Keweenaw - Chicago (3 of 4)

In Houghton, we stayed at the Downtowner - a little, old, spotlessly clean motel right beside the lift bridge.

I wish I could've got a photo of the lobby, but I didn't, so I'll try to describe it. Imagine a small, dim living room that smells faintly of coffee, cigarettes, and some sort of chemical used to mask cigarette smell. The walls are covered with photos, tourist info and signs with smart-aleck sayings on them. On every available surface are gigantic, sleeping cats. Behind a little counter is a nice lady who looks a bit like a cat herself. She and her husband have owned the Downtowner for thirty years.

We loved it there. On our last morning, the Spouse stepped outside the room and photographed the Ranger III ducking under the lift bridge on her way out to Isle Royale.



That night, we looked out our new hotel room at downtown Chicago.



In the morning, I photographed an El stop on the street below (well, technically above the street below).



The Spouse used hotel points to get us a room at the Palmer House Hilton. This place was built in the days of the "grand" hotel, where people could stay and be important and aristocratic. The lobby was impressive and overblown and fun. The current management ruined the effect, however, with really loud, strange music that filled the atrium and drowned out that nice murmuring, clinking-silverware hotel lobby sound.









I call this statue the Sleepy Golden Woman. This is what I look like first thing in the morning:



"Ha," said the Spouse.

Keweenaw - Chicago (2 of 4)

The Spouse's great-grandfather was a copper miner on the Keweenaw peninsula. The area is dotted with old mine shafts and remnants of the mining industry.

Once during college, the Spouse got to descend one of the shafts with friend who was taking seismograph readings underground. You can still descend the Quincy shaft, but I said "no, thank you." There was enough great stuff to see on the surface.

Smelter, odd building, slag boat:







The soil is so full of iron that the roads look pink, and many of the village buildings are made of the local, red rock.





The red leaves had fallen, but the golds were still there.

Keweenaw - Chicago (1 of 4)

"I'm sorry I'm acting like a kid in a candy store," said the Spouse. We were driving around the Keweenaw peninsula - a wild, beautiful part of Michigan that juts northeast into Lake Superior. The Spouse went to college here, and for thirteen years he's been telling me about it. Last, week, he finally took me.

I told him I don't blame him. Who wouldn't want to go to school on a campus that looks like this?





This lift bridge connects the towns of Houghton and Hancock over the Keweenaw waterway, a portage canal that crossees the entire peninsula. Trains no longer use the trestle underneath, but in winter it's open for snowmobiles (although people drive across the ice, anyway).



The structure on the hilltop is the Quincy mine shaft. More on the copper mines in a later post.





The Spouse has a back-in-the-day story about a college buddy driving his car over the jetty to this lighthouse. That story, and a few others he told me, made me conclude that you can attend and succeed at a challenging engineering university and still lack a shred of common sense. "Ha," said the Spouse.



More to come.