Friday, July 20. It's an overcast day, it was raining lightly overnight, and Ernie's wipers take a swipe when the drops reach a critical mass.
We stopped at the National Forest Headquarters in Duluth for ideas of where to spend the weekend, and then hit a nearby Super 1 grocery store. Like the WinCo grocery we hit in Idaho, the bagging area beyond the checkout clerk is split in two. While she was scanning our groceries, the previous customer is still packing her groceries as ours are heading to the other side. But at least Super 1 accepts credit cards.
The drive on I-35 through metropolitan Duluth was delightful, especially considering it's a Friday morning. Traffic is light as the highway weaves between Lake Superior and Old Industry on one side, and the aging city on the other.
I-35 ends, turning into Minnesota 61, as it follows the lake north to Grand Portage and the Canadian border. We quickly took a scenic byway with less people heading to their favorite camping spot for the weekend. We stopped at a state park with a full campground but with day use parking to see the waterfall overrun with kids and adults taking selfies. Sharon saw a sign for smoked fish and had to stop. We also got some cheese curds, which I may enjoy more. I'm not a big fan of picking bones out of the food in my mouth, and the smoked trout definitely had enough bones to be wary of.
We had our choice of sites at this Superior National Forest Campground, and coughed up $7.50 for our choice. We chose #1, since all the lakefront sites had paper on their poles.
But then we went for a walk. To the boat launch area, and then the path along the lake, when we ran into some fishermen and a rainbow trout. And they showed us all of the crawdads (12) that the trout had eaten before being caught. There is now no doubt in my mind that trout do a yeoman's job of keeping the crawdad population in check. What was really amazing was one of the crawdads was still alive, and started swimming away while we chatted. I think the crawdad's name is Jonas.
One of the guys (who'd been here a few days already) also told us that a site we wanted but had a "1" slip on its pole had been like that for days, do we moved to #18, with a lake access on site! Yippee! (After dinner we stopped by their site, and got good advice about our camping options for tomorrow.)
Time for SUP action, we pumped them up (well, Ernie's house battery provided the energy), and wandered off around our lake. It's not 9 miles long (the name of the campground is from the railroad stop that was once here, perhaps rnamed because the next water tower was 9 miles away), but it does have a trio of islands. The gaps between islands and mainland are shallow with big rocks just below the surface. I hit a few with my fin before Sharon hit one hard, and lost her balance. Fortunately she broke her fall with water and not rock. The rest of the paddle was less eventful, but a nice way to unwind.
The weather forces us to put away the screenroom and chairs earlier than we'd like, but Ernie is comfortable and dry, and homey.
We're only here one night. Sharon is confident we will find another site somewhere else tomorrow, maybe in Minnesota, maybe in Canada.
Minnesota pictures are at https://photos.app.goo.gl/NVTFbUfwkT6ZprAp8
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