Sunday, October 4, 2020
No route map today because we remained in Munising, MI. We spent the morning doing laundry, and in the afternoon we took a boat tour of the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. The area is called Pictured Rocks because the minerals dissolved in spring water that seeps through the cracks in the sandstone cliffs leave multi-colored patterns that people imagine as pictures painted on the rock face. I’m sure that we could have imagined various things painted in the mineral deposits, but the tossing of our tour boat in the 4-5 foot waves left little time for musing on such things. The fairly dismal pasties we ate for lunch which might otherwise have stimulated our imaginations, proved quite a challenge to keep in their rightful places inside our bellies. In my experience, pasties are either really good or really bad, but never mediocre. However, I digress. We didn’t take any pictures of either the laundromat or the pasties, so here are the pictures and videos we took on the tour.
Our tour boat was called the Pictured Rock Express – a handy little triple-decked catamaran powered by twin Caterpillar diesel motors. Here she is departing through the channel east of Grand Island carrying the tour group after ours.
Being old and cold-blooded southerners (although Sue is Michigan born and bred), we opted to settle on the lower enclosed deck rather than the open upper deck in the chilly wind, and with the presumably more intense pitching of the pasties.
