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The cliffs of Pictured Rocks rise from Lake Superior along forty miles of shoreline between the towns of Munising and Grand Marais, Michigan, on the Upper Peninsula. The cliffs are a spectacular example of the erosive action of waves, wind, and ice. There are many colors of rock on the cliff faces and fascinating formations carved by nature. Longfellow refers to the cliffs in his "The Song of Hiawatha." "Gitche Gumee," named in the epic poem, is Lake Superior. "Mighty Gitche Manito" refers to a formation in the rocks called Indian Head Rock today. It is part of a cliff that rises 300 feet from the water. Flat Teddy visited the area today, August 19, with me on a three-hour boat cruise. Lake Superior had some two-foot swells and gave us quite a ride in the 65-foot boat we were in, but we had a good time on the top deck in the sunshine and cool wind.

I got a ticket on a one o'clock boat tour through the boat locks at Sault Ste. Marie. I have never been on a boat that was progressing through locks, and it was very exciting. I tried to imagine the scale of the Panama Canal locks as compared to these. There was only one lock from the Ste. Marie River to Lake Superior, and it raised us 20 feet. But still, it was interesting to see the bottom door close behind us and then watch the side of the canal as we rose up through the lock while it filled with water. There was a great "Ah!" from the passengers as the upper lock door opened, and ahead of us we saw the blue waters of Lake Superior shining in the sun. We cruised north across the eastern end of the lake to the Canadian side and past a steel plant. Then we went down through the Canadian locks. I got a good look up at the Ste. Marie rapids as we went past them when we were back down on the Ste. Marie River. They drop twenty feet overall, and they gave the early travelers (the Indians and the voyageurs) such a headache portaging around them!

After I was back in the RV I could see a huge Great Lakes ore boat (here is a stereoscopic picture of a historical ore boat) approaching the locks, so I drove over to where I could watch it pass through. It looked as if it would take a person at least five minutes to walk from the bow to the stern of it. A mighty ship. I thought of the Edmund Fitzgerald, which went down in Lake Superior in a huge storm in 1975, taking all hands with it, and wondered how its size compared to this one.

Please see the August 21, 2000 entry in Flat Teddy's Journal.

This five-mile-long bridge is one of the longest suspension bridges in the world. It connects the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to the lower section of the state, crossing between the towns of St. Ignace and Mackinaw City. It opened in 1957 and replaced the old ferry crossing between the two sections of Michigan. In the days before the bridge, the line of cars waiting for a ferry would sometimes stretch back as far as twenty miles. Every Labor Day many people participate in the Mackinac Bridge Walk, as the west two lanes are closed to vehicle traffic and people can walk there. The east two lanes remain open for vehicles to drive across. On the right (or west) of the bridge lies Lake Michigan, and on the left (or east) side of the bridge is Lake Huron. The bridge crosses a narrow five-mile-wide passageway called the Straits of Mackinac, between the two Great Lakes.

This is the last of the motor-homes that Charles Kuralt and his team used for their travels around America as they collected stories for their television show "On the Road." It is on display at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. I wondered if someday we'd see Charlie Brown parked right beside Charles Kuralt's RV in this museum! (You see, Charlie Brown isn't named just for Charles Schulz's cartoon character, he's also named in honor of Charles Kuralt.)

Noah Webster House

This house is in Greenfield Village, Dearborn, Michigan. Noah Webster had this house built in New Haven, Connecticut when he was in his sixties. He was a great believer in public education and promoted the idea of girls going to school. He wrote Webster's Blue-Backed Speller in 1782. In 1831 he published The Elementary Primer, or First Lessons for Children. It cost 6 1/4 cents then. It was created to be an introduction to the Blue-Backed Speller for younger children. In all, about a hundred million copies of the Blue-Backed Speller have been sold and used around the world. As late as the 1920s many people had fond memories of learning their spelling lessons from one of these little textbooks. Henry Ford had this house moved to Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan, to honor the life and mind of Noah Webster and the influence Webster had on American public education. Henry Ford built Greenfield Village to honor Americans who had shown great inventiveness and thereby influenced American life. All houses and workshops in the village have been moved here from original sites all over the United States. Among others, one can visit Thomas Edison's Menlo Park compound where he worked on his inventions, Luther Burbank's garden office, the Wright brothers' cycle shop where they built their first full-scale airplane, and George Washington Carver's childhood home.

Fort Collins Trolley in Dearborn, Michigan

Imagine my surprise to look up at this trolley in the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, and see these words painted on it! The sign beside the trolley says:

This trolley is a Burney Safety Car, made in about 1921. This car was used first in Grand Rapids, Michigan. During World War II it saw service in Marion, Indiana, and in 1948 was sold to the Fort Collins, Colorado, Municipal Railway, where it received a complete mechanical overhaul.