Our first stop in the UP was in Munising, near Pictured Rocks. Jer thought he saw a mountain goat on this hill, but it turned out to be a large white dog...too bad!
This is Miner's Castle.
In the background is Grand Island, in Munising Bay.
We took a hike near Miner's Castle to see Miner's Falls. This was the view on the way.
Here we are, checking out the falls:
We went on an accidental boat tour of Pictured Rocks - we thought we were going to take a glass-bottom shipwreck tour. It was still beautiful! :)
Hanging out with the cap'n.
We stayed in Newberry one night - which is the Moose capital of Michigan, but this is the only one we saw.
After looking for Moose in Newberry, we went to Tahquamenon Falls, below are the Upper Falls. We started to hike the trail to the Lower Falls, but it was 8 miles round trip, so we did a couple miles and turned around, then drove to the Lower Falls.
Here are the Lower Falls. The boats were no longer running, so this is as close as we got to them.
After Tahquamenon Falls, we went to Whitefish Point and the Soo Locks, then stayed in St. Ignace for the night. Thankfully we made it back to civilization because our car decided it was time to break a pulley and so that the serpentine belt could fall off. We were able to get the car to a service station and still take the ferry to Mackinac Island for the day. Except for being worried about the car, and really cold, we had a good time at the Island. Below is a view of the Mackinac Bridge from the Arnold Ferry.
This is the famous Arch Rock.
All in all, it was a fun vacation, despite the lack of planning and car mishap! :)
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This post had ended just above here, but my husband reminded me that we were done at Mackinac Island on Tuesday, and did not finish our trip until Friday, so I may have missed some of the details. I think that he is right, so I will add on to the end of this post. :) So, part of the car mishap story is that in fixing the pulley that broke, they managed to break the power steering fluid reservoir, and were unable to find a replacement part, so they GLUED it back together. You read that right. Glue was holding part of our car together. We considered ending our trip then and there, but there was a non-refundable hotel reservation for Thursday and we were too cheap to pay without staying. So we decided to drive through Petoskey and Charlevoix on our way to Traverse City. Unfortunately, it was raining, and we were crabby from having the car issue, so we had lunch in Petoskey and then kept driving, but instead of continuing on US 31, we managed to get on US 131. We still wanted to go to Charlevoix, so we had to cut over on some smaller roads. We passed through Boyne City and stopped in downtown Charlevoix and shopped for a while as it drizzled. After we got as far away from the car as possible, it started to rain harder, so we quickly got back on the road after getting a bit wet. We drove through Traverse City, trying to decide what we would want to do the next day and figuring out where to stay that night. After we found a hotel, we went to the Mall and out for dinner, then back to the hotel to watch the ALCS, unfortunately, our Red Sox did not ultimately pull out a victory. The next day we shopped at the outlet mall and downtown Traverse. We ate dinner at a brewery. The next morning we got on the road right away so that we could pick up Molly during their morning office hours instead of at 6PM, since we wanted to go to the HC football game that night. Poor Molly picked up pink eye at the kennel and had to go to the vet and take eye drops for a week, so I don't think she enjoyed the vacation as much as we did.
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