a week. It would not be uncommon for a 90- pound wolf to eat 12 pounds of meat at one “helping”.

We had a spirited lecture by a young lady on interesting facts about wolves. Then we saw a slide show on the habitat and other residents of the Arctic Wolf. The man who has done the most research on the wolf and published widely, David Mech, was there today and inthe enclosure with the wolves.

We finished up our stay with an hour walk through the adjoining woods with a guide. She pointed out various plants and trees. Nothing to do with wolves – just a pleasant walk.

We then drove all over the place trying once again to see the lakes. There’s supposed to be thousands of them around here but it’s hard to know that from the car. We ran into the same problem here as at Lake of the Woods. Trees from the road hide the shoreline and the shoreline you can get to by car is all privately owned. The public land is designatedwilderness and therefore there are no roads.

The only access is by water. We just aren’t water people and do not have it in us to paddle a canoe for miles to see the same birch, aspen, and red pine trees we can see from the shore. We have been assured that the most wildlife we will see will be on the road – if we’re lucky.

We did find one overlook on a gravel-logging road. We stopped and were delighted to have another first – our first look at loons. There were two males and two females fishing busily not too far off the bank. Then we got to hear the cry of the loon. It is truly a strange and haunting call. That was great.

We cooked in the apartment tonight and have spent the evening reading and relaxing. We will go for a hike tomorrow. Hopefully it will live up to its billing as having great views of the lakes from high bluffs. Then it’s off to the tire store and a day in the “big” city of Virginia.

MINNESOTA

August 10 - Today our spirits rose again. The sky was clear blue and the four days of overcast and intermittent rain had passed. Once again, the morning temperature was in the 60’s. That has been true almost every day of the trip. The afternoon temperatures have ranged from the low 80’s everywhere but in North Dakota where we saw the high 90’s and occasionally 100 degrees.

We found a hike that sounded interesting even though we had to drive 20 miles out of our way to get to the trailhead. It was a good walk – it was great to be dirty, sweaty, andtiredagain. Love those hills whenwe can get them.

The trail ran through an area that had been involved in a derecho with hurricane force winds they had hit here on July 4, 1999. There were 350,000 acres of land laid waste by that tremendous storm. We were on the fringe so there were a lot of trees topped and down but also enough forest was standing to make it an agreeable ramble. We skirted several lakes and were high enough up on ridges to look down on them. The waters were clear and the forest pristine. We did not see any wildlife however.

There were only a couple other people seen in the 3 hours it took us to make the loop, which made it quiet and peaceful.

We found a beautiful roadside overlook for our lunch and then drove to Virginia, Minnesota to have the tires changed. Our exact tires were not on the recall list but we decided that we would still have more peace of mind if we didn’t have even a second cousin of the offending tire on our car once we got back into really hot weather in the south. That seems to be where most of the horrendous accidents have occurred.

We’re going to the movies tonight to see Clint Eastwood’s “Space Cowboys” and have popcorn for supper. Decided if we had to be in a “big” town tonight, we might as well avail ourselves of the big city life. Tomorrow is a long drive day back up north to Ely and then east to the western shore of LakeSuperior.

August 11 - Drove from Virginia back to Ely and then took Highway 1 to the North Shore of Lake Superior. It took us an hour on a payphone to secure motel space for the next three nights. Driving around this evening, we saw how lucky we were as the “No Vacancy” signs are everywhere. This is a very popular shoreline – and the reason is obvious – it’s gorgeous.

GooseberryFallsStatePark

We started out at the Gooseberry Falls State Park with two falls to visit and the lake shoreline to explore. The falls are within easy walking distance of the visitor’s center so we mingled there with a lot of people; more people than we’d seen in all the hikes we’ve taken in the past week combined. Had a picnic lunch and then walked along the shore.

The shoreline is made up of lava rock – hard, black, thick and smoothed by millions of years of pounding waves. The rock that hasn’t been worn down remains as cliffs up to 150 feet high. The trails along the cliffs make possible some spectacular vistas of the coast.

Millions of years ago, the land split apart from Lake Superior down to Kansas. Lava percolated up to fill the gap. Glaciers then came through andscoured it down.

When the glaciers backed off, the lakes of all sizes were left behind. Among them was Lake Superior, the largest inland freshwater body of water in the world with 10% of all the world’s fresh water. And it’s right outside our motel window tonight completewith the sounds of pounding waves.

TettegoucheState Park

The second park of the day was Tettegouche State Park. They have miles of hiking trails including one section of the Superior Trail that runs over 200 miles along the shoreline. They have resort-to-resort hiking here. We’re seriously considering looking into that for leaf time next year.

The hike we took there was unusual. It was about 4 miles round trip out to a very pretty 60-foot triple cascade falls. The terrain must be very wet during the spring. To avoid erosion, they have built countless wooden stairs that makes the walk an outdoor stair-master workout.

That hike plus a strenuous evening saunter out to a high Lake overlook have left us very tired this evening.

The motel clerk said they saw the northern lights over the lake last night. It’s overcast tonight so it’s not too hopeful. Seeing the Aurora Borealis is still on my top 10 experiences yet to come.

DriveNorthShore,LakeSuperiortoGrandMarais

August 12 - It rained and rained and rained this morning. We decided that it should be taken as a sign and did not budge out of our little suite until 10:30 when the rain stopped. We thought back and decided that this was the first day in six weeks we had not been up and seeking new adventures before 8 o’clock. We read and watched the raucous Herring gulls that were begging food from the people sitting on the balconies above us. The gulls have a 4-½ foot wingspan and a foghorn voice. They were rewarded for their persistence and decibels with breakfast cereals and breadcrumbs. Running around among them and up on our first floor patio were chipmunks. They were wet from the rain and from skittering

through the belly high wet grass. They used the opportunity of the moisture to freshen up for the day. One little fellow sat for some long time right outside our sliding glass door washing his feet, rubbing his tummy and wiping out his underarms. He looked very well groomedwhen finally chased away by the gulls.

The only hike of the day was at Temperance River; named by some wag that commemorated the fact that this river is the only one in the area that enters into Lake Superior without a (sand) bar at its mouth. The hike was really a walk of less than a mile along the rim of a magnificent gorge with a powerful river roaring through. The rain of several hours had swollen the volume to a torrent. I’d love to see the fury of this water at the spring melt!! It was a very satisfactory way to spend midday.

We learned more about the geology of this part of Minnesota. The land split apart from Lake Superior southwest to Kansas 1.1 billion years ago. This long rift valley allowed molten lava to well up to the surface, which it did intermittently for the next 20 million years. Between the slow eruptions, there were shallow seas that produced sedimentary deposits over the lava. When the glaciers came, there was a layer of lava and sedimentary rock arranged like a layer cake more than 20 kilometers deep. The glaciers scoured the land over and over. When they finally retreated for the last time (for now) about 11,000 years ago, the lava bedrock was left behind with the lakes as their progeny. That explains the table rock formations on the shore and the cliffs behindthem.

We went to a “nice” restaurant for dinner. The sign said, “Please wait to be seated”. We did and no one came. We decided it was too warm in the dining room anyway and went outside to the lakeside patio for dinner seating. Shortly thereafter, the manager came out and embarrassedly asked if we had a reservation. We admitted we did not and he hesitantly told us that there were people ahead of us for seating. Lois muttered under her breath, “We’ve been thrown out of nicer places than this”. Somehow that didn’t seem the best retort. We ended up at My Sister’s Place Bar and Grill. Everyone had a tattoo including our waitress and hostess. Good food though even though it was typical of all meals here – NO vegetables. This is meat, fish, pork and potato country. The closest one comes to a veggie is coleslaw.

The diary’s done, the Web site is current, and the laundry is clean. Time to get to bed as we will be up early in the morning to take a scenic drive to the northwest back towards Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. All is well.

GrandMaraisAndGrandPortage

August 13 - The weather today was the best yet. Clear blue skies and temperatures in the 70’s. Fabulous.

We drove for a couple of hours on a road called the Gunflint Trail. It climbs out of town and follows a ridge along the low Sawtooth Mountains overlooking Lake Superior. This gives magnificent views of the Lake as well as access to many small lakes and rivers. Unlike around Ely, you can actually get to the edges of multiple lakes withgorgeous views. Unfortunately, wesaw no big animals today.

We got to see more of the damage done by the July 4, 1999 storm. It hit very hard close to the city. The storm is called a derecho. It is not a hurricane or tornado with circular winds but rather straight-on winds of nearly 100 miles per hour. The winds lasted less than 20 minutes and knocked over more than 20 million trees. The pictures show how many of them were snapped off and others just pushed over. This stormleveled more trees than Mt. St. Helen’s in all her fury.

The little harbor here is lovely. It is possible to walk along the shoreline and out onto the seawall protecting the inner harbor. The lava rock is smoothed by water and scoured by the glaciers. When dry, it is not at all slippery and fun to climb and walk over. The rock fractures into natural steps and platforms.

Lois tells me we are walking on the Canadian Shield – the oldest exposed rock in the world. The lava bubbled up 1.1 billion years ago and has been uncovered by glacier action so it’s now on the surface for our walking enjoyment.

GrandPortageNationalMonument

We visited the replica fort at Grand Portage National Monument. They have people giving demonstrations of different jobs that were done in the late 1700’s when the fur trade was in full throttle. We saw a birch bark canoe being made, the woodworker making the paddles, the blacksmith, and a cook in her 18th century kitchen. Everyone was in period costume and using tools of the times. It was all very interesting and informative.

The North West Company was owned by the Scottish. The Hudson Bay Company, their major competitor, was owned by the English. The competition was fierce and sometimes lethally violent.

The Hudson Bay Company had their forts on Hudson Bay and had the Indian trappers come to them. The Northwest Company had their men, the Voyageurs go to the Indians. The French people of Canada lived on the rivers in present day Ontario. By law, the farms passed to the oldest son. The others had to find another living. Some struck out further west to homestead, some into the clergy, some the army and others became the Voyageurs. So the Scots owned the companies and the French did the backbreaking work.

One group of Voyageurs signed three year contracts to be stationed over winter in the far northwest of Canada trading with the Indians for the furs the Indians trapped. When the first thaw occurred in the spring, they carried those furs thousands of miles east. They turned in their furs at Grand Potage, gathered supplies for the next year and went back west for the next winter.

The other group of Voyageurs signed one-year contracts. Their job was to paddle their 40-foot canoes carrying 4 ½ tons of supplies from Montreal to Grand Portage. These supplies were for the fort and to trade with the Indians to the west for more furs. Their trip took 6 weeks.

They unloaded the canoe every night, hauled it up onto land, repaired and repitched the seams and then tipping it over, used it as a shelter for the night. They finally unloaded their supplies for the last time at the fort. However, their work was not yet finished. As part of their contract, they were to carry that load over the Grand Portage Trail to the eastern terminus of the Pigeon River.

This meant carrying six 90-pound bundles 8.5 miles up and over the Sawtooth Mountains. They did this in three trips carrying 2 of the 90-pound bundles at a time. They then had to carry the same weight of furs back along the trail to the Fort and load up their big canoes for the 6-week trip home.

Our interpreter today confirmed that the coastline is scattered with the graves of many of these menthat didn’t survive this extreme labor.

The whole history of fort lasted from 1778 to 1804. The resurvey of the US –Canadian border after the Louisiana Purchase showed the fort to be in the USA and not in Canada. To escape taxation by the US, the Scots moved the center of the Northwest Company to a new Fort William, just south of Thunder Bay. Might Microsoft be thinking the more modern version of this grand escape?

We drove to the Canadian border to a State Park. The Pigeon River is the border between Canada and the USA across Minnesota in the east. There is a 120-foot falls on the river just a half-mile off the road. This falls and the 24 others on the 20 miles upriver from Lake Superior explains why the Voyageurs abandoned their canoes and marched the hated Grand Portage overland to Port Charlotte on the upper Pigeon River.

To round out the evening, we found the road marked “No Maintenance Performed” and drove several bumpy miles to where the road crossed the Grand Portage Trail. The flying teeth named deer flies were out so we just ran down the trail for a short burst, had our picture taken by the timing device and our picnic table, and then raced back to the car for the drive “home”. At least we can truthfully say we walked the Voyageur’s trail even if it was for such a brief interval.

Nice dinner at a restaurant on the Bay. Nobody had a tattoo. Beautiful sunset.

Best tee shirt this week worn by a 50-something lady who admitted to a “strict Catholic upbringing” – “Well-behaved women rarely make history”. She laughed and said she was making a small effort to break out and make history in her own.

Best welcome sign on a camping, fishing outfitting store and restaurant, “Eat here and get worms”. Hopefully a jest.

JudgeC.R.MagneyStatePark

August 14 - We had planned to get up before dawn to see the sunrise on the shore. However, we were blessed with an overcast sky so got to sleep in an extra hour.

We stopped at one more state park before going into Canada. This was the Judge C.R. Magney State Park. This visionary man was instrumental in establishing 11 state parks along Lake Superior. His philosophy was summed up as, “Our state parks are everyone’s county estate.”

This particular park’s focus is a spooky geologic feature called Devil’s Kettle Falls. We walked a mile with many, many more of the stairs for which these parks should be famous. The falls are 60 feet tall. The peculiar part is what happens when the water splits into two cascades at the lip of the falls. One side goes into a plunge pool and continues down the Brule River to Lake Superior. The other side thunders down into a hole in the ground and disappears. It does not rejoin the Brule River downstream. In fact, they have no idea where the water goes. Speculation is that it goes deep into the earth to join a distant water table. The visual and auditory effects were striking.

CANADA

Ontario,ThunderBay

FortWilliam

We crossed the border without incident and went to tour Fort William at Thunder Bay, Ontario. This is a huge replica fort of the original that stood near this site. It was the home base for the North West Company after they moved from Grand Portage. The fort walls were not to keep anyone out. It was not a military fortress. The walls were to keep the animal out of the stores and to help protect against floods.

The present fort is extremely well done – a living museum. The personnel are mostly college students working for the summer months. They are in costume and stay in character of the roles they would have played in the daily life of this fort in 1815. There are 42 outbuildings and a complete farm. A small Indian settlement is outside the fort as well.

When this fort was the center of beaver trade from the Pacific Ocean to England, there were over 1000 men here through the summer. 10’s of thousands of beaver pelts were brought from the far northwest for their transfer to England to be made into men’s felt hats by the “mad hatters”. Tons of supplies were brought here from Montreal to trade with the Indians who were trapping the beavers. The only reason the beaver survived was the change in men’s fashions to silk hats. The

beaver trade collapsed.

Atits height,the beaver tradeto supply men’s hats employedthousands of people on two continents. All for HATS – nothing else.

Watched President Clinton’s speech at the convention and got to bed after midnight.

DriveThunderBayToSaultSte.Marie

August 15 - It would be presumptuous to characterize a city after spending only a few hours in it. This should be particularly true for those of us who were totally ignorant of the fact that Thunder Bay is a large city of over 100,000. We thought it was a small town – a leftover of more prosperous times.

Having said that, it was our superficial impression that Thunder Bay is a cold town in more than just the sense of the weather. The homes we saw in the downtown area were colorless and looked hunkered down for the winter even in the summer. The buildings have that closed up, small double-paned windowed, inward looking, defensive character of structures warily waiting for the first onslaught of arctic wind and snow. The sun shone brightly but the wind blew off thelake and the air stayed very cool. A nice day. But if this is August .

We decided to go on to the east. Just outside of town, we stopped at an overlook and information center. We inquired how far it was to Sault Ste Marie and were astonished to hear it was over 700 kilometers (420 miles) and would take us 8 to 10 hours to make the drive. Ontario is huge!

Lois got out her reading and we set off. She’s reading aloud the book, “Independent People” by the Icelandic, 1955 Nobel Prize laureate in literature, Haldor Laxness. She was able to read almost non-stop for over 9 hours. They don’t call her leather lungs for nothing. The Trans Canadian Highway is 4860 miles long and stretches from St. John’s, Newfoundland to Victoria, British Columbia. Sault Ste Marie is nearly half way in between. Over 1400 miles of this roadway lay in Ontario. As I said before, Ontario is huge. Only Quebec Province is larger.

The road was two-lane all the way and in very good condition after the first 50 miles. Prior to that it was rather bumpy from frost damage, I presume. Everyone

stays pretty much to the speed limit of 90 Km/hr and the traffic was civilized and orderly helped immeasurably by the many passing lanes that are frequently provided. We are spoiled by Interstates as we are no longer have the experience of sharing two-lane roads with 18-wheelers. Lots of 18-wheelers.

A moment to remember was the sight of a double trailered, fully loaded, mildly fish tailing logging truck pass an infuriatingly slow sedan who had set himself on cruise control. This made it impossible for the truck to gather speed on the downhill to get a running start on the uphill. After several miles of this, the truck driver passed the car on a curve and a double solid yellow line. The stupid car driver never slowed or inched over. That was the only incident of possible near disaster that we saw.

Saw several animals along the way – unfortunately all road kill. A small black bear, a red fox, a skunk, a deer, and perhaps what was left of a porcupine. The most common sign on the highway is a wonderful picture of a moose who in facing the road with silhouette in mid stride looking as though he’s about to sneak up on the pavement. The signs say, “Night Danger” and in keeping with the legally binding bilingualism, “Danger De Nuir”. What a monster that would be to hit at 60 MPH at night!

Wawa

The scenery is monotonous and unrewarding until after Wawa. That is not a misprint. It’s Ojibwa for the Canadian goose. From that town east, the road rises up and over many high cuts in the hills giving spectacular views of Longfellow’s Gitchee Gumee, the Indian name for Lake Superior, “The Big Sea Waters”. There was a very steady and brisk wind from the north all day which pushed our car and the surface of the lake around quite a bit. There were crashing breakers on the north facing beaches. It’s still strange to see all that crashing water on a beach without the smell of salt in the air.

The gas stations along the way are all full service. I haven’t seen that in years and was so taken aback at the first stop that I didn’t say anything to the attendant. So when we stopped again, I thought to rectify what might have been seen as a social failing.

The 20-something young man who began filling the tank and washing the

windshield approached. I asked him if they had full service all year round. He answered, “Yup.” Pressing on, I opined that it must get awfully cold for such work in the winter. He agreed with, “Yup”. I enquired if they got a lot of snow in these parts. I was assured they did by the enunciation of an even more spirited, “Yup”. Just for the heck of it, I tried once more. “Do they keep the roads plowed through all winter?” A proud, “Yup”.

My social obligations met, I retired to the A&W Root-beer store where Lois awaited with floats for each of us.

WinnieofPooh

The paper placemat informed us that we were in the hometown of Winnie of Pooh fame. Seems a soldier bought the young bear as a mascot for his regiment in this town as they were passing through on a train trip during WWI. He named it Winnie after his hometown of Winnipeg. When they were transferred to France, he gave the bear to the local zoo. There, a young boy named Christopher Robbins saw the bear and gave it the additional handle Pooh. The stories followed. We were excited to learn there was a Pooh Park in town and rushed over to have our pictures taken with the statue.

Unfortunately we will not be in town for the 3-day festival beginning this weekend, The Annual Winnie Home Town Festival.

An event of some magnitude we suppose.

SightseeingTrainRide

We stopped for a picture with a massive Canadian goose at the outskirts of Wawa. It really is impressive. It was placed there to commemorate the last hookup of the Trans-Canada Highway in the 60’s. An information center there taught us that there is a thriving gold-mining industry in this part of Canada. They estimate there is $63Billionstill inthe ground.

We’re is a nice Mom and Pop Motel tonight and have reservations for an early morning train ride up into the forest. It’s midnight, Caroline and Teddy have spoken at the convention and it’s time for bed.

August 16 - The tourist, sightseeing train left at 8:00 AM sharp. The trip involved a 114-mile ride to a park in the forest that the train company had “improved” with picnic areas and walkways to an overlook and several waterfalls. We carried our lunch and settled in for a quiet, scenic idle through the Boreal forest.

Why are children allowed out in public before age 18?

The pre- teenage boys immediately behind us on the train were not rude but they were persistent in their voluble discussions on the merits of various methods of mayhem found in recent movies. One small person made a career of running the aisles for the three hours of the outward journey. And last, there was the 2 year old who was terrified of train travel. This was made clear to all in the train (and the surrounding countryside) by sudden wails of unbelievable decibels and octaves capable of loosening one’s teeth in their sockets. We marveled that a human child could produce such a shriek. Later, we marveled that we could survive this recurrent vocal blast.

We arrived and took refuge in the forest. When 545 people fall out of a train and into a woods, there is no pretense of wilderness. However, the day was beautiful, the adults relatively quiet, and the scenic attractions worth thewalk.

At the time of departure, it became clear to us that the adults had no intention of abandoning their offspring in the wilderness so every one of them would be back in our company for another three hours. Controlling my voice so as to not demonstrate my rising panic, I asked the ticket taker if there was any other seating available. Learning that we were in coach #1, she looked at me with understanding and whispered, “Try #8, and good luck.”

Coach #8 was so quiet that we alternated reading, sightseeing and snoozing. The rocking of the car, the sun in the window and the lunch had us very relaxed for the return. We arrived back at 6:00 PM, had a lovely supper on the St. Mary’s riverfront and went “home” to watch the Democratic Convention.

MICHICAN

August 17 - This was a day of two firsts: our first boat ride through a lock and our first visit to Michigan.

SooLocks

We had tickets for a boat ride/tour of the Soo Locks leaving at 10:00 AM. We “forgot” to set the alarm and overslept. In 12 minutes flat, we were dressed, packed and in the car in plenty of time to make the boat. And how glad we were to do so. It was a most interesting event.

The St. Mary’s River divides the USA and Canada at this point of the border. Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario is on one side and Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan is on the other. The river is the connecting waterway between Lake Huron and Lake Superior. We saw several massive ore ships coming up the river while eating dinner the night before and while on our little tour boat. Right there in town, the river is no wider than the “t. John’s at the Gator Bowl so thosehuge ships almostfilledthe horizon.

They took us down river to see some uninteresting shoreline buildings. Then we turned up river and entered the locks on the American side. We rose 21 feet in 12 minutes. There is no feeling of motion and no noise involved with the inrush of those thousands of gallons of water.

Next, we went further upriver to the steel mill on the Canadian side. We went down a channel and got very close to a large ship unloading coal to be used to fire the furnaces, some massive machinery hung from towering overhead cranes loading sand onto elevated remotely controlled hopper cars, the furnace stacks which cook the ore and sand, and a ship loading the finished product, rolled sheet steel, into its hold for shipment to some other Lake port. There were no people evident. All the machines appeared to be working on their own volition. The furnace stacks had an extremely dark, rusty, ominous color with monstrous pipes, columns, and valves protruding from all angles. The whole plant looked like a set from a Spielberg movie with this being the place some miscreant would be sent for penal servitude on a lifeless planet. I was amazedat it all.

We reentered the lower river through the Canadian locks. The whole tour took 2 hours and was well worth the price of admission.

WhitefishPointLighthouseandMuseum

We crossed the bridge, spoke momentarily to the customs official and drove to Paradise. It’s a tiny town along the western edge of Whitefish Bay on Lake Superior. The St. Mary’s River has its origin in this Bay and all shipping between Lake Huron and Lake Superior must pass through the Bay to or from the river and the locks.

As a ship leaves St. Mary’s River and enters Lake Superior into the Bay, it must navigate up and around a point of land that sticks out into the Bay called Whitefish Point. From that Point westward for 80 miles is what is called, “The Graveyard of Ships”. The narrowness of the Bay with resultant congestion of ships and subsequent collisions, the nearness of the shoals, its exposure into the Northwest, furious, November storms, and the occasional dense fogs have led to over 550 shipwrecks in this area in the past 400 years. After the loss in 1975 of the ore ship Edmond Fitzgerald with all hands, a group of local people formed an organization dedicated to preserving the history of mariners in this area of the Great Lakes. They have done a wonderful job in establishing and running a maritime museum at the site of the lighthouse at Whitefish Point.

The lighthouse is the oldest operating light on Lake Superior. It was originally built in 1848 but has been replaced by more modern facilities since. It like all other lights in the USA (except the first light in Boston – thanks to Ted Kennedy) is remotely controlled. The lighthouse “keeper” is in Sault Ste. Marie.

This lighthouse not only had the light on the tower, it also had a foghorn. But what a surprise it was to learn that the horn was placed underwater, far out from the shore at the Lake bottom. In the dense fogs that could blanket the sea, a captain would place a listening devise on the inside of his ship’s hull and listen for the low pitched warning of shoals. The lighthouse keeper had a listening devise in the shallow water at edge of the Lake through which he could be sure that the horn was working!

We toured their museum that had stories of some of the most spectacular local wrecks, examples of old and modern diving gear used to explore those wrecks, andinformation plus an example of a lighthouse lantern.

We then saw a 15-minute film on the sinking of the Fitzgerald. The boat was in contact with another throughout the horrible night’s storm. shortly after the last communication that, “We are holding our own”, the Fitz dropped off the radar of the trailing ship. They have visited the wreck in 500 feet of water but still don’t know exactly why she sank. She had been listing for several hours beforehand. The trailing boat had just experienced two 35-foot waves that came in unusually close succession from behind. The Fitz disappeared at about the time those two waves would have reached her and perhaps they caught her broadside??

In the film they showed ore boats being tossed around like corks on the furious seas that occur here in November. Thirty and Forty foot waves are whipped by near hurricane winds. So many of the wrecks occur in these horrible storms. November is not a time to be on this inland sea.

For the last part of the exhibit, we took a tour of the lighthouse keeper’s home that had been built in the late 1800’s. It was decorated downstairs as it would have appeared in 1920 and upstairs as it would have looked in 1884. It was a very nice, cozy cottage. A lonely way of life for the man, his wife and children. It was an 80-mile round trip walk to get to a town.

Dinner at a bar and grill in Paradise and then to the motel for Mr. Gore’s speech. As the Detroit Free Press says the following morning, “Gore Does His Sell; Now Time Will Tell”.

On one last note. Lois and I came to this part of the country to try to learn about the ways of the people who live here. We hadno idea we hadso much to learn.

Wehave seen

 Farming (milk, wheat, barley, alfalfa, sunflowers, corn, cattle, berries, & beans)

 Mining (silver, gold, iron ore, copper, and coal)

 Fishing

 Forestry

 Basic manufacturing (steel, lumbar, paper, and taconite)

All this work is done by hardworking men and women in sometimes-harsh climate andsometimes dangerous, dirty, dusty, damp, deafeningly loud conditions.

The final common element of these products is water. We now have a real sense and profound appreciation for the overwhelmingly powerful place the waters of the Great Lakes, the Mississippi and all her sister, mighty rivers have played in the fortunes of our great country. The volume of these basic goods that add to the fabric of our rich lives could not be transported in such vast quantities by any rail or highway system alone. The rivers are and always will be the true highways of our midland goods. The captains and ship hands of all the vessels that ply these often-dangerous waters carrying those goods have our deepest admiration.

TahquamenonFallsStateParkAndCranberryFarm

August 18 - It was a bit grim this morning. Cold and raining at the outset. Besides that, we got slightly lost out of Paradise and had to travel several unnecessary miles to get to the park. We bundled up against the persistent wind with a shortsleeved shirt, a denim shirt, long pants, and a polar Tec sweater and joined the Michigan natives in their shorts and tee shirts for the stroll to thefalls.

The Park is in two parts: one for the smaller lower falls and one for the upper. The parks around both attractions are well kept and inviting. They were well visited by families and their dogs. Up here, dogs are welcomed in most parks as long as they are on a 6- foot leash. Cricket would have loved the male 180-pound Rottweiler. What a beast! Almost as big as the Berry’sMonte.

The upper falls are 200 feet across and 50 feet high making them second only to Niagara Falls in volume in the eastern USA. The water was rather low today –they haven’t had their usual rainfall this summer. Actually, the dryness has put a damper on the Annual Wild Blueberry Festival

that is going on this weekend. They have had to (horrors) import blueberries for their cooking. We’ve had some great pies and cobbler – who cares where the wild berries were picked.

We wandered the paths of both park sections and the weather improved as the day wore on. By mid-day, the sun was shining and the blue sky had returned. Our spirits rose again.

To cap off the afternoon, we drove out to see a cranberry farm. The lady that showed us around is the great-great niece of the fellow that started the farm in 1876. It’s called the Centennial Farm for obvious reasons.

We learned that cranberries grow in soil – not in water. They like sandy, welldrained, acidic soil similar to blueberries. There is no pit of seed in the berry. They are bitter. In processing, they use two cups of sugar for every three cups of berries. A new plant takes 4 to 5 years to put out its first berries. It is an evergreen and lives under the ice in the winter. They flood the fields only at harvest time in October so the berries will float above the plants and the harvesting machine can pick them off the top of the water without hurting the plants. Once a plant begins to produce, it will put out a crop a year for decades.

During the winter, they spread a layer of sand on top of the ice so that when the ice melts, there will be fresh, rich soil added to the fields. When needed, they water the plants during the summer with an irrigation system from a neighboring small lake. You can see Lake Superior from the fields. The wind was fierce. What must it be in January!!??

The farm has 5 fields each the size of a football field. They harvest four 18-wheeler truckloads full of berries each year. They are shipped by truck to Wisconsin (the cranberry growing capital of the USA) for cleaning and freezing. They then are shipped through the Great Lakes to New York for processing. That’s how they end up on our tables at Thanksgiving.

We’re off to the west tomorrow to visit the north shore of the UP (Upper Peninsula). Late to bed and early to risemakes one tired.

MunisingandPicturedRocksNationalLakeshore

August 19 - It seemed a bit cold in our room when we woke this morning. We had left the window open for the fresh air. It was so cold that Lois broke her oath to never, never wear socks withsandals. The shame!

When we got to the car, we found the cause of our discomfort. It was 39 degrees! The clear blue skies overnight had pulled back the blanket of yesterday’s clouds and allowed the ground’s heat to escape.

So with the heat on in the car in August, we set off for the northern lakeshore of the Upper Peninsula, or as calledin these parts, the U.P.

We got to Munising on the Lake Superior coastline late in the morning where we were to spend the night. The map promised a scenic drive further west to Marquette. The promise was fulfilled as the road ran close to the shore on many occasions. In that area, the shoreline has many easily accessible beaches of white sand. In the shallows, the water was not too cold and some of these polar bearlike people were basking in the sun and swimming in the waves. Of course by now the temperature had soared to 68.

Today, we for the first time sought out a particular food. The cinnamon bun for which this area is famous. We stopped at a local bakery and found them. The place smelled so good, we stayed for lunch and had a most delicious local baked good – the pastie. It’s a meat pie with ground beef, diced potato, rutabaga, onion and carrot all placed raw in extremely short pastry shell and baked for an hour. Mouthwatering in the extreme. We must learnhow to make these!

It was time to begin the exploration of geologic wonder of Pictured Rocks. This area was formed of sedimentary rock from shallow seas.

The glaciers did their work several times and left 200-foot cliffs stretching 30 miles along the lakeshore.

The tourist bureau suggests viewing the cliffs from the lake by tour boat. We decided against another boat ride and instead found a trail that wound its way down through the hardwood forest to the bottom of the cliffs.

There we found a splendid beach. The sand was a fine a granular sugar and just as white. The white bottom out into the lake produced a turquoise blue as splendid as any seen in the Caribbean. A sharp shelf further out resulted in the change in water color to a deep brilliant blue. The sky remained clear of all clouds. A river up the cliffs flowed into the lake at the beach. The water flow of the river pushed into

a depression at the shore so the waves of the lake pushed up and over the outgoing river. Quite a fight, but the lake wonevery time.

After climbing back up the cliff, we walked to the falls. This walk was also through what they call the Northern hardwood forest of beech, birch and maple trees. It’s an open forest with sunlight filtering down to the floor with ferns and hemlock growing in the low light. The path was wide and smooth and quiet. We had such a nice day today.

There are trees turning fall colors along the edges of marshy places. Yes, fall colors in August. I have pictures to prove it. If only the Internet connection would stay up so I could document my claim.

Thecinnamon bunwasas goodas advertised.But Ienjoyedthepastie more.

August 20 - Even though we left the window only half open, it was cold in the room when the alarm rang at 6:30. We bundled up and went to the motel lobby for the Continental breakfast. There we found the Michigan native tourists in short sleeves and shorts again. The big screen TV was on in the lobby and tuned to the Weather Channel. And there it was – the local map with 32 degrees stamped squarely on our location. The natives whistled and put on light sweaters but kept the shorts. These are hearty folks who will remain certain that the summer doesn’t end until Labor Day no matter what the temperature. Lois had to resort to socks withsandals againinspite of her mortification.

There was hoarfrost on the ground and mists billowing up over all the small lakes and the little river following us on Route 28 back to the east. The summer flowers vied for our attention with the leaves turning autumn colors on the trees. It was a beautiful morning.

At H77, we turned north and went back up to the south shore of Lake Superior. This is the area of the Grand Sable Sand Dunes section of the Pictured Rocks National Seashore. This was another first experience in a unique geology. It was also a lot of fun and prolonged the beauty of the day.

GrandSableSandDunes

The banks of the sandstone cliffs along the lakefront are 300 feet tall topped with the reddish fine granular sand of the dunes. Those dunes are another 50 to 100 feet tall and roll along back for a mile off the coast to the road. There are grasses holding the sand in place in many places and some evergreen trees are trying to take hold. But there are many places where there are only mountains of sand. The fun was in trying to get to the top of the very steep slopes, sinking deep and sliding backwards one step for every two upwards.

After a lot of effort, huffing and puffing, we could get to the top. Then, what a hoot to run back down at headlong speed. It peculiarly gave a sense of flying as you could, without fear or hesitation, propel yourself straight out into space to land in the soft deep sand of your step. We didn’t try rolling down – we would have never gotten the sand out of ourclothes.

We went to the site of an old logging operation where an overlook platform made possible a view east and west along the coast for several miles. Not only were the cliffs spectacular but so was the vast expanse of deserted, wide, rocky beach at their base.

The drive to the overlook was just grand. There were no othercars on the way so we could enjoy the solitude. We were in the early, yellow-green light of morning driving along a well-maintained gravel road. The way was closely lined by an alee of tall maples, various evergreens, and birch that arched over us with that stunning light filtering through mile after mile. The effect was particularly appropriate to a Sunday morning.

There was the obligatory falls to visit down the inevitable line of stairs. Then a picnic lunch and departure for the south coast ofthe UP and the shoreline of Lake Michigan. Our final destination – here in Saint Ignace from which we will take ourselves and bikes on the ferry to Mackinac Island tomorrow for the upscale tourist event of the trip. The town of 3000 has Lake Huron on its east, Lake Michigan to its west and the Straits of Mackinac connecting the two to the south.

A couple more observations on food:

They love salt up here in the North Country. We have both had many evenings with true pitting edema well above our ankles. This goes away with drinking lots of water and further exercise and as we are running up and down stairs with alacrity, is not a sign of failing health.

In general, salt is the only spice. However, the food is not bland and has been good overall.

We still don’t have vegetables on the restaurant menus. The only fruit and veggies we get are what we buy in the grocery store and eat raw for lunches. This is meat and potato country.

I don’t care how cold it gets up here, look for lines at the Dairy Queen. They are everywhere – in towns big and small. They far outnumber any other chains and appear to be the local hangout for young people in the smaller towns. There have been very few McDonalds and almost no Burger Kings.

For the most part, we have been in rural and small town areas the whole trip. Mom and Pop restaurants are the rule. They serve the Walleye and trout from the local lakes and cod from Iceland. When we have seen ethnic, it’s been mostly Italian.

We will be planning tonight how and where to camp out for a few days thereafter. It’s time to get out the tent and get even closer to nature – hopefully at temperatures above 40.

MackinacIsland(Mackinaw)

August 21 - The island is reached by tourist boats: two levels, 30 to 40 passengers and very fast. There are several competing ferry companies at the docks of St. Ignace (pronounced Ig-nuss). We chose Sheplers as they provided overnight parking.

We got a good seat on the outer, upper deck for the 7-mile crossing of Lake Huron to the island. I took some pictures and Lois chased the bike helmets around the deck scattered by the ferocious wind. As others fled below, we held our ground and out of pure stubbornness and silly pride stayed above for the entire 16 minute trip. Our coiffeurs were particularly stunning when we disembarked.

Boy,do weneed haircuts!!

In 1875, the Congress of the USA named Mackinac Island our second national park after Yellowstone. Following the Great Depression, the island was deeded to the State of Michigan as its first state park.

It’s about 5 miles long and 3 ½ across. 82% of the land remains a state park but every other inch is for the tourist trade. There are many B&B’s, large and small summer hotels (all of which are frightfully expensive), fudge and ice cream stores galore, tee shirt shops, restaurants, bike rentals (also outrageously overpriced), and a renovated cliff-hanging fort from the late 1800’s. All of these are conveniently and gratefully huddled at one end of the island on or just off of the main, dockside street.

In 1901, the state decided to ban forever all motorized vehicles from the island with three exceptions: a fire truck, an ambulance and a police cruiser. All commerce is propelled by horsepower. This makes for a wonderful ambiance and an unforgettable aroma.

I took almost as many pictures of horses as Sharon did of Elk at Banff National Park. But in my defense, there were dray horses, riding horses, fancy carriage horses. They came in teams of two and three with a great array of interesting conveyances behind them.

The horses’ presence with the resultant slowing of people’s tempo was one of the main attractions of our visit.

The other significant attractive feature of the place, due to the lack of horseless carriages, was the ability to bike without fear of death. The only danger could come from other bikers or a mound of horse manure. We suffered neither.

True to form, we presented ourselves at the door of the fashionable Iroquois Hotel in worn walking shoes, bike helmets in hand, and one day’s clothes change in a backpack. The doorman looked us over and graciously asked if he could help us using such a tone that made it plain he was certain he would not be required to. We’ve been this route so often and have become quite practiced. so with what my Mother called a “shit-eating” grin on our faces, we signaled that we had either not understood his tone or forgave it, and announced that we had reservations for the night. As nothing in the place would rent for under $200 a night, he dropped the forcedsmile andgraced us with his welcoming one.

There was a wonderful tee shirt in one of the storefronts that listed “10 Lies About Mackinac Island”. Two of them were, “All the bike paths are downhill” and “It doesn’t hurt to ride a bike”. Lies! Lies! Damnable lies!

We first rode the relatively flat road that circumnavigates the island. That is only 8.5 miles and follows the shoreline the entire way. The temperature was in the 60’s, the lake was calm and the sun shone brightly on the eastern shore. The road is a standard two-lane width so that horse drawn carriages can pass each other and in excellent repair. It becomes a snowmobile track for the 400+ winter residents.

We passed a building in progress. There were many workmen there busy at work. They had all come to work on bikes andwerea good three miles fromtown.

We stopped to climb yet another long set of stairs to the overlook for Arch Rock only to find the horse drawn sightseeing wagon unloading a hoard of gray haired ladies of the St. John’s Volunteer Association at the top. We had inadvertently broken one of our cardinal outdoor rules: Never hike anywhere you can get to by car (or in this case – horse).

We got back to town at mid-day and had lunch at an outdoor café right on the shore. For Pat’s interest, we took a picture of a golf course right next to the restaurant. It is a nine-hole putting green. Not putt-putt golf, just small beautifully manicured putting greens. They appeared devilishly designed.

We rode along the upper shopping street so that Lois could visit the post office and the oldest continuously operating fudge making shop in the USA. They would only sell ½ pound bricks at a minimum. They advertised a third brick free with the purchase of two. So, I sent Lois in for 2 pieces of fudge and she came out with 1½ pounds. Does this woman know a bargain when she sees one??

The bike map now turned our attention to the interior of the island. We rode to see the Grand Hotel (the “largest summer hotel in the world”), the stables for the 300+ horses on the island, the old cemetery, the outside of the fort, “St Anne’s Catholic Church (which has parish records of births, deaths and marriages dating to 1665), and many palatial homes on the bluffs. All of these attractions other than the church were straight up short and brutal hills. Another lie, “The owners of the mansions love to give private tours –just ask”. We didn’t.

By evening, we were so tired we had passed hunger. One bowl of soup and one salad shared between us fulfilled our needs. Read the USA Today, cleaned up and hit the hay early. No Internet access so I’m getting further and further behind on thepictures.

August 22 - Two other tee shirt lies. “The sun will come out and it will warm up” and “You do get used to the smell.”

We awoke to pains not known before. We had hoped to sleep late but there was major construction progressing on the roof of the hotel and the workman held a loud day’s planning conference right under our window a little after 7:00. It was raining slightly but with enough vigor to give us a graceful escape from further biking. Aspirin and breakfast made walking possible so we did a little shopping on the main street and found a picture for our travel wall at home. We sat on the veranda of our hotel, read the newspaper, caught a few more whiffs of horse urine, and then caught the boat for the mainland.

We had determined to stay in St. Ignace for the afternoon to let me catch up on my pictures. This required Internet access so we stopped at one motel after another until we found one that purported to have it. Believe me, a correctly sized hole in a wall into which the laptop phone line will fit, does not in all cases an Internet connection make. After much fussing and fuming, Lois called the library and the librarian said I could come and connect through her fax machine. That produced a connection of glacial “speed” so I’ve given up for now.

In the meantime, Lois and I had spent a leisurely, relaxing day in a motel with a balcony overlooking Lake Huron. As only people who have known each other for a very long time can do, we suddenly and independently came to the identical conclusion and proclaimed, “Relaxing is NOT a vacation”. We have chucked the idea of camping out along Lake Huron for a couple days of R&R and are instead going to turn south, leave Michigan, turn left at Ohio and head for the Appalachian Mountains in Pennsylvania. We’ve seen the majesty of the Lakes (and still can’t believe it’s not the ocean) and we don’t enjoy hiking in woods or lakeshore. We arelonging for mountain hikes againso will go look for them.

Fudgeis at 11/4 poundsand counting.

DriveMichigantoOhio

August 23 - We ignored the 6:00 alarm clock call. It was still dark and the fog bank we had seen advancing on the motel off Lake Huron the night before still hung heavily on the shore. We decided it would not be a happy experience to cross the 5.8-mile long Mackinaw Bridge in these conditions. When it became light, we started out even though the fog persisted.

Had we waited for the fog to lift, it would have been close to noon before we got underway. The ride over the bridge was spooky as the fog naturally thickened the higher up the span we went. There was very little traffic so we made it without incident.

I got to travel with Tina Turner today. Lois’ hair had overnight taken on the color and the wild abandon of Tina’s most famous celebrity photo. Something in the hair washing water I suspect – a real screamer first thing in the morning. I suppose it was cruel to laugh but it was impossible to avoid it withoutbursting.

The Grays have met their match. We met a man tending to the needs of a wayside park whose verbal skills will remain in our lore forever. The people in these parts speak very quickly but this fellow was a machine gun. Lois, Nelle, Kathy – take a second-row seat.

We were the only wayfarers at the park and he was at the door to the restrooms as we approached. I made the comment that caring for the park in January must be challenging. He said there was nothing to it as they close the park the first of December. Bladder control must be a requisite of winter travel in these parts.

He then went into a 10 -15 minute non-stop, animated, interesting, and rapid-fire treatise on the vagaries of the weather over the past few years (hotter and much less snow) and his many employment pursuits (rancher, wayside park custodian, winter road inspector, and local fire department volunteer).

I must admit that I missed some of the details as I became fascinated more by the manner of his speech than the content. I was mildly alarmed that he might never take another breath and pass out in mid climatological dissertation.

Only our vast apologies at having to use his recently cleaned facilities and the appearance of a new audience released us from this very loquacious and delightful Midwesterner.

Our interactions with other folks in the upper Midwest have of course, been superficial and brief. There has been a predictably consistent behavior pattern worth mentioning: the meetings on the walking/hiking trails.

I believe I mentioned that the people in North Dakota were reserved. I had stood across from individuals filling their gas tanks, not 5 feet from me, without as much as a glance: much less a, “Good Morning”. At 6:00 AM and with no other people in sight, that always felt peculiar. Any attempt at superficial comment on my part was usually met with a baleful look and a mumbled, indiscernible reply. I learned my lesson, “We don’t take up conversation with strangers here”, and thereafter kept a respectful verbal distance.

Meeting people on the trails (short paved walks or longer hiking trails) was also disconcerting at first. No one would make eye contact or use any body language to admit we were right there in front of them. In groups, they would continue to talk among themselves but not one of them would look in our direction as they passed. We tried the usual, “Hi”, “Good Morning”, “ Good Afternoon” which did not make them change stride or even peer inour direction.

I hate to say it, but Lois and I began to take this on as a challenge, especially with the lone walker approaching. Picture a 4–foot wide winding path in a sunlit forest. You have been walking for an hour, seeing no one other than your walking companion. Then ahead approaches a lone figure, striding purposefully, head erect, eyes straight ahead. Wait. Wait. Now! As he begins to slip by, give a hearty, loud, “Hi there!”

The effect is immediate and visible: a startled disjointing of stride. There is instant confusion. “Where do I look?” “What do I say?” It’s as though our greeting had ripped off some cloak of invisibility and he now stood naked before us. Alone, with no companions to keep us at bay, there might be a stuttered; “Hello” heard

moments after we had passed. After a few such encounters, we lost interest in the game and took pity on this helpless prey by keeping our mouths shut and playing the “King’s New Clothes” game as though wewere alone inthe world.

The rest of the day was long and tense once we got to the Ohio Turnpike. It’s dangerous to maintain the speed limit with 18- wheelers running up your back but the occasional blinking blue lights of the Highway Patrol warned of the consequences otherwise. With good fortune, I did not make any close acquaintances with truckers or patrolmen.

We traveled over 500 miles and have stopped just short of the Pennsylvania line. We will be on the Pa. Turnpike in the morning. To bed.

MARYLAND

August 24 - We had to wait again this morning for some of the fog to lift. No Way was I going to get onto the Pa. Turnpike in pea soup fog! Later in the morning, the fog was replaced by a high haze and in the late afternoon by heavy rain and light hail.

There was construction on the Turnpike that produced miles and miles of concrete barriers lining both sides of our two eastbound lanes. The trucks are required to run in the left lane. This had the effect of having me sandwiched between several 18-wheelers on my left and concrete walls on my right as we made our way around curves and over blind hills.

This traffic, combined with the weather conditions, prevented me from being as enthusiastic about the western Pennsylvania scenery as Lois. I was too busy white knuckling it. Speaking of knuckles, those of my thumbs have stopped hurting after having done so for the past year. I noted that with the colder weather and our hiking, I was drinking more and more water and less and less diet coke. Could it be the NutraSweet, Equal? I loaded up on diet coke for two days and the pain returned. I switched back to drinks without artificial sweeteners and the pain disappeared again. Very interesting.

Throughout the day, Lois was reading a book that gives a fascinating account of the Hurricane that devastated Galveston, Texas, in September 1900. It helped to keep my mind off some of the rigors of the road.

FortFrederickandC&OCanal

We stopped for lunch at a Maryland state park, Ft. Frederick. This is a fort built by the Maryland Colony in 1756 to help the British Army ward off the Indians that the French were inciting during the French and Indian War. The British won this war in 1763 and all claims the French had in Canada, the Mississippi Valley regions, and the Great Lakes were lost to them forever.

We next stopped for a brief visit at one of the visitor’s centers for the C&O Canal. This 184-mile canal was built by a company headed by George Washington. It runs from Cumberland, Pennsylvania to Georgetown, Maryland. Prior to the advent of rail traffic (which spelled the doom for the canal), there were shipments of coal and other goods from Pennsylvania and West Virginia to Maryland and Washington, D.C. by this water route. The towpath has been maintained as a National Historical Park and is used by hikers and bikers along its entire length.

We’re in a small town at the northern terminus of the Shenandoah National Park and will be going into it tomorrow. We have made reservations at a hotel in the Park for two nights. The TV weather station holds out hope for better weather the next few days. One can only hope.

VIRGINIA – NC - TN

ShenandoahNationalParkSkylineDrive

August 25 - Again, we awoke to fog. Thick fog. Heavy fog. Unrelenting fog. The folks on the Weather Station are giving as much play to this wet blanket lying over Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, and Virginia as to the tropical storm in the Atlantic. This is our third day in a row of it and today it lasted the longest.

We snuck up to the entrance station of the Park to find we wouldn’t have to pay to get in. It is the 84th Anniversary of the National Park Service so they were letting everyone into the Park System freebies this day. We drove to the welcome center at mile 4.6 and waited for the fog to clear. At 10:30 we thought it had begun to lift. We were wrong. The valley and mountain views were nonexistent. Lois read another book aloud, we got out the tree identification book and had our hand at those in the parking lot, and we waited. At noon, the fog got worse by blowing up the ridges onto the highway. We hadlunch in the car andwaited.

By 12:30 we had been in the Park for over four hours and had traveled 4.6 miles on the Skyline Drive.

We gave up the idea of seeing views and decided to try to learn something about the Park itself and the surrounding lands.

To do so, we bought an audiotape that gave information linked to the mile markers along the Drive. This got us on our way.

By Mid-afternoon, the fog had lifted so we were able to take a hike. It promised great views. We enjoyed the uphill climb to two small rock outcroppings that did allow a view into the valleys below. However, we still couldn’t see very well due to haze, which I think is a euphemism for smog.

We looked into this phenomenon further and found that the industries in West Virginia and the Ohio River Valley are primarily responsible for the particulate matter that produces air quality for which the National Park feels obliged to apologize. It is truly a shame.

With spectacular views out of the question, we turned our attentions to the smaller and/or closer attractions of the Park: plants, trees, and wildlife. This quest was rewarded. We slowed down and enjoyed nature from the lovely wild flowers, the strange insects and spiders, the colorful amphibians, a real live timber rattlesnake close up, the ubiquitous deer, andof course, the bears.

We came upon a mother and cub munching their way along the roadside. They were behind one of the short stonewalls built by the CCC at points of roadway drop-offs. That made it impossible to approach her for pictures without having her suddenly appear over the wall with maternal instincts enraged. We opted for leaving the Park with all our limbs rather than photos.

BigMeadowsLodge

The rattler was crossing the road. He/she was very bright and may have just molted. It also had a fat belly so had just eaten. We followed it up a slope at a safe distance to get a picture. It felt our presence and coiled tightly facing us, placed its head low to the ground and rattled a warning. Got a good picture and left it undisturbed.

We’re in a wonderful rustic hotel midway down the Park, The Big Meadows Lodge. It was built in 1939 and is constructed all of American Chestnut lumber. Sadly, the chestnut is now virtually extinct in the USA due to an imported fungus. This was a magnificent tree that was a major source of food for many of the creatures and the people in these parts.

We have a two room “suite” as it was the only accommodation available. Every inch is of wood paneling. The old floors squeak like the wood floors in my Grandfather’s old farmhouse.

The 6-inch long hinges on the plank doors are not identical suggesting that a real blacksmith had made each one by hand. The windows are small and boxy but largeenough to look downinto the fieldbelow to watchthe evening deer grazing.

We went to a Ranger program that was to start at 8:45 PM. She was to speak on the night creatures of the park. There was a long prelude as she struggled with her recalcitrant slide projectors. Meanwhile we watched the keen young boxer champing at the bit to mix it up with the plump retriever who was lusting after the oblivious blackScottie. Toour right, a young mansat bolt upright meditating.

We, on the other hand, just continued to wilt with fatigue and were grateful for the end of the presentation and the chance to get to bed.

August 26 - Today, we had no fog for the first time in days and days. As anticipated, the haze persists and obliterates the views. We took three short hikes and enjoyed them greatly. Much of the time we were on the Appalachian Trail. We discussed it for about 30 seconds and decided we do not want to try the entire 2100 miles next year.

I am extremely impressed by the excellent condition of the trail. It is maintained entirely by volunteers throughout its full extend, Georgia to Maine. We didn’t see any “through hikers” but they would be further north by now as the whole hike takes four to six months and they have to be in Maine by early October to avoid the very cold weather.

We explored talus slopes, a very small creek (they are undergoing a three year drought), an old cemetery from the pioneer days (earliest grave of a man named James Dean born in 1796), and a few overlooks.

We were further saddened to see the numbers of dead Oak trees. They are being killed by the gypsy moth that got into the USA from Asia. It has no natural enemies here. And to cap it all off, the woolly aphid is attacking the hemlocks. Will there be any hard woods left standing? As the majority of dead trees are scattered about, there are no areas of blight. In their literature, the Park Service is trying to put the best face on things by telling us that the dead crown of the forest will allow more sunlight onto the forest floor allowing other species to thrive. Only time willtell.

We saw another bear this evening. It had strayed too close to the lodge and the Rangers were trying to chase it back into the more distant woods. They were doing so in golf carts. Quite a sight! The bear left just as a lady strolled by with her tiny poodle on a leash entirely unaware of the presence of the possibility of her lovedone becoming dinner for Ursus Americanus.

Though they deny any Lime Disease in the Park, they give hints on how to avoid ticks. With all the deer around, we decided to be very diligent in tick prevention. Among the top three instructions is the wearing of light colored clothes (“The better to see you with, my dear”). As we only had one pair of light colored pants and shirt with us, we have worn the same clothes for two days and will probably sweat on the trails in these tomorrow as well. Pat would be horrified and disown us immediately.

Oh well, one definition of a vacation is a time during which you can wear the same pair of socks for twodays. We’re just extending the definition.

No Ranger talk tonight. Just a very good meal at the Lodge, reading the Washington Post inthe sitting room, a shower, and off to bed.

August 27 - Except for one short hike up into the hardwood forest, this was a travel day. We were up and out early for the usual breakfast of cereal and juice at an overlook. We had no fog in the morning but as we got to the south end of the Park at mid-day, the fog rolled in from the east totally obscuring the peaks we had planned to hike.

We must confess that our spirits rise and fall with the lightness or darkness of the skies. We didn’t find the Shenandoah National Park the outdoor playground for which we had hoped. The fogand haze did blunt our enthusiasm. To have the fog roll up and over us again was disheartening. We therefore skipped the last hikes and drove south onto the Blue Ridge Parkway. It is our intent to drive the whole way to the Great Smokey Mountains National Park on the parkway – at the 45 mile per hour limit prescribed.

We stopped at the first Ranger Station on the Parkway as our trip meter crossed 8000 miles. They had a living museum set up with a farmhouse, outbuildings, and a garden, as it would have appeared in the late 1800’s. There was a friendly volunteer couple demonstrating quilting and basket making. I’m always taken by the ingenuity of construction and mechanics that people of that age could imagine and produce with trees as their onlyresource.

As we left the parking lot, it rained! But it was a brief shower that washed away the haze for a while and we were able to get some of the long hoped for views of the valleys so far below. What a genius and crazy idea it was to conceive a park system as a road along the tops of a mountain range for almost 600 miles at a time in American history when the populace was “conquering” and “taming” nature to the needs of man. Thank goodness we had men like Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, John Muir, Stuart Udall and Harold Ickes.

We are in Roanoke, Virginia for the night. For the past hour, the thunder has been rolling down from the mountains to the east and the rain has been coming down in sheets. We have heard hail on the metal window ledge. They are putting emergency flash flood warnings on the TV and have cancelled the Virginia Tech football game for tonight. Heavens!! This must be serious. Perhaps the rain will completely wash away the haze and we will have clear skies tomorrow??

BlueRidgeNationalParkway

August 28 - We got an early start with leaden skies overhead. But, Lo and Behold, as we drove up the steep incline out of the Roanoke Valley back onto the Blue Ridge Parkway we got above the cloud cover into blue skies. It was a beautiful sight looking down on the white fluffy clouds and eerie to hear the morning traffic noises of the day coming up through theclouds.

We can tell we’re back in the south. There are friendly open smiles and greetings on the hikes. There are al dente snap green beans on the menus as a welcome back to vegetables in our diet. The waitresses know to ask if we want sweet or unsweet iced tea. The soft, slow, southern accented speech is music to the ear; the word “yes” pronounced with two syllables. Y’all has crept back into the vocabulary. Grits and biscuits with gravy are on the breakfast menus. It feels like home sweet home.

We stopped at another reproduction of a mountain homestead in the manner of the 1890’s. This one had a gristmill and lumber mill involved.

The machinery was hand hued, massive, and wicked looking. Those devices look as though they could put a big hurt on you. There were opportunities for photos gratefully taken. I love the digital camera. None of the worry about running out of film and the ability to look at a picture and immediately decide to redo or delete is priceless.

The weather was quite variable with alternating clear skies, fog, rain, and low cloud cover. The subdued light was very effective in bringing out the colors in the grasses, roadside flowers and the leaves of vines and trees starting into their Autumn change. The early reds of the maples in the North have given way to the reds of the Southern Dog Wood trees. We were surprised to see that the Azaleas and Dog Woods are setting buds at this time of year for their marvelous displays next Spring and Summer. The haze was higher and thinner than in days past giving a purple hue to distant forests without obscuring the rank on rank mountain ridges.

The Parkway is 469 miles long connecting the Shenandoah National Park with the Great Smokey Mountains National Park. Except where it runs through National Forests, it is only as wide at the beautifully maintained two-lane road with private property and local roads running parallel. In building the Parkway in the late 1930’s, the National Park system also landscaped the roadside with trees and shrubs. The Shenandoah Valley lies to the west; the Piedmont runs along the eastern border. It is a most marvelous driving experience.

For mile after mile after mile, we had the countryside to ourselves. When we were in a stretch where the private land was hard upon the road, we revisited our farm viewing. There are very small dairies and crops of corn, cabbage, sunflowers, and yes, we’re back in the land of tobacco. In the wider sections in Virginia were rolling hills and hardwoods of maples, tulip poplars, black locust, Northern red oaks, American basswood, apple, and dogwood trees.

In North Carolina, as we got further and further south, we gained altitude and slipped among the evergreens of White Pines and spruces. Throughout the length was rank on rank of yellow, red, purple, and white wild flowers as well as massive azalea bushes. The serenity of the enforced 45-mile an hour speed limit, the solitude of the road, and the splendor of the flora produced a restful and fulfilling day.

Lois has been reading aloud Jack London’s “Sea Wolf”. We can recommend it. It is a tale of adventure on an arctic sealing boat and the Faustian amoral captain whose actions make life hellish for the shanghaied gentleman protagonist. Deep into the tale, the cook loses his foot (shark incident). There is a long interval in which the story line proceeds over the officers’ mess table. Breezing along in her narration, Lois suddenly turned to me to enquire with all seriousness, “Who’s

doing the cooking?” As I howled with laughter, she saw my point and protested in good humor that, “One must keep track of these important plot details”.

It occurred to me that the vegetation was changing as we were going up but the views to either side of the road remained the same until. Suddenly as we came around a curve there loomed Grandfather Mountain over our shoulders, the second highest east of the Mississippi River. Mt. Mitchell, at 6067 feet, just a bit further to the south is the highest. The entire Appalachian Mountain chain seemed to leap out of the earth on that curve as we left the gentler Blue Ridge behind.

We learned that Grandfather Mountain is privately owned. It’s also a United Nations designated World Heritage Biosphere which means it is actively involved in the preservation of plant and animal life native to the area. It’s one of 324 in the world and the only one privately owned.

They charge a per person fee to drive to the top. At the top is a suspension bridge over a gorge leading to a promontory. We got onto the bridge just as a wicked looking bank of black clouds began coming up the north side of the mountain towards us. Good sense prevailed. We didn’t go to the top.

We’re in Ashville, N.C. for the night. Plan a very early start tomorrow in order to get to the NP quickly. We’ll be back in our old stomping grounds where we first learned to love the out-of-doors, hiking, and animal watching. Seems a fitting end to a wonderful summer journey.

August 29 - We had our first hot breakfast in weeks at The Day’s Inn’s complimentary buffet. The fatty meal “stuck” with us for hours but was very tasty. Even on the repeats.

The only traffic we had on the Parkway was coming from the south as commuters made their way to Ashville. There was hardly anyone on the road after that brief flurry of worker bees. It was a good thing as the clouds billowing up from the east were thick.

At times we were only just able to make out the center yellow line for 10 feet in front of the car. There was no place to pull over, so with flashers flashing and prayers a-flying, we would press onwards looking anxiously behind for any fool crazy enough to be driving faster than 20 mph in those conditions.

The clouds continued rolling up the ravines onto the eastern ridges. Many times on entering a tunnel we would be in thick cover, but as we exited not more than 50 yards onto the western slope, the sky would be crystal clear. We began to count on that fact to relieve the tension of the drive. Luckily, we saw no other cars behind us until the fog had cleared.

We were now in the land of big mountains. The clouds were below us. The views, when possible, were for miles over rank on rank of evergreen shrouded mountains. Even though they look heavy and majestically tall, our literature asked us to believe that these mountains used to be as high as the Rocky Mountains or perhaps even as tall as the Himalayas. So that’s what happens if it rains and snows on you for a few million years.

The Blue Ridge Parkway ends at mile 469 as it dead-ends into Newfound Gap Road. We turned right and headed for Gatlinburg 30 miles to the west. We drove through the town, made a U-turn, drove back through (stopping long enough to grab a sandwich) and then rapidly escaped its turmoil and commercialism for the shelter of the Park.

TENNESSEE

SmokeyMountainsNationalPark

We stopped at the large Information Center for hiking pamphlets. The parking lot was packed so I pulled to the end of the parking lot and stopped to let Lois out of the car. We took an additional 15 seconds to point out where I would pick her up on her return. Those 15 seconds was just too long for the car behind me who blew his horn angrily. I pulled up and as he passed, he gave me a withering look. My pulse rose, I’m sure my blood pressure rose, and I was trying to remember which finger was the appropriate response when I realized that this was the first time in weeks that I had been engaged in an altercation with a total stranger brought on by a perceived pressure of time. Not only was the man angry that his rush into the Park for quality relaxation time was being thoughtlessly delayed but I had instantly risen to the challenge with a visceral response. As I said above, “It feels like home”. Pity.

The afternoon was more pleasantly pursued. After securing a room at the Wear’s Motel in Townsend (we have been staying at this old place off and on for decades), we went out to Cades Cove.

There we took an easy hike out to Abram’s Falls – 5 miles round trip with only gentle ups and downs on a goodpathlinedwithAzaleas.

We took our time and at the falls took shoes off and cooled them in the stream. Little minnows nibbled on Lois’ toes. They didn’t seem to care for mine.

It was hot and humid so we were soaking wet when we finished the hike and not, shall we say, “fresh”. Also, we were tired from a full day of tense driving and walking. So we just picked up a hot dog and fries at the local bistro and ate in the room. As tomorrow is our last day of the trip prior to the drive home we have made big plans for day. Should we survive those plans, we will be home on Thursday.

CadesCoveBikeRideandRichMountainTrail

August 30 - Cades Cove is one of our favorite places on earth. It is a relatively flat 2500 acres of pasture, streams, and hardwoods. The last tenant died last year and his cattle were sold as his little farm transferred to the National Park. They are now mowing and using controlled burns to keep the Cove open land. They hope to rid it of introduced grasses and get back to the natural plants of the original landscape.

The Cove is surrounded by tall tree-covered mountains and ringed by a one-way paved road of 11 miles length. On Wednesday and Saturday mornings from sunrise to 10 AM, the road is closed to cars so that bikes can be ridden around this periphery. A lot of people take advantage of this wonderful opportunity. This was what we did as our first enterprise of the day arriving at the entrance to the Cove at 7:30. And we’re off!

The ride is a lot of fun and substantial work. There are long downhills where you can really get up a head of steam. My only worry was that a deer might pop out ofthe bushes into my path.

That would have been a wicked surprise for both of us as I’m certain I was, at times hitting 35 mph. Now - since one starts and ends at the exact same spot, those downhills must be repaid. And they were - at times in a slow walk with the bike being pushed. We saw many sweet deer – bucks and does – like ghosts appearing and disappearing into the wisps of mist in the tall grasses.

Where arethewoodchucks?

Crunch, crunch, crunch. That’s the sound of a large black bear tearing berries off a wild cherry tree overhead. Look up! See her wide butt right above your head? Keep your bike helmet on to protect from the barrage of sticks and small branches she tearing off and pitching down onto the bikers’ heads. Neat!

OK. The bike ride’s over and we could still move so we decided to go for a 9-mile hike 3000 feet up to the top of one of those mountains ringing the Cove. It’s advertised as having “wonderful views of the Cove”. But before we took off, we stopped at the Ranger Station to askabout the woodchucks.

The wolves got them! They had an attempt to reintroduce the red wolf into the Cove about 10 years ago. There was plenty of prey base for the pack (so much for the woodchucks) but there was no way of protecting the cubs from distemper that was endemic in the domestic dogs. They moved them to another part of the Park but the prey base wouldn’t support them there. They were moved again to easternNorth Carolina and they are thriving.

A few groundhogs were smart enough to put their burrows under the stables near humans and they survived. These exceptionally bright rodents will be the breeding stock for the next generations, safe from the wolves and the coyotes that took their place.

Is it possible to hike continuously uphill for 3 hours without any respite? I’ll answer that, “Yes, it is!” After 2 hours of that, we started at the beginning of the alphabet to enumerate the adjectives that would describe the phrase, “uphill walk”. Some of the printable ones ranged from aggravating to wicked. And there were many, many more. The first 4.5 miles were straight up; the next 2.5 miles were up and down along the ridge; the last 2 miles were straight down. Five hours after we began, we reached our car and sanctuary. We must have looked as though we had just climbed Rich Mountain as a gentleman at the parking lot remarked, “No one ever climbs that mountain in the summer. It’s just too hot and the dense tree cover obscures all views of the Cove. In winter, with the leaves off the trees, you can see for miles”. Now that’s information we could have used a few hours earlier!!

We’re extremely tired and hot so we’ve come back to the motel. Our plan is to rest for a couple hours, get clean, and then go back up to the Cove for the evening Ranger programonwilderness backcountry.

Lois is dyeing her hair and I’m just dying. A hamburger and a couple aspirin may give us the energy to get out once more. We’ll see.

DriveHome

August 31 - We made it to the Ranger program. He showed beautiful slides of the backcountry in spring, fall and winter. There were not too many pictures of views in the summer. Remember why?

We left before dawn and headed for I-75. There was not too much fog so we made good time until 30 miles north of Atlanta. From there until below Valdosta, it poured: buckets and slashing sheets of rain. Driving through Atlanta is hair raising enough but that was intolerable.

Aswepassedover the Florida border, thetripmeter turnedto 9000 miles.

Lois was able to finish our last book, Richard Davids’ “The Man Who Moved a Mountain”. It’s a thin book telling of the life of a man raised in the Blue Ridge who is called to the cloth. The tales of his own upbringing in the “hollers” and of those local folks he ministers to were heartwarming, at times hilarious, and richly told. We were particularly taken with the story as we had just passed through that area and had seen the cabin of the midwife who had delivered him and one of the many stone churches that he inspired the congregations to build with their own hands. The midwife, who lived to be over 100, delivered more than 1000 babies. She had 24 of her own but not onelived to see his/her first birthday.

The deluge began again as we swung onto I-10 for the last portion of our journey. It had been raining at this very place when we had passed it as we began our odyssey. We considered it a sign that nature was closing the circle on our trip. It was the end of our summer’s journey of adventure. The ending of the book was moving.

Theskies wept. Notalone.