July 13, 2012

We slept until 8:45 this morning.  I guess the time change affected us.  Jim needed a haircut and we found a place in Hancock.  It’s supposed to rain tonight and some tomorrow so we wanted to drive the Keweenaw Peninsula today.  We stopped at the Quincy Unit of the Keweenaw National Historical Park.  All of this area is about the copper mining era.  We went to the Laurium Manor owned by Thomas Hoatson Jr., owner of the Calumet & Arizona Mining Company.  This house has 45 rooms and is 13,000 square feet.  We visited the Phoenix Church, the Central Mine Site, and Central Methodist Church.  This church has services only on the last weekend in July and  is a reunion of families of the original miners.

We drove to the end of Hwy 41 in Copper Harbor.  This highway starts in Florida, goes through eight states, and is 1,990 miles long. We saw the Copper Harbor lighthouse which was built in 1866 and is the oldest operating lighthouse east of the Mississippi.  We visited Ft. Wilkins historic state park.  This fort was established to maintain order during the copper rush of the 1840s.  There were people in period costumes who were in character for the era when the fort was active.  Jim bought us lunch at Tamarack Inn in Copper Harbor.  We ate pasties.  They are similar to Natchitoches meat pies. The miners carried the pasties down in the mines with them in tin pails and would heat them up with their candles.  The pasties were served with brown gravy on the side and coleslaw and they were really, really good.

We drove back to camp via the road along Lake Superior and stopped at Eagle Harbor lighthouse and drove by Great Sand Bay which has a nice beach.  After arriving in Calumet, we stopped at the Calumet visitor center of the Keweenaw National Historical Park and saw a couple of short movies about the area.  We had a beer at Red Jacket Brewing in the old 1905 Bosch Brewing Company building.  There was a mural on canvas above the bar that was painted in 1906.  We got back to camp and sat outside about 15 minutes before it started to sprinkle -- that  ran us inside the Casita.  I fixed dinner and we watched some TV.