Two Long Down Days

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Munising Tourist Park Campground, Munising, Michigan

As we approach the longest day of the year, it is very difficult not to notice how much longer they are at these latitudes. On the way up here we passed the 45th meridian, which means we are in the northern-most quarter of the globe. The sun seems to rise well before 5:00 AM, and set after 10:00 PM. Officially that isn’t true, but my body seems to want to wake up around 5:00 anyway. There seems to be more light for longer periods than further south.

So things are kind of strange with our body clocks now for some reason. It didn’t help that day we took the sunset cruise. We were hungry after the boat ride, and so ordered a pizza to-go and took it back to the trailer. After finishing dinner it was after mid-night, which is pretty late for us old folks. The next day, being Father’s Day, we decided to take it easy and didn’t have much planned. Napping seemed to be the main accomplishment.

And late Sunday night, the rain came in - it was a cold, hard rain. Although we didn’t see signs of major flooding here, we were told that parts of the Upper Peninsula received heavy rains and damaging floods. Yesterday morning, it was thick with fog coming in off the lake - at times thick enough that you couldn’t see the RV next door. Add to that periodic rain and temps down in the 50s and even high 40s, and it was really pretty miserable. So, instead of getting out for a hike or two in the park yesterday, we declared a weather day and took some more naps.

That’s not a bad thing, though. Joan is still fighting shoulder pain and I think that takes a lot of energy from her, so she’s been tired. And then there was that exhilarating boat ride with the spectacular views of Pictured Rocks - the sights were thrilling, but that also took some energy to maintain the excitement. Importantly, we also have a really big event starting Friday and going through the weekend. And, as Joan likes to point out, we have been on the road now for two months which by any standard is a fairly long time. In short, there are plenty of reasons to conserve energy, so taking a couple of down days, even long days is OK.

But that also means we don’t have a lot to report. I’ve been reading the book about the geology of this part of Lake Superior. It is kind of fascinating that this area of the world really only has two time periods where anything happened. The first is when all this sandstone was laid down, back before and a little after the time of the trilobites, or around 400-500 million years ago. The land here was apparently the floodplain of highlands centered around central Michigan. So the sandstones here were deposited by river systems that were feeding the ancient predecessors of today’s Great Lakes. The next event were the repeated ice ages of the last million years, especially the Wisconsin Ice Age which ended about 12,000 years ago. The glaciers scraped away everything else around here and deposited it all further south. Whatever happened in-between on earth, either didn’t happen here or it was all eroded away because the rock layers that might otherwise have been deposited in those times are simply not here. In geological terms, it is an ‘unconformity’ of seriously large proportions.

Joan and I have, of course, been paying attention to the news some. We are both finding the destruction of immigrant families to be morally indefensible. I don’t particularly care how much ‘law and order’ someone might believe in, there is just no defense for what this administration is doing now. If there is any reason to defend the moral integrity of this country it will have to show itself in the elections this fall. If there isn’t a resounding defeat of the current administration’s policies, then I really don’t think we have much future as a country. At least not a country I want to be a part of.

But that’s politics and Joan says I shouldn’t put politics in a travel blog. This morning we’re going to head out for a second, and final day of exploring Pictured Rocks. There are a couple of places we can take the dogs, so we’re going to spend some time with them today. Tomorrow we head further north and west.

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Photos

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After the Fog Lifted

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On the Beach