Duluth Finally
We made it. These new RVer's are destroying the old way of travel. There are so many out there that most all of the campgrounds are booked well in advance. We are now at Lakehead on the docks here in Duluth. Literally "sitting on the dock of the bay". The campground manager told me that he has bookings into 2027. These reservations are mostly for the big holiday weekends and it would take a death of the RVer to open up these slots. Within an hour of being here we got to see one of the large cargo ships go under the 'lift bridge'. Shortly we will get to see one of the largest ships on the 'Great Lakes".
Jan and I just sat down with a map to lay out our loops for our time here. We are both very excited with our choices. I hope to share these trips. Our goal is explore the "North Shore" of Lake Superior here in Minnesota.
7/26 We traveled up the "Arrow Head" seeing many of the sights we had planned on seeing. Since this area is over 5" of rain short, the rivers flowing into Lake Superior are way down on flow. Our trip took us to Gooseberry Falls, Split Rock Lighthouse, Black Beach, Tettagooche State Park and on to Grand Marais. Our hiking was minimal but we still got in about 10 miles today.
At Gooseberry, we found large crowds and our first encounter with "black flies". The falls were less than 20% of their normal size but still they were pretty. Before we made it to Gooseberry we stopped at a place called Betty's Pies. We had heard quite a bit about this place so we had to try it. As we stood there looking at the pies selection we met a woman with a beautiful dog. The dog was really sweet and we made fast friends.
This woman was a farmer in the area and she helped Jan to make up her mind on what pies to get. Jan is a real fan of coconut pies and this lady was eating a piece of it. When I ordered I got a coconut cream and blueberry pie. We started eating them when we got back to our campground and were well pleased with our choices.
Split Rock Lighthouse was next. I had been wanting to see this since we started to plan this trip. As we got out of our car, we were SWARMED by black flies. Even after repellant the flies continued to swarm us. We finally were able to make it to the beach where we had a beautiful view of the lighthouse.
Black beach was interesting. The beach turned this color some years ago because of one mining companies dumped a residue into the lake here. They no longer do this but here is the result.
looking character on the trail, Because the water was at such a low level the volume going over it was small. Still a nice view.
All of these parks were loaded with people.