Tour

I'm showing the map again so you get a little perspective.  In the U.P. you have water on all sides and scattered throughout the middle in smaller lakes.  You have trees. Rocks. Hills. Snow. Not a lot of people or towns.  Many hundreds of years ago the native people discovered copper in the hills and the largest copper mines in the world were in the Keewenaw Peninsula, that little tail looking peninusla just below the word 'Lake' in Lake Superior. This is where we spent most of the time. It's clean up there, it's stunningly beautiful, and it's quirky. The place was settled by the French, British, copper was mined with men from Wales and the Scandanavian countries. I was told the Keewenaw Peninsula has per capita, more millionaires and more poverty than anyplace else in Michigan. 

 As soon as you cross the bridge you start seeing signs for pasties, the food of the miners.  They are everywhere.  Not being in my home environment, after a day or so I was hungry for a cookie.  We could find pasties on just about every corner but no bakeries with cookies. 

Served in paper bags, we ate them only once but this was the best I've ever had.  Sometimes they can be really dry and you'd order gravy.  After eating this unbelievably moist and delicious one I told PH it was a sign of the coming dryness if the proprietor offers gravy to go with.

If you aren't eating pasties, you should be eating whitefish.  At this little roadside stop the proprietor was out catching the fish that morning and cooking it up for lunch and dinner that day.

 OK, besides being beautiful, living in the U.P. means a serious commitment to snow.  This place gets snow.  Notice the height of this measure.

 Now, please notice in the first photo where this red arrow is placed.  I took a close up so we could see they had just under 20 feet of snow and the all time low was 161.1 inches ( I mean, if you have that much snow do you really have to add the '.1' ???)  I show this because I was in a store and heard a woman telling someone that their winter tourism wasn't very good last year because "we didn't have the snow."  Yet, the arrow points to 20 feet of the stuff!

This was my favorite.  For the life of me I don't know why someone would want a deer skull boiled.

We saw some beautiful country, gorgeous lake vistas, abandoned copper mines, isolation and enjoyed talking to the locals. We spent a lot of time in the car covering territory but travelling from place to place often looked like this so it wasn't a hardship. We were on top of a mountain looking down on full growth forests.  It is often said when asked to describe Michigan in one word: green.