An ironclad route

Friday, June 8, 2007

It’s not hard to figure out what one of the main resources of northern Michigan is; you just have to read the name of every other town! Our starting point this morning was Iron Mountain, and our route took us through Iron River, Iron County, and Ironwood. As well, you could see the rust colour of the soil by the roadside and know that there was iron all around.
We were spared the overnight tornado that we’d been warned about – in fact, before we turned in the sky had cleared and the sun was shining. We both noticed that it seemed quite light for nine at night, and that’s when I remembered that the map showed us crossing a time zone and it was only eight, Central Time! Still, we were tired so we turned in. The neighbouring campers must have thought we were a lively pair.
The highway was really lovely today – beautiful, tall trees, some of them pines but lots of deciduous trees, banked either side and we passed many clumps of purple and pink lupins, buttercups and daisies in the grass by the road. There were lots of wide expanses of fields and we were surprised almost none of them were cultivated; we guessed maybe the iron in the soil made them less desirable for crops.
Closer to lunch time we caught glimpses of Lake Superior to our right, and when we got to Ashland the highway was right next to the shore in places. We spotted a stretch of curb big enough to park at easily, so right there in the town we stopped and made our lunch in the trailer as the day’s traffic whizzed past us. When we finished, less than half a mile beyond we discovered a lovely waterside park with plenty of room for our rig, and grass, trees and a beautiful view to enjoy. Oh well. We were hungry!
Duluth, Minnesota, the largest American port on the Great Lakes, was situated just at the point, more or less, where we wanted to get off the highway in terms of mileage – having decided to cover about 200 or 300 miles, tops, per day. That meant we had to look at campground possibilities just short of Duluth or just past it, and Val was still fresh enough to choose the latter, so I flipped through our KOA directory and our Woodall’s and found a spot just a short jaunt off Highway 2 south on Interstate 35 in a place called Cloquet (we thought the locals might call it "clock-wet", but discovered they used the proper French pronunciation after all).
Once I found the spot, I had to rejig the Streets and Trips program to guide us there – all while the truck was steadily eating up highway and bearing down on Duluth. We could see evidence of the large, industrial metropolis, with factories, smokestacks, cranes and black-girdered buildings that only added to my anxiety. I could just see us snarled in some huge turnpike cloverleaf while I tried to figure out which exit ramp to take with seconds to identify it and get our rig pointed in the right direction!
I needn’t have sweated it. The program plotted everything beautifully, gave the directions (in a pleasant female voice – "in four point five miles, turn left at interchange 239") and we found our campground without one wrong turn. I love it!