Ishpeming to Munising
Last night we went to a brewpub / restaurant for dinner, and it was great. For a start, we got I.D.'d, which is always flattering. For another thing, I had a lovely bit of salmon, it was delicious and there wasn't so much I had trouble walking afterwards. We took some of their pale ale in a take-out bottle. The waiter told us it was a half gallon. I'm not ashamed to admit we had to ask him how many pints there were in a gallon. He had to work it out by going via quarts... There are four pints in a half gallon. We should have remembered this from the 1 gallon of beer prize they give at the Brunswick pub quiz in Leamington...
When will they learn that milk bottles are no good for beer?
In the morning, I took back all the nasty things I said about the motel. The bed was incredibly comfortable. The damp smell became unnoticable after a while. It was tricky getting up.
We were out in time for a breakfast of pancakes, then we got to the start of the mine tour in time. The iron mine wasn't what I'd expected at all; I was all prepared to go down a hole in the ground. It turned out to be an open-face mine, and the big "exhibit" was the processing plant which purifies the low-grade ore into high-grade pellets suitable for steel factories. It used to be a traditional pit until the high grade ore ran out.
I wasn't too impressed that some of the equipment has its power listed in Volts on the chart above. I nearly got pedantic on the feedback form and wrote "voltage is not power", but I thought better of it. Look at how a shovel costs $8.5 million!
The processing plant was noisy and unpleasant, as you might expect. It's fascinating to see, though, and we felt priveleged to have the chance to see it. It was a lot more up-close and gritty than any factory tour I've been to before. It was ore inspiring.
With that done, we got back on the road, stopping very briefly for a paddle in Lake Superior.
We arrived in Munising and bought pasties for a snack. Apparently Cornish Pasties are a Michigan Upper Peninsula speciality, probably something to do with the mining culture. The rest of the USA has trouble getting its head around making "pasty" rhyme with "nasty" and not "hasty".
Munising is the tourist base for the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. There are rock formations that can only be seen from the water. We were too late to go on a boat trip today, and for some reason we were exhausted. We checked into a motel, phoned the boat trip people for a reservation, then flopped for a while, before popping over to the garage across the road to buy junk food. We settled back and watched Planet of the Apes (the film, not the planet, nor the musical). It was rubbish.
Aside: Road Kill
I forgot to mention any of this in recent days. Since the start of North Dakota, we've seen all sorts of unidentified dead stuff on the road. It seems to have increased in density as we move East.
In the Eastern half of North Dakota, we watched a swan, surely four feet head to tail, swoop gracefully towards the road, like poetry in motion. As it crossed the left hand carriageway, it entered a dip, placing itself neatly under the wheel of the enormous lorry cab in front of us, whereupon it ceased to be a swan, and immediately became an amorphous mass of gore and feathers. Our car didn't get stained by the carnage, but had we hit what was left, I doubt we could have done more damage.
In Minnesota, a deer leapt into our path from the forest on the roadside. I slowed down, it saw us, it began to run -- directly away from us without moving out of our path. I slowed down further and it had the bright idea of moving off the road. I still had to swerve. I hope that deer learned something that day. Yesterday we saw a deer that hadn't been so lucky, dumped on the roadside.