Lake Superior Circle Tour: To Mackinaw City and Home Again

Kinda loved the symmetry of this shot

So after Duluth was a long driving day to Mackinaw City, but it was good weather, some entertaining randomness, and - of course - really pretty scenery.

This is Duluth - much better shot with the sun out

We passed into Wisconsin fairly early in the drive but no drama as we drove through it.  

One of the last Superior shots I took

Pretty scenery and not much else.  Kinda lovely.

In Wisconsin we had some marsh-like breaks to add variety to the scenery

We got to Michigan and shortly Lake Michigan started appearing on the other side of the road, which was kinda cool but almost distracting 😂    Like beautiful scenery but it just seemed wrong to have the lake on that side of the car.  

Lake Michigan

I really have no idea what was going on here, but it made me laugh

This just might've beat out the Canada Goose on the other side of the lake ;)

I really enjoyed Mackinaw city.  I could've used another day (or even a few hours) there, but then that'd be enough of that.   It's not huge and like 99.8% tourists.   I think not much to do beyond a day or so of exploring the primary strip.

The bridge going toward Mackinaw City;
The weather was wild depending which direction you looked...

Took this on the bridge to Mackinaw City

The view from our room was fairly stunning

To the point that our hotel had no interior hallways (like what you see in the Caribbean) which tells you it's absolutely not open during the winter.

This was in the same area as the market

When we got there there was a market type thing set up about a block from the hotel and we tried to go explore, but we were getting there about the same time as a terrifying-looking storm was rolling in, so vendors were packing up as quickly as they could.  Ah well, prob ended up saving me money I didn't need to spend ;).  

Dinner we went to a restaurant on the main strip and had fairly excellent pizza.   It was packed and a very odd combination of Christmas trees and disturbing animal trophies -- I feel like it's a decor that's particularly American ;)

I mean, we had driven past this earlier in the day ;)

After dinner the rain had ceased so we walked part of the main strip - mostly cause I wanted to go to the Kandy & Korn store to get some Candy Corn for Chris (ugh - I swear HE would consider it a treat 😂.  It's not my thing, but I can appreciate that it is his).   But the store didn't have any?!?!   It had types of candy and types of popcorn, but sadly no candy corn.   

Roosevelt also appreciated the room

There was lots of ice cream though and had I not been super stuffed from dinner that would've been the perfect way to end.   Or so I thought...

Because that night, just after Mum had started to settle in and when I was still up, we heard a loud bang!   Sure enough, there was an *amazing* fireworks display on the lake that our balcony gave us a front-row seat for.   We had NO idea it was scheduled.   So we sat and watched that as a really magical end to the last hotel night on the trip :)

The cherry on top

The next day all that remained was the drive back home.   I will say I hadn’t really clued into the difference the Canadian ban on single-use plastics makes till I saw the pile of garbage we had collected just at breakfast in the hotel.  Each piece of cutlery was plastic AND individually wrapped in more plastic.  Other stuff too of course but that was the part where I really saw the impact. 

On the road again...

The drive itself was good. Billboards re-appeared about Flint Michigan.  The funniest part of the trip home was at the border crossing where Google suggested a faster alternate route ;).  Suffice to say, we kept to the original route.  

umm thanks Google but I think we'll suffer through the 6 minutes to avoid being arrested

The only really difficult part of the drive was the two-hours it took me to get from my parents' place to mine (usually about 50 min *sigh*).  So that was less ideal.  But made it, tired and happy, and looking forward to the next one.

Still smiling over the fireworks last night.   What an amazingly perfect end.