All along the shore of Lake Superior there are many light houses. Some are old and are no longer in use.
And some are newer.
We think the shore of Lake Superior is a beautiful place and have put it on our ever growing list of places to revisit.
We drove to Duluth. I am not sure why, but every time I have heard of the city of Duluth I would think of smoke filled skies, factories and dirty streets. Sort of what you think when you hear "Cleveland". Was I ever wrong. Duluth is a fairly small city that is one to two miles wide and 20 to 24 miles long. It sits on the shore of Lake Superior and is really a nice place ---- for a city. They have taken the old waterfront buildings and made them into shops and restaurants. There are lots of parks and trails. The picture below is a panorama of the downtown area. There should be a bar on the bottom of the page that you can click on and drag to the right that will allow you to scroll from one side of the picture to the other. I hope this works.. I have never tried it before.
This is the entrance to the Duluth harbor from Lake Superior. At the end of each of the jetties is a lighthouse that you can walk out to. This area is the most visited tourist attraction in Minnesota. When the ships come in they pass by you so close that you could hit them with a rock.
At the end of the ship channel is the Aerial Lift Bridge. When a ship comes, the entire driving section of the bridge lifts straight up. I enjoyed watching people who were walking across the bridge. When the bells and sirens go off warning them that the bridge was going up they would panic and run like h---. Great fun!!!!
Ocean going ships from all over come to Duluth. This one is a Dutch ship coming in to load grain. How do I know what it is going to load you ask? There are several web sites that will tell you. There are also web sites that will tell you all about the ships - where they are from, who owns them, when they were built, when they had their last wreck, and all their specs. One of my favorite sites is boatnerd.com.
This is a 1000 foot long ship (referred to by the locals as a "footer") about to leave the harbor by going under the bridge.
Of course we had to take a tour boat trip. This one was very interesting. It went out into the lake and then all around the harbor. We went right up to one of the loading docks for the ships. You can get some idea of how big this thing is by looking at the railroad cars on top. The dock can load two ships at a time and can hold four trains at one time.
This "footer" is loading coal.
This photo was taken through the windshield of our motorhome and shows the view we had while we were in Duluth. Downtown is straight ahead and the Aerial Lift Bridge is just out of sight to the right. We had to go over the bridge to get off the island where we were staying. The view of the lights at night was great. The ship entering the harbor is the Arthur M. Anderson. It is about 750 feet long. It is the ship that was following and in contact with the Edmund Fitzgerald when it went down. The Edmund Fitzgerald looked just like this ship. Both ships were reporting 30ft waves at the time. To this day, no one knows why the ship went down. The last contact from the ship was "we are holding our own".
North along the lake shore is the small town of Two Harbors. There is a another loading dock there for iron ore. To protect the dock and the ships they built this jetty.
We left Duluth and again headed west. We stopped at Lake Itasca and went wading. After wading all the way across, we stood in the middle of the------- Mississippi River. This is where it starts. The rocks to my right separate the lake from the river. We have seen the beginning and the end (headwaters and mouth) of the Rio Grande and the Missouri, the end of the Ohio and now the beginning of the Mississippi. It is going to take some thought to figure out how to see the end of this thing.
For the first time this summer we drove south. We went through the southeast corner of South Dakota, down through Nebraska and stopped for a few days near Great Bend, Kansas. Near there is a famous bird watching area called Cheyenne Bottoms. It is located on the central flyway and many birds stop here on their spring and fall migrations. In the photos below there are ducks, pelicans, egrets, gulls and avocets.
Something of interest must be going on to the right.
In this same area is Fort Larned, a fort built to protect the people on the Santa Fe Trail.
The fort was built of rock soft enough for the soldiers stationed there to carve their names in them.
We are now in Dexter,NM where we lived for many years before we retired. We are having a great visit with old friends (they are old but, of course, we are not). We will be leaving here and arrive at our wintering grounds in Surprise, AZ in a few days. That will mark the end of this summer's Irwin Adventures but who knows what the future will bring.
