Huge Indian Crotch
It's lucky our bodies were still on Central time, else we we would never have made the ten o' clock checkout time at the motel. Our first task of the morning was to locate the "world's tallest Indian". This didn't take long, and I got some pictures not only of the world's biggest Indian, but also the world's biggest Indian Crotch.
With that, we set off in search of breakfast. Nowhere stood out in Ironwood, and we found ourselves on the road out still looking out. In the end we settled for gas station hot dogs, overlooking what I think was Lake Gogebic in Bergland. There was a speedboat race event on, and the noise dominated the town, like an angry swarm of wasps.
We pressed on through yet more trees, stopping to eat some sandwiches at an anonymous lakeside. Later, we screeched to a halt at a post office in Sidnaw, to buy some postcard stamps. The lady behind the counter can't get many customers at all, let alone foreign customers, and she was eager for a chat. She was a strange lady: she held well reasoned views on the heightened security in the USA post 9/11, but she expressed surprise that ten 60c stamps should come to $6 ("that seems an awful lot"), and wasn't aware that Ireland was near England. I mustn't mock because when we mentioned we might be interested in going on a mine tour, she immediately suggested one near Ishpeming, which we decided to investigate.
Ishpening wasn't much further, and we stopped at a tourist information centre. It turned out that the mine tours (to a working iron ore mine) were daily and left from that very spot -- but we'd missed today's. We decided to book a place for tomorrow, and stop in Ishpening for the night. An involved drive around the town followed, looking for the coolest motel we could find. Nothing stood out in terms of signage, appearance, or lakeside location, and we ended up in an anonymous little establishment which is comfortable, but smells a little damp.
The mine tour requires that you wear flat shoes, not sandals, and Debbie hasn't brought any shoes, so we made a shopping trip to buy some. This took us to the largeish Marquette, and its Wal-Mart.
I took the opportunity to buy another calling card, because there aren't enough minutes on mine to do another update. In theory you can add minutes to calling cards, using a credit card. I tried this last night. Using the automated system, you need to enter your ZIP code and US phone number using the keypad, so they can validate the credit card. Since I don't have a ZIP code or a US phone number, I had to transfer over to the manned system. After spending twenty minutes carefully spelling out my street address and postcode, contending with awkward placenames, surnames and accent problems, the transaction failed because the address didn't match the card. We double checked the spelling: the address needed a V instead of a Z, but it turned out that to retry we'd have to start again from the beginning. Between us, the AT&T operator and I amicably agreed it wasn't worth the trouble.
Back to today: we decided to take a different route home, but missed our exit. I revised the route, and took us up a dirt track which linked us to the road we needed. This turned out to be a great move -- it climbed steeply for a mile or so, coming to a viewpoint high over Marquette.
Debbie has a copy of US Cosmopolitan here. One of its little items is "how to drive a stick shift car". "Once you've mastered first geat, the rest is easy" apparently.