Day 9 - July 27, 2000

plus ... the drive back to Michigan

We woke up this morning expecting to find our food spilled all over the ground by the flying squirrels. Thankfully, they only had chewed a 1/4" hole in the duffel bag. The inner bags appeared to be un-holey. We loaded that up, along with our wet clothes, test, and the rest of our gear and headed toward the car. We were all thinking about Famous Stars the whole way back. Of course, just to tick us off, it started to rain again as we entered Moose Lake. Yes, that was 7 days with rain out of 9 on our trip. We can sure pick the days, eh?

There were tons of motorboats this day, and wakes were getting annoying. As we closed in on the boat landing, I pulled out our third paddle from underneath the gear and began paddling from the middle seat. YAY! We had survived. We unloaded the stuff and carried it up to the car.


Here's me carrying the canoe up to the car.

After packing all of the gear in the trunk and half of the back seat, including hiding the wet clothes bag which smelled none too chipper in the trunk, we hooked the canoe back up to the roof.


Here's us hooking the canoe back up to the car (taken from Tracy's website).

I made sure no one was looking and quickly changed clothes into some dry, clean stuff in the parking lot. Then we sat down on the car seats and relaxed. The wet clothes bag smell was permeating the car, so we had to open the windows. After making sure everything was secure, we headed in to Ely, and straight for Hardee's. It had just turned lunch time, as in lunch is served at 11:00 am and we got there at 11:00 am. We ordered 11 Famous Stars and drinks. The lady taking the order gave us our change and ran, avoiding the wrath of the guy on the grill in the back when he saw our order. While waiting for our food, we found out that the severe weather the other day produced a tornado with a fatality in southwest Minnesota. Thankfully they weren't that bad when they got to us! We also noticed that the Tigers didn't do very well while we were on our trip. Oh well, nothing new... We devoured our burgers. Actually, half of them, and we saved the others for the ride back.

We had a couple stops on the way back.


First, it's Reeves road. Named after a distant relative of the guy who discovered the Reeves muntjac from the Vilas Zoo in Madison ... or something.


Here's me schmoozing with the locals in Two Harbors, MN


And now campaiging for the bass vote in Ashland, WI (hey, it was an election year).

It got really foggy after Ashland on U.S. 2. Thankfully the traffic wasn't bad. We again hit that massive detour at Wakefield that took us 30 miles out of our way. As we neared the choice between M-69 and U.S. 2 in Crystal Falls, I decided to take M-69. It turned out to be a good choice, because upon our return home, we found out that U.S. 2 was closed in Iron Mountain because of extreme flooding. Yeah it started raining pretty heavily once we were in Michigan, too.

Eventually we got back to Escanaba. We unloaded the car.


Here's us taking the canoe off the car.

We divided up the gear and brought them to their respective homes. It was time to rest up now.

Here's my Dad, glad we survived another trip!

As I was unpacking the next day, I noticed that the flying squirrels did make it through all of the bags, because the amount of Bri's Deluxe Trail Mix was drained drastically. I soaked the wet clothes for several hours in detergent. Thankfully they cleaned up pretty well. I then went and bought some new sandals, because the ones I had pretty much died out there. I also snagged sunglasses because they disappeared. I also got the film developed.

We checked out the pictures the next day before settling down and watching 'The Severed Arm' and 'Enemy of the State.' Yes, Severed Arm is a bad horror movie, and yes, it's really bad. Well, that's all I can remember out the end of our trip. Hope you enjoyed reading and seeing this.

Just click the 'Back' button on your browser to return to the map you were looking at.