We had decided before the trip that we would all go to the Trestle Inn for hamburgers and beers at lunchtime before we parted ways. This should have been simple. As it turned out, it wasn’t as simple as we anticipated.

There was a detour on route 7, necessitating quite a few extra miles of driving on the gravel roads, (extra driving both before and after for all of us), and it may have been a rather foolish thing to do, but we still kept on with our original plan.

After some dusty travel, we arrived at the Trestle Inn.

Piwi had a stretch in the parking lot, followed by her lunch, and then was loaded back into the Jeep.

We enjoyed big, greasy burgers, onion rings, beers, and more conversation (we never seemed to run out of things to talk about!) for an hour or so, and then we parted our ways. Bill and David back to Ely and their beautiful home there, and Neil and me headed down the North Shore for our evening’s lodging at the historic lighthouse B & B in Two Harbors, MN.

The lighthouse is really quite interesting. It is beautifully preserved (or restored?), and still has a working light every night. There are three guest rooms within the lighthouse, with a shared bathroom. The shared bath was a bit awkward when we needed to clean up, but our early arrival kept us out of the way of the others pretty well. And I did appreciate the big, deep claw-foot tub to soak off my dirt and ease my aching joints! The only down side was that the rooms were on the second floor, and the light was up in the tower, so there were lots of steps to climb in order to really enjoy this place.

Breakfast the next morning was beautiful, congenial, and LATE! 9:00. I was awake at 6 AM as always, and spent the time downloading photos into my card reader.

We drove across Wisconsin, stopping at the Foster Cheese Haus for our traditional lunch stop (it’s a favorite of ours), and spent the night at Delafield, so that we could board the Lake Express Ferry in Milwaukee the next day shortly after noon. It was a very rough crossing on Lake Michigan, and I was very glad to get on shore again at Muskegon.

Now we are back home in Michigan after more than three weeks. So many memories, so many friends that we saw, new experiences, special places. As I said at the beginning, we are richly blessed.

There is no way to adequately thank Bill and David for making this canoe trip possible for me. They say that they had fun, too, and I believe that. Even for someone who usually does it quite differently, I think it was a trip with just a few challenges and some special moments. Sharing the licks, laughs, and antics with Piwi made it even more fun.

And we did return to Cherokee. That’s the best part of all.