(OT) Praise/rant/etc #12 (UP edition)

[Eye of Hoffs]

I must be mellowing in my old age because I don't have so much to rant about again. Or it could be that all the extra sugar in the bread is finally numbing my brain, so Caroline has been given strict instructions that should I ever say the word “rough” in reference to the top of a building then she is to immediately go and purchase a shotgun and put me out of my misery.

We spent Friday in Green Bay, a city we really liked, possibly because it is relatively small. First stop was Lambeau Field, home of the Packers. We took the Classic Tour of the stadium which first involved us being taken up to one of the impressive suites (prices run up to $180k a year if you are interested) and getting a talk on the history of the stadium and franchise. I hadn't realised that the seating capacity there was top five in the league now. Next it was down to the basement to walk through the tunnel where the home team runs on to the field, accompanied by crowd cheers being piped in on speakers, Then it was more talk and photo opportunities from the edge of the grass. I must say that down there the whole field seems a lot smaller than it does from the stands or TV on game days. The experience was really a lot better than I made it sound and as an NFL fan I certainly enjoyed it. Better still was that Caroline seemed to like it even more and she doesn't know her spikes from her end zones,.

Next up was another train museum, this time the National Railroad one. I wouldn't rate it as highly as the place in Duluth but the main reason for visiting was that they had one of the huge Big Boy Union Pacific locomotives that hauled freight over the mountains between Wyoming and Utah and could supposedly pull a train over five miles in length on a level grade. We began by watching a film about those engines in the theatre there. You could tell immediately how ancient the movie was not only by the somewhat grainy appearance but by the opening scenes which had a boy with crew cut hair and dungarees watching a train go by as a serious, deep-voiced narrator intoned “For decades the mighty iron workhorse has crossed our countryside....”.

After football and choo-choos the afternoon was altogether more refined with a visit to the Green Bay Botanical Gardens. Here they had plants. And more plants. In fact, think of pretty much any two random words and then add on a common plant name and they probably had that variety there: Mystic Illusion Dahlia, Solar Power Heucherella, Sugar Bread Daffodil, Dog's Breath Azalea, etc. Still, it was all very nice although we were clearly a few weeks too late to see many of the finest blooms. But I did get to enjoy some of the delightful Mascara Skirt Roses adorning one of the terraces where a wedding reception was being held.

To please Ian, we finished up somewhere a bit more upscale from Denny's, a place called Grazzies, which is ostensibly an Italian restaurant but also does a lot of America stuff. Taking full advantage of this rare opportunity to sample some Mediterranean food I selected the steak & fries.

Saturday dawned and it was time to head north to a new state. After taking the coastal road to get some nice views of the liquid Green Bay we headed over a bridge into Michigan's Upper Peninsula. The Dells aside we had some very good memories of Wisconsin although like Minnesota it seems unlikely that we will ever darken its diners again. And so we had a minute's silence as we left the state for the last time in this plane of existence. Actually that all turned out to be total BS. Unbeknownst to us the journey to our first Michigan destination eventually took us back into Wisconsin for around ten miles. But let's just airbrush that little detail from history.

We had one stop to make that day â€" a mine! This one was America's favourite they said, but then so are all the others that I have seen advertised. The tour here was something I never expected: we went down a tunnel which led to a hole. Then we went down another tunnel and saw an even bigger hole. Pretty amazing stuff I can tell you. I've never seen that before in a mine tour. To be fair, these things always bring your attention to the awful occupation that mining was (and probably still is). The miners were paid 14-20 cents an hour depending on their job. The top rate was for those operating the stoper drill, which drilled up into the tunnel roof. If it caused a cave-in then guess who was on the receiving end? Hence the equipment's nickname: the widowmaker. Despite that the pay rate meant there was always a long waiting list of people wanting to take on the role.

After the mine it was another couple of hours before we hit our lodgings for the next three nights. We were staying at a small one-storey house on the shores of Lake Superior, part of a cabin resort. The Beach House as it was called was what we call sloggetty, in reference to somewhere we stayed at in Hawaii. For although Hawaii can boast the best three lodging places we have ever enjoyed, it also had the worst â€" the notorious Camp Sloggett. Most of our time on the island of Kauai was spent at the sublime Hanalei Resort Colony which I mentioned in an earlier post. But I also wanted to hike around the magnificent interior of the island which although only around ten miles as the crow flies from Hanalei in the north, would actually take you over two hours to get there by car via the only road access in the south. So I arranged to stay in the nearest place to the hiking trails â€" Camp Sloggett.

We had never stayed at an American camp before (or since) so didn't really know what to expect. But for a start the place was deserted; we never saw anyone the entire time we were there. And then when we set eyes on the “cottage” we had rented it looked as though nobody had been in there for a hundred years. It was pretty run down. But the worse thing was that it was a bug's paradise.

Now I must confess here to being a major arachnophobe. I hate the things. And I lived in mortal dread of running into one of Hawaii's horrific cane spiders. Now don't give me that “oooh, the poor things aren't poisonous, they're more afraid of you” garbage. Those things are MONSTERS!!! I mean, they remind me of eight-legged versions of the Zanti from an old black-and-white The Outer Limits episode. They're evil, man-eating fricking mega-arthropods straight from the mouth of Hell, It's even said that when scared they will charge at you. Eeeeeuuuuuuuugghhhhh. And Sloggett had dark nooks, crannies and holes where a whole division of them could be lying in wait to launch an ambush.

We ended up (carefully) moving the bed into the middle of the room away from the walls and went straight to bed when it got dark as we didn't dare put the light on to read lest we attracted....whatever. And I won't even mention the bathroom and kitchen but it was clearly far too dangerous to go to the loo at night, you just had to hold it in until the (relative) safety of daylight. And on top of all that Caroline was terrified that Freddy Krugger's cousin would be dropping in to play slice & dice. It was the worst two night's holiday ever (I think we left a day early) and never to be forgotten. Oh boy were we glad to get out of there.

So yes, the beach house was sloggetty. Not nearly as bad of course, but fairly old and a bit...worrying; plenty of little crevices where who-knows-what could be waiting. No TV and internet there, which was fine as we knew that in advance, but they did have a tiny television with a built-in VHS player should anyone wish to use it. Too bad we forgot to bring all of our many tapes. And things didn't improve after dark. With another bad high blood sugar night I lost count of how many times I got up to visit the loo, the body's way of trying to flush away the excess. But there was no light switch by the bed and I bashed my head on shelves twice, And then in the morning there were several flies flitting annoyingly around and I broke the kitchen blinds trying to despatch one.

The one saving grace of the place, and the whole reason for booking it, was that it was right on the Lake Superior beach. But then you probably already guessed that from the name, didn't you? Mind you, after the viscous attacks I had suffered from the Mosqwaffe back in Minnesota I was keeping shoreline exposure to the absolute minimum.

With the first night negotiated it was time to explore this part of the peninsula. But once again we made the fatal mistake of trusting the weather forecasts which called for heavy rain and thunderstorms on Sunday but just showers and drizzle Monday morning followed by a cloudy afternoon. So the main event, a long backpack through Porcupine Mountains State Park, and the reason for staying in the area at all, was put off until the following day.

Now if there is one thing that the UP has in spades other than trees then it is mines (excuse the pun), a legacy of all the copper and iron that was extracted over the previous century. You have to be careful everywhere you go that you don't fall down one and it is a wonder that this whole part of the state has not just collapsed a few hundred feet into the hollowed-out earth below. We had visited one the previous day of course but that was not enough to satiate the hunger of my wife. Honestly, she'd have been better off being born a ferret or something. And so our first stop was another of these wonderful attractions, which was America's favourite of course. This one offered tours where you could rappel down to the lower areas but we were just doing one that stayed on the first level.

As it happened I ended up not going down at all. My blood sugar was still stubbornly high and I was feeling pretty crappy, so Supermole went off on her own. Upon her return she bubbled with excitement. They had gone down a tunnel and seen a hole then gone down another tunnel and seen an even bigger hole, which all sounded kinda familiar. But the latter one had bats in it!

Having exited the bat-cave it was full nana nana nana nana ahead for a tour of some of the third thing that the UP has in abundance - waterfalls. They reckon this has something to do with glaciation and what have you but seems far more likely that it is a result of all the subsidence from mining. After visiting a few we then took a circuitous route back to the bug house. Most times a highlight of trips to areas like this is always a close encounter with some unusual or exotic creature such as the grizzlies we had seen in Yellowstone last visit. This time we had an even closer meeting. As we were heading down US/county/park/state road X, a huge brown thing landed on the shoulder not far ahead. And no sooner had it touched down than it was taking off again â€" straight across the road. By now Caroline was braking but it was obvious what was going to happen â€" with a sickening thud the thing impacted the top of the passenger side windscreen before disappearing over the roof. It was something of a glancing blow but nevertheless quite a whack. Looking back we could see it standing up and moving but having no clue what we could do for it or who to call even if we went back, and a large truck bearing down on us, we just carried on with a heavy heart.

The incident certainly ruined the rest of the day and much of the subsequent ones. It was not as though we were speeding and there was no way of avoiding the hit except possibly by swerving into oncoming traffic and killing ourselves and others in the process. But we had watched these majestic creatures soaring overhead on various occasions during the trip and had thought how nice it would be to get a closer look. Talk about irony. And many times in the past fortnight we had heard about hunting animals, such as the trigger-happy Alaskan girl on our train ride, and thought how we could never do anything like that, even just fishing. Yet here we were having just broadsided a bird of prey.

As Sunday came to a close we sat on the beach feeling a bit dejected and watching a curious narrow line of low clouds gradually approaching off the lake. That day had seen a brief heavy downpour of rain whilst Caroline was down the mine but otherwise it had been pretty clear and certainly no storms. With hardly a breath of wind the lake was almost like glass and the evening was still t-shirt warm. Yet as the clouds passed overhead the wind suddenly picked up dramatically and the water turned to a mass of ripples. Within minutes the waves were crashing on to the shore and it had become rather cold even with a fleece on. This was a bad portent indeed.

Come Monday the wind had picked up even more and the rain had been falling for some time. Today was to be trek day, one of the highlights of my trip, but as we drove into “The Porkies” things were not looking good. We got to Lake of the Clouds, where we were to begin the walk, and faced the howling wind and driving rain. I was not at all relishing lugging a fairly hefty pack along twelve miles of rolling country in this, nor eating a soggy lunch in some wood-turned-bog somewhere. And as the sky showed no sign that things were going to change anytime soon we decided to just give up on the hike and do some more waterfall hopping instead. We drove along the road that skirted the park and then headed off to a place called Black River Harbour to eat our packed lunch.

We returned to the park later in the afternoon but conditions hadn't really changed and the wind had even picked up some more. Our last stop was the Summit Peak area, most spectacular view in the park they say. But all we saw were distant trees in the mist and it was tough to even stay standing atop the lookout tower (Caroline didn't even bother going up). So the day was a real disappointment, the only plus being that the wind had kept the Mosqwaffe well and truly grounded. But c'est la vie I guess. Still, I am sure those nice Weather Channel ladies would have made a better job of the forecast if only we had been able to see them here.

Tuesday was just another transition day as we made a lengthy six hour trip to the east of the Upper Peninsula where we would catch a ferry over to Mackinac Island. I'm never one to pass up an opportunity to see bit of military hardware, though, so we took a small detour to Sawyer Airport. Until the mid-nineties this had been a US Air Force base and several decommissioned warbirds lay tucked away on display nearby, dripping metal sentinels in the wind and driving rain that had been coming down now for about thirty-six hours. And unlike the ones in the museums you could walk up to these and actually touch, smell and taste them. Okay, maybe not the last part.

We are staying on Mackinac Island for two nights and elected to get there from the UP ferry terminal at St Ignace so that we have a chance of crossing the impressive Mackinac Bridge to the Lower Peninsula in clearer weather on Thursday. Hopefully there will be a clearing of the clouds on Wednesday but apparently the low pressure system is following us down into the Ohio valley. And things have not started well on the island, but I'll leave that to next time...

Observation
A hollow win for the Fins. I think it's about time to start a “suck for insert name of best college QB prospect” campaign in Miami.

Pictures of the day
1) Caroline poses alongside Aaron Rodgers.

2) The big iron beastie.

3) Taking maximum precautions against the Mosqwaffe proved highly inconvenient at times.

4-6) Typical views in and around The Porkies,

7-8) The lonely B-52 and F-111 at Sawyer.

[Dr Alzheimer]

Aaron Rodgers looks english, somehow. And I really share Aaron's arachnophobia!

[CharGar]

While on the island maybe you can visit Skull Cave, a place where a fellow Englishman also visited.

[Hoffs]

While on the island maybe you can visit Skull Cave, a place where a fellow Englishman also visited.

Fifty demerits for suggesting that I visit yet another hole in the ground.

[Zardoz of Crete aka Kimi aka Victoria Secret]

While on the island maybe you can visit Skull Cave, a place where a fellow Englishman also visited.

Fifty demerits for suggesting that I visit yet another hole in the ground.

LOL

[Sara Dale]

I love trains.   I haven't been on one since 1966.  Both my grandfathers worked for the B&O Railroad.