North Shore Trip #1

I left Lake Calhoun from my team building event on Thursday, September 12th and went directly home, packed the car and was on our way up to Duluth for the night.

By the time we got up there, it was dark.  We checked into our hotel room that my lovely sister got us for free.  This building was converted to a hotel and based on the picture below, it's kind of creepy.  I was just waiting for the twins in the the move The Shining to be standing at the end of the hall.

In the picture below, M is standing at the end of the hall.  That's a pretty long hallway.

We went to eat at Canal Park Brewing, walked around Canal Park and called it a night.

We woke up early on Friday and walked to Canal Park.  There was a ship coming in sometime after 8:30 am.  We could see it out there but it still looked like a long ways out there.  We waited for about 45 minutes when it came in around 8:20 am.  It was worth the wait.

We went back to the hotel, ate breakfast, got ready and headed out for the day.  We would slowly be making our way up the north shore to Schroeder where we'd be staying for the weekend with M's siblings and partners.

Our plan was to stop at different waterfalls on the way up the 71 miles to our destination.  I had bought a book for my dad of waterfalls of the north shore years ago.  I asked my mom if I could have it and she gave it to me.  The first waterfall we went to was Amity Falls in Duluth, except there was no waterfall.  It was completely dried up.  After seeing some of the waterfalls from the street on the way up to Schroeder, we knew this book wouldn't do us much good until the area wasn't as dry as it was.  

We stopped at Stony Point for a picture and headed directly to the house.

We were able to check in early and M's sister Kim and husband Greg had already checked in.  Check out the house we stayed in for the weekend.  The house is called Birken Bay.  It's shaped like a dome.  This picture was taken from the shore of Lake Superior.  

The weather was absolutely gorgeous on Friday but it was starting to get windy.  We saw some kayakers pass our shoreline from our deck.  It would be about 45 minutes since that point that those same kayakers would be on our shore.  The winds had changed and they found it too dangerous to continue to their destination about 6-7 miles ahead.  Instead, they asked for ride to their car.  Since I was the only one that hadn't started drinking yet, it was unanimous that I would be the one to drive them to their car.  I chatted with the kayakers while I took them to their car.  They were both women, both from St. Paul and both lived 6 or so miles from where we live.  Once we reached their car, they tried giving me $20 for the gesture which I declined.  It felt good doing my good deed for the day.

Ray and Dolly showed up shortly afterwards and there would only be one sibling missing, Lisa, who wouldn't be there until later that night.

For dinner, Greg made his famous ribs.  We cracked a bottle of Split Rock wine and had a toast before we headed to the beach for a fire.

Lisa finally showed up at 11:30 pm, after getting a flat tire a third of the way up.  Poor Lisa.

I made breakfast for everyone on Saturday morning.  I made a combination eggs, cheese, bacon, green peppers, jalapeno and Serrano peppers in a muffin tin.  Everyone really liked them.

Saturday was cloudier than the day before and it was windier.  Look at the waves.

We got ready and headed to Lutsen where we were going to take a ride on the gondola's.  For the second time we've tried as a group, they were closed for their yearly maintenance.  Instead, we decided to go hiking a little bit instead.  It was getting pretty warm and most of us weren't prepared to do a lot of walking. 

Our first views of nature on our hike. Beautiful. 

We didn't really know where we were going but we decided to go to the overlook that was shown on the map that we got in the gift shop.  We kept climbing and climbing and climbing and climbing.  Finally, we got to the overlook AND....you couldn't see a damn thing.  We were high up but just high up in the woods.  The background of the picture below is the "overlook".  We couldn't even see through the trees.

We got back to the main grounds and ate lunch at Papa Charlie's before heading back to our house.

We played on the shore for awhile and started another fire. It was pretty warm and you really didn't even need a jacket by the fire.

It started to rain around 8 pm so we took the party inside. We didn't eat dinner until late.  Ray and Dolly made us BLT's and for the first time, I had guacamole on my BLT. Dolly made the guac and she says she eats them like that and oh my, it was one the best BLT's I've ever had. YUM.

We woke up on Sunday to a rainy, cloudy day and started packing quickly and left around 8:30 am. We had a super fun weekend as we always do with this group.  Goodbye dome home!

There's a ship on the horizon between the trees