Labor Day Adventures

Saturday afternoon, after my nephew's birthday party, Joe and I , the boys, and Grammie and Grandpa V. drove up to the UP. We went straight to our hotel in Paradise, MI. Yes Paradise is in Michigan although I'm not sure it's what I picture when I think of Paradise! The hotel was great and had a beautiful view of Lake Superior. We walked on the beach a bit and then everyone went for a swim before bed. The next morning we headed out to Pictured Rocks National Park. We stopped along the way at the beach - Grammie had to find some good rocks for her pond. We went to the Log Slide which is a huge sand dune where they used to slide logs down to Lake Superior to transport them other places. There are all kinds of warnings about going down the "slide" - don't do it if you have heart or breathing conditions, it may only take minutes to go down but over an hour to climb back up, etc. So all 6 of us went jumping (or controlled sliding) down. They sure weren't kidding when they said it was difficult to climb back up! The picture looking up the log slide doesn't do it justice, and of course for every step up you take, you slide halfway back down again. It is 500 feet long, and a 300 foot elevation change! But we all made it safely back to the top without any heart attacks or passing out. You'd think that would be enough for one day but we pressed on to Taquamehnon Falls. Just as we got out of the car we were caught in a torrential downpour (the UP hasn't had rain for ages - so of course it rained on us now!) We went to the Upper Falls and then decided to hike to the Lower Falls - it was only supposed to be 4 miles - so we think, no problem. Wrong. The first bad sign is the posted sign saying the hike should take 3 hours - what? 3 hours to walk 4 miles, are you kidding? Then as we are hiking we come upon a sign at what I felt should have been at least halfway and it says 3 miles to the falls. Yikes! So you can imagine how tired we were when we finally came to the end of the trail (we are just sure that it is longer than 4 miles). We went back to Paradise and ate at one of the 2 restaurants in town. It was very much a Yooper experience - they even had a cigarette vending machine (I've never seen one).

On Monday we packed up and headed out to St. Ignace. All we knew was that we were going to walk the Mackinaw Bridge and we needed to park somewhere. Before we could even see the bridge, traffic on the freeway had come to a stop. So we decided to just get off the freeway and look for a spot to park, people were everywhere! We parked and walked down the freeway, now passing all the cars that had been in front of us! We walked across the bridge with tens of thousands of other people. It was really cool, walking on the open grate looking down at the water below was a little freaky though. Then once we reached Mackinac City we sent Joe and his dad to catch the shuttle back to St.Ignace to get the car. Grammie, the boys, and I went to the park to eat and play. More that an hour later we finally got a call from Joe saying that the line for the shuttle was so long (think hours in line) he had hopped on the ferry to Mackinaw Island. He was then going to take a ferry to St. Ignace, get the car, and come get us. But he had split from his dad who was going to stay in line just in case the ferry thing didn't work out - so we had to go find him. And thus began the crazy, hours long search for Grandpa! Anthony and Grammie walked up and down the gigantic lines for the shuttle looking for Grandpa with no success. Then Joe arrived and he and his mom power walked around Mackinac City twice and FINALLY found a hot and tired Grandpa! Hurray! We then headed for home in what I can honestly say was some of the lightest Labor Day traffic ever! Thank goodness for that!