For anyone that has followed our blog they know we are loopers, a nickname for people doing the Great Loop. In the gift shops they have a whole section of merchandise for Yoopers...so what is a yooper? It's a native or resident of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Yooper comes from the acronym for Upper Peninsula - The residents are "UPers"- hence Yoopers. They eat something called a pastie, kinda like a meat pie but they say better. They consider themselves a hardy bunch living in this northern climate with no sympathy for the rest of the country when it comes to snowfall.
Wednesday June 16, 43 years ago we said our "I do's" and this year we were locking through the MacArthur Lock at 6 am in Sault Ste. Marie. What a gorgeous day we had to travel 132 miles to Munising, MI. I'm not sure we will see such a flat Lake Superior as we did Wednesday. We passed the 5 miles of sand dunes known as Grand Sable Dunes, that rise 300' above the water. Just west of the sand dunes are 15 miles of Pictured Rocks along the National Lakeshore. The name "Pictured Rocks" comes from the streaks of dissolved minerals in the ground water that stain the face of the rock and weather-sculpted cliffs. The best way to see the rocks is by boat, which brings many tourists to Munising. Although we viewed them from Captains Choice, we decided to take the boat tour to hear the narrative about the area.
One of the facts they pointed out was that the bushes on the top of the cliffs are really stunted trees. During the winter the wave action and water spray creates 3' to 4' of ice on the trees, stunting their growth and making them look like bushes. Some of the rock formations are actually 200' ft high. Munising is a great town, it was actually bigger than we thought it would be, packed with restaurants, breweries, gift shops, grocery near by and tourists. We had a fabulous dinner at Tracey's at Roam Inn for our anniversary.
For the most part we will be traveling more miles in a day then we did when we were looping. Our hops between towns is much greater due to the fact that Lake Superior is so large and the upper peninsula of Michigan is sparsely populated so there are great expanses of state and federal land between towns. Watching for those "weather windows" is top priority for moving to our next port. We noticed that mornings are generally pretty calm but the winds start howling in the afternoon. We were away from the dock by 5:30 a.m. Friday morning on our way to Marquette, MI, one of our shorter runs of 40 miles to the west. We knew the weather window was going to be short, light winds early but by noon the winds were forecasted to be 25 knots gusting to 40. We got to Marquette just after 9 a.m. and right on que mother nature turned on the wind machine. We were happy to be tied to the dock before it really started to blow.
Most towns along Lake Superior got their start as lumbering towns but Marquette was founded on iron ore. From the marina you can see the ore dock which was built 80' above the water in 1931. The ore would be brought from the mines by rail to the top of the docks and unloaded into "pockets" that have chutes that can be lowered to discharge the ore into the ships below. The use of the pockets and chutes allowed for storage of the ore before being transferred to the ships. The tressle that was used was dismantled in the late 70's, and this ore dock was last used in 1971. In Presque Isle, the harbor located just west of Marquette, there is an active ore dock.
We enjoyed our stay in Marquette, which is the largest city in the Upper Peninsula. The city is very hilly, so we got a good workout as we walked around looking at the sites. The other thing we noticed in the downtown areas was there isn't any Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts or McDonalds or anything that is a national food chain, everything is local restaurants/coffee shops and they were busy which was great to see. They also have a nice farmers market on Saturdays. The weather was very fickle, we saw a high of 84 Friday and a high of 58 Saturday. The water temperature is about 53-54 degrees, if the wind is coming off the water its chilly!
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