It Always Rains, Part 8

In this installment, we head back to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and Canada. NOTE: I have included minor edits (punctuation, mainly), but the text mostly remains as it appears in Mom’s original. The boldfaced subheadings/intros are mine.

Upper Peninsula and Thunder Bay

Traditionally, we take our vacation on the Fourth of July, and we wanted to go back. Sibley awaited us. A check with my doctor, an outdoorswoman, and we were on our way with the understanding we were not to get too far from civilization if I needed help. We decided this year to investigate Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and wanted to camp at Porcupine Mountain. We’d been told it was a very busy place and probably would be to our advantage to camp in a private campground where we could make a reservation. We made the trip in easy stages, stopping frequently to explore the excellent Wisconsin rest area waysides. A good many of them have historical markers or short hiking trails. The one we chose for our lunch marked the headlands of the Wisconsin River and had countless tiny red squirrels for our amusement.

The private campground we’d chosen was not at all crowded and reasonably priced. The camping was cool with very light rain and intermittent sunshine. We were glad of the coolness when we hiked to Lake of the Clouds at Porcupine Mountain. Everyone was glad for an early bedtime. We enjoyed the drive across the very top of Wisconsin the next day with a pleasant lunch stop at Amnicon Falls State Park. Again, Al did some daredevil climbing. It felt good to stretch and hike a bit before resuming our trip. Near Chequamegon, we saw a hen bird attempting to take her family of chicks across the highway. Not all the chicks made it, I’m sorry to say, as the car in front of us couldn’t quite stop in time.

Another hundred miles found us setting up camp at Temperance Falls State Park. Sunday afternoon just prior to a holiday is not a good time to seek a campsite. Despite our early stop, an absolute necessity at a state park when site hunting, we got one of the few remaining ones and found the park overcrowded. A hike to the falls and river before supper meant cooking and eating by lantern light, which is something we ever do. It also meant heavy jackets, as it was downright cold by then. I’m forever hauling along everyone’s long underwear, which is frequently welcome, and then feeling like a fool hanging it out on the clothesline in the middle of summer after we’ve returned home! It got even colder before morning, and we woke to the dishcloths frozen (in July?) on the clothesline under light rain.

By the time we got to Grand Portage National Monument this year, the sun was shining, so we did our exploring left over from the previous year. In the large hall, we found the Indian crafts on display interesting, and we enjoyed watching the Indians at work. It would have been fun to have taken the time to follow the trails made by the early explorers, but we went on. Through Customs again and on to Thunder Bay. We discovered we’d caught Canada on a holiday, and the banks were closed, so we were unable to exchange our money for Canadian currency. July 3^rd is Dominion Day in Canada, roughly the equivalent of our Independence Day. It is not necessary to exchange United States currency for Canadian currency, but sometimes the rate of exchange is such that it is advantageous to do so. Canadian money is much prettier than ours, with animals on the coins and each denomination bill a different color. There’s a pretty park at the tourist center in Thunder Bay, and we were just in time for a trio of young men in Scottish dress and a bagpipe concert. A brief stop for groceries, and we were headed for Sibley.

Our uppermost thought was the heron, and we anxiously looked for him as we entered the park. The area where he’d been was congested with boaters and fishermen, so to our disappointment we didn’t see him. By the third consecutive day of setting up camp, we had become very slow, but we knew we were going to spend more than one night at Sibley, and we took our time. Besides, it was the warmest we’d been, and we were glad to shed jackets and bask in the sunshine. The ground squirrels were the “tamest” we’d encountered, to the point they sat at the table with us while we at our supper. No wild animal is ever tame enough to risk being bitten, and we treat them all warily while enjoying them.

We found Sibley to be exceptionally clean with large, well-spaced private sites. One thing we found quite unusual was the park crew filling our own wood yard every day. The wood still had to be chopped into usable-size pieces, but we didn’t have to find and haul it ourselves. The wood cost must have been included in our camping fee as we did not pay for it separately. There was ice available at the park—cut from Lake Superior in the winter and stored in a regular icehouse! There were moose at Sibley, and the young woman in the park office had suggested the best place to see them. After supper, we went to one of the park’s many lakes with patience and field glasses. We should have gone with mosquito repellant! We found moose tracks but no moose. We finally abandoned the project and returned to camp. At ten we were still reading by daylight, an odd sensation indeed.

For once, we slept in the next morning and found ourselves eating breakfast almost at lunchtime. Gail had made friends with a little girl, so with her parents’ approval, the girl set off on the day’s jaunt with us. We spotted the heron on the way out of the park, a good omen. The amethyst mine was even more interesting this sunny, warm day, and we bought quite a few pieces both for ourselves and for rockhound friends. We were not venturesome enough to do our own digging and contented ourselves with the selection the mine had for sale. The children had the opportunity to climb up and down and work off their excess energy. We’ve collected a number of rocks over the years and unfortunately have not labeled them as to location. We’ve never done anything with them (except for a pair of amethyst bookends) either except pack them when it’s time to move. Movers love us with boxes marked “rocks”!