Bay Furnace

We started our morning yesterday with a phone call to Wayne's mother in Newfoundland to wish her a happy 90th birthday! Special thanks to my cousin, Cheri, for her help delivering something to Mom Leonard! After our communications with the Great White North we decided to start off our day with a drive down to the visitor center for Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore and the Hiawatha National Forest. After picking up a handful of literature we decided to take the short drive over to the Bay Furnace Historical site.

Wayne admired the stonework while I scampered around trying to get a shot. This sunny and 75 degree weather we keep having in the UP is excellent, but not a good friend of the photographer! It looks weedy in the photo around the base of the furnace, but there was a sign stating that it was actually a garden of native plants. I enjoyed the bee balm and bumblebees buzzing around.

There was a stairway down to the beach, and I noticed that it didn't seem that far down the shoreline to our RV park.

We drove further down M-28 just past Au Train to scope the area out. (By the way, fantastic looking beach in Au Train! Very white sand and much more shoreline!) We headed back into town for some groceries, and while we were at Glen's Market we purchased some raffle tickets for the Lions Club annual Rubber Duck Race on Saturday. Hope we are winners!

When we returned to our campsite we went for a walk around the campground and chatted with some full-timers who didn't know where they were wintering yet this year...got to love that! Wayne settled in for an afternoon nap, and I took an hour walk down the shoreline toward the Bay Furnace. Of course it was farther than it looked, but I made it a little over halfway to a little lighthouse before turning back. There wasn't much of interest along the way, but the exercise and the sound of the waves was very relaxing.

We made dinner and then headed back down M-28 to the Brownstone Inn in Au Train for dessert. I had the blackberry peach cobbler and Wayne had the chocolate cake with fudge sauce. Both were delicious and after looking over the menu we decided we'd come back another day for a meal. I've got my eye on the brown rice lentil burger! When we got home we watched a few episodes of Just Shoot Me on DVD before heading off to bed. Wayne made a lot of noise the previous day about needing to kick back and rest, but today he seemed restless and said we needed to get out for the full day tomorrow. So, it's just after breakfast now, and we'll be heading out to Miners Falls and Miners Castle. It might rain today, so we'll save biking on Grand Island for Tuesday!