On to Ontonagon

Despite cloudy weather and a chance of rain, we made our way to Ontonagon.  Lake Superior laps at the waters edge of this village of about 2000 people.

We tried to find the Ontonogan Lighthouse by ourselves, but it is well hidden.  We wound up at the Visitor Center and signed up for the tour.  It was well worth the money.  The woman who did our tour was quite interesting and brought  little tidbits of unwritten information into her speech.  She knew all about the lighthouse keepers, their wives, children, grandchildren and even great-grandchildren.   I'm going to refer to her as Miss Encyclopedia Britannica...Brit for short.  She was a wealth of knowledge.

The first place that we looked at was the two-holer outhouse.  It is rather unique since most outhouses are made of wood and don't survive very long. 

A group of university students was given instructions to dig out and identify all the things dropped down the privy above!  I immediately thought this was totally gross, but by then, the remains had turned to compost.  We went inside the lighthouse and there was a shelf with all of the "finds".....a broken sugar bowl, bottles, broken dishes, etc.  Very interesting, but I'm still glad I wasn't one of those students!

"Brit" showed us the kitchen pump still worked.  It takes over 100 pumps by hand to fill up the kitchen sink.

Later on, "Brit" demonstrated the portable fog horn used by the Ontonogan lighthouse keepers.  We put our hands over our ears and it was still loud.

Time for a picnic lunch at a nearby park just off the lake.  

At least we had pretty good reception for Don's phone and Terri's I-pad.  She was helping him look up something on the Internet.

Our next stop was Porcupine Mountain State Park and Lake of the Clouds Overlook, affectionately called The Porkies by locals.  It sure was applicable for that day since it was cloudy and lightly raining when we got up there.  Terri was holding the umbrella over me as I snapped a few pictures.  By the time we got back to their car, we were wet, but not drenched.

Okay, what do you do when it is drizzling and you still want to go sightseeing?  Take a underground mine tour!  Although numerous mine tours abound in the U.P. we decided on the Adventure Mine guided tour.

Part of the fun was getting to the mine entrance.  It was an uphill, bumpy ride and we struggled to stay in our seats while holding on to the straps with one hand and our hard hats with the other.  It reminded me of the Indiana Jones ride in Disneyland.

I had to take an up close picture of the back of the jeep for our daughter, Heidi.

This is my favorite picture of Ron and Don together.  Notice anything similar?  About the only way you could tell them apart from the back was the color of their hair!   After not seeing Ron & Terri for over 20 years, it was amazing how much Don and Ron are alike and the same went for Terri and me.  We wore the same color and style of Sketchers one day!  I always knew she had good taste in shoes and clothes!

There were a lot of bats in this mine.  I got several pictures of single bats, but this group photo was my favorite.  I don't know if they smiled or not since their little mouths were facing the wall.  Maybe I should have said "cheese" or "mosquitoes" first.