Delta and Schoolcraft Counties

Thursday morning...I was excited. We were going to get the rest of my 5 miles at Fayette Historic State Park. The town of Fayette was built to manufacture charcoal pig iron back inthe 1800's. They chopped down all the trees to get charcoal for the kilns and used the plentiful limestone in the area to purify the iron. Now it's a living history museum. There is a big old hotel, they've reconstructed a worker's house, there are some of the houses of the upper class of the town on display. Very impressive and interesting!

This is looking at Big Bay du Noc which is named after the Indian tribe that had been living in the area.

Here is the building where the furnace was located. You can still see the remnants of the slag in the bottom of the stack.

This is one of the kilns where they made charcoal.

There was a wonderful hiking path that run up along the hill behind the city. The views were amazing. That water is so blue....

Another one of those woodpeckered trees.

Delta County was done!

The last county that we were going to get done was Schoolcraft. I had been planning to go to Seney National Wildlife Refuge but changed my mind because there is no shade there and would have been miserable. Everything they say about the flies in the Upper Peninsula is so true. They are horrible and laugh at bug spray with their little mouths. We were going to do Manistique instead.

The first thing we did was eat. Cedar Street Cafe was perfect. It was located in an old building and managed to maintain it's historic character but had a modern classy looking dining space.

Once I had eaten my club sandwich (yum) I headed out toward the trail.

This was another lakeside town that does a good job of making the shore available to everyone. The trail was great. It had all the important things (in my opinion): They had restrooms, signs to explain about history and the wildlife, and water. I did about half my miles and then had to walk around town to get almost done. It was one of those, "I'm sick of this" moments and I'm afraid Wes got the brunt of my frustration.

I thought this was a pretty cool looking church.

This looks like an arts and crafts style house. Nice porch!

I had .36 to complete so we drove out of town and stopped at a roadside park and I got it done. That was all I achieved yesterday. We made it back to St. Ignace and I spent a while doing our stinky, sweaty laundry. This morning I went to Mackinaw City and Wes set off for Petoskey.