Wanderung 4

Toyota Tundra Tows Trailer!

Or: Following Fall Foliage with Family Flophouse Firmly Affixed!

September - October 2003

October 12 - Marquette, Michigan

We rolled out of bed around 8 o’clock, had breakfast, packed, hooked up the trailer, and finally left the dumping station at the campground at 9:30, for a total elapsed time for breaking camp of about and hour and a half. Monika and I recalled that the same sequence when we were tent camping (e.g. Wanderungs 1 and 3) took a little over an hour, if memory serves us correctly. I imagine we could shave it down to about an hour with the trailer if we really hurried. The extra time with the process with the trailer is partly due to carefully stowing things in the trailer in such a way that they will not bounce around while traveling, which occasionally requires some thought. But certainly also the processes of disconnecting the water and electric lines plus lifting the jacks and making the connections to the car and the dumping sequence are all likely suspects for taking some of the extra time. In sooth, it does seem to take a bit longer to get going in the morning with this kind of rig. A motor home would avoid the hitching process and might be as fast as breaking camp with a tent, but the price would be driving what essentially amounts to a bus, and I’m just not ready for that even if we could afford it.

In any event we headed pretty much due north for 40 miles and then turned east for 25 miles or so to Marquette, Michigan, which is a small city on the shores of Lake Superior. They had a “Tourist Park” on the north side of town that included a campground, and we worked our way over there to see if it was still open—our 2001 camping guide said the campground closed October 15th, but we weren’t sure if that was still true in 2003 or not. Altho no one was there when we arrived, the campground appeared open so we picked a nice, level, pull-thru type of space and set up the trailer. Aside from one tent camper, we were the only folks in the campground and that gave me a lonely feeling—altho an introvert I enjoy the camaraderie with other campers. I’m sure the lack of campers was due to the approaching end of the camping season up here; apparently they usually get their first snowstorm in late October and are solidly snowed in by December for the next 3-4 months.

We were fortunate to have very pleasant bright and sunny but cool weather, so we decided to use it by visiting the Marquette Maritime Museum that afternoon. We basically drove east to the lake and then south until we found a rather small museum housed in the old town waterworks building. The museum is next door to the Coast Guard Station on the shore of the harbor, and right after we arrived we found they were giving a tour of the lighthouse at the station so we joined it.

The Marquette lighthouse is quite unmistakable as it is painted a rather vivid shade of red, something close to chartreuse, I think. It used to be plain old brick, but the Coast Guard wanted to increase its visibility so they picked a color that would be noticeable, and it surely is! The lighthouse has a 2-story schoolhouse-shaped building surmounted by a small lighthouse tower about the size and height of the bell tower in an old-fashioned schoolhouse. The museum has leased the building from the Coast Guard, which was still running the light for coastal navigation purposes, and is slowly refurbishing the interior to house collections of maritime artifacts and paintings. We had a very nice tour of the interior from which we had great views up and down the coast, and then we walked out a catwalk at the front of the lighthouse to the site of the old foghorn building. From the catwalk looking back we had some very nice views of the exterior of the lighthouse and a grand vista seaward.

At the end of the tour we went back into the museum, which had an extensive display of photographs and information about shipwrecks and lifesaving on Lake Superior. There are 41 shipwrecks in and around Marquette harbor (!), so this focus, altho depressing, is a historical fact of life for the maritime industry. The museum also had other displays including the Fresnel lenses for three lighthouses: a fourth-order, third-order, and second-order lens. The curious thing about this numbering system is that the smaller the number the larger the lens is—the second-order lens was huge and must have weighed a ton.

As we exited thru the museum gift shop I spied a wooden tablet with the photographic image of the Marquette lighthouse imprinted on it in some way, possibly by silk-screening. It was on sale for $8 and I bought it thinking I could drill 60 holes in it when we get home and use it for a cribbage board on our next trip! When I finally got to it after the trip, the drilling process turned out to be a bit tedious but the end result was indeed a 1-of-a-kind cribbage board to take with on our future Wanderungs. So the Coordinated Cribbage Contest (CCC) will clearly continue in the confines of the Tin Blimp in the future—stayed tuned for updates!

Copyright 2004 by R. W. Holt and E. M. Holt
Prolog Map Epilog

September 2003
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October 2003
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