North Woods

  
   We had lunch today (Day 3) in Bayfield, Wisconsin. It's a very nice town on the south western end of Superior with a big sailboat marina and pretty waterfront. There are boat tours from there to the Apostle Islands, a group of mostly uninhabited islands just off the mainland. It's a sailing heaven for people with boats; the islands have sandy beaches, limestone cliffs, deep woods and light houses to explore.

   I wish we could have spent more time along the Great Lakes, we both feel there's much more to see and enjoy, but we have to be careful of our time too. We need to get back home eventually and I'd hate to rush our way through some of the major US parks we'll see later in the trip.

   The scenic roads along the lakes have been well worth taking, but for our next couple of days we'll head back to the interstates so we can cover some ground across Minnesota and South Dakota to get to Mt Rushmore, in the southwest corner of the state. We'll also try to see the Crazy Horse Monument not so far away (thanks, Paul).

   Today we took the scenic routes from Marquette, Michigan through Duluth and finished in Minneapolis, covering a distance of less than 500 miles all day. The U.P. of Michigan was mostly heavy forest and we didn't see anything of the iron ore mines that are really big in the area. I also saw a few bumper stickers supporting nickel and copper mining. Along Rt 2 on the top of Wisconsin we could start to see dairy farms and we knew we were leaving the North Woods.

   Funny thing about the Dakotas, the roads all seem to go north and south, with hardly anything diagonal across either state. From Duluth we would have liked to see Fargo, N. D. next, but with no direct routes to the southwest it would add extra hours on our next leg. We decided to skip Fargo to save us some time (sorry Joe, I was going to send you a picture).

   In today's post I have a chance to show off some of the "Welcome to" signs we've passed so far. We've having fun and haven't even gotten to the really good stuff yet.

   Hope you have good weekends, my friends !