We spent the first two nights in Bay Furnace campground. One of those nights, we went out for a fantastic birthday dinner for my mom in Munising. I’ve come to really enjoy the dining strategy of grabbing lots of small plates for everyone and trying a little of it all. I’ll be darned if I don’t want to try the artisan cheese curds, the smoked whitefish dip, AND the whipped ricotta with birch syrup. Everything fancy, with a Great Lakes twist.
We also spent time in that area exploring the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. We viewed the sedimentary cake layer cliffs from above and below. This day was cut short, however, when I realized I had lost my wallet. I’ll admit, I had some distrust of strangers lingering from the attempted car break-in, assuming someone certainly must have stolen it. Midwest kindness prevailed though, as I soon got a voicemail from a park ranger saying I could pick it up at the station. I searched my bulging wallet full of useless items afterwards, but I couldn’t find my phone number on anything. I had to chalk it up to a Christmas miracle.
After the Christmas/Munising area, we spent one night north of Marquette, MI on Lake Independence. A pleasant but crowded campground provided some concrete evidence of Sasha’s development over the years as we were not even in the top 10 loudest dogs there! Near this campsite, we hit up a used bookstore (a favorite activity of all four readers in that group), took a buggy hike down a washed-out road to a waterfall, and ate dinner at the site of the film “Anatomy of a Murder”.
The final stop on the trip was two nights at Little Girl’s Point, outside of Iron River. We camped on a bluff overlooking Lake Superior and a beach claiming to be one of the best agate hunting places in the world (Aileen certainly proved this with a solid collection by the end of our stay). The bugs were rough, lying in wait every morning outside the tent screen, salivating at the promise of human and dog blood. We made the most of it though, seeing spectacular sunsets from the bug tent, hiking around Iron River where the bugs were tolerable, and making a pilgrimage to a holy ground for my dad, the Stormy Kromer factory. The shores of Superior have been a constant in my life for as long as I can remember, and it was wonderful to explore a new section of them with people I love.
Now we’re spending a couple of nights in Minneapolis with Aileen’s parents, enjoying the familiar trails around the city’s major lakes that we’ve run countless times. The dogs love returning to houses and people they know, and there is always something comforting about doing the laundry with the detergent and dryer sheets of childhood. A hot shower and a comfortable mattress aren’t so bad either. In between an Eastern and a Western adventure, this time in the middle (temporally and geographically) felt comforting and like home as always.
Sasha sidenote: I alluded to it above, but one of my great joys with Sasha is watching her run into someone she trusts out in the big wide world. She has a deep mistrust of any stranger, so when she realizes someone is in the inner circle out in the wild, it's a total transformation from snarling and snapping to wagging and smiling. My parents have worked incredibly hard with unconditional love from the start to be in that inner circle. So driving up to the campsite as soon as she heard my mom call out "Sasha bean!!" was all wags and smiles.