At Lakehead Marina/RV Park

This has been an eventful stay and we hope to return one day. We look out the window to see sail boats, fishing boats, and tankers. The largest we've seen was just over 1000ft in length. And we are so close! This really is a cool  place.

We rode bikes on the shoreline hike/bike trail towards town. We stopped at the top of a hill in a beautiful park, the hill had more to do with our turn around than the park.

We took several walks along the shoreline. I walked a side street from the marina to the bridge and met a nice lady in her garden. Betty, my new friend, took me on a tour of her amazing garden, front, back and across the street on the banks of the bay. She and her husband own and operate an inn on the bay side of the harbor.

I was walking across the lift bridge when a microphone voice garbbled something. The message, if not the words, was clear; GET OFF THE BRIDGE. Lights flashed, horns blared, barricades lowered. I got the message. After all the excitement, a small pilot boat came through the channel. It headed out to a tanker, stayed a bit, then returned alone. You'd think a phone call would have been easier.

We took another walk, crossed the lift bridge and then the Minnesota Slip Bridge for pedestrians to the convention center. We entered the Skywalk that takes pedestrians uptown through a variety of offices and stores. You exit several blocks up at street level and can walk across that street to another Skywalk entrance where you climb/ride upstairs and eventually exit at a different street level, a block or 2 further up. You can go north/south or east/west crossing streets at any number of locations. Maps are posted to let you know where you are and what street you are about to cross. We still got lost.

Today we walked the sandy shore of Lake Superior on this side of the bridge. We saw a number of ships waiting to come into harbor, the backs of houses we had seen from the street, and a bunch of shore debris. Just like walking on the Gulf shore, there is driftwood and trash. Of course the wood is different and there are rocks instead of shells, but the trash is the same crummy stuff.

Today we got our first experience of heavy traffic of the auto, pedestrian and ship variety. Cars were really backed up waiting for the bridge to lower. Coming back, we had the same situation on the return trip. I guess that the combined factors of sunny day, summer and weekend led to traffic jams.

We drove out to the burbs for some groceries and came back from the top of the hill down to the harbor. What a great drive! Any skiier would love this slope! It also showed us how very red the lake still is. "Still" is an operative word because we have only seen it this color. We only assume that the lake is normally a different color.