THEMES & Things

There are themes to the things we do. As time passes on this trip, we progress through themes of things we are going to. For a bit there was shipwrecks, then it was forts, always there has been museums but lately it has been mines. Today, it was an iron mine and a museum. Today's museum was a really neat one. It was the IXL Museum Wisconsin Land and Lumber Company. It was about this fellow that invented a machine to automate the tongue and grove board for hardwood floors. The mine was very neat too. We were at a depth of awful deep in a very cool damp and sometimes slippery iron mine that was hosted by Big John himself. We rode a very narrow train through a very narrow tunnel and got off and walked some distance into a very large cave where the iron had been mined out. Now the creepy thing about this mine to me was when the guide described this one particular drill that was used for overhead drilling which was very deadly and men were on the wait list to use it for an extra 3 pennies per day. They were actually waiting in line to have rocks fall on their heads. We came into the city of ESCANABA today. If you will look through old posts you will find in one of my very first posts a reference to a movie, Escanaba in da Moonlight. It is not quite like that here, but close. Troy says that everything about coming to the UP is like going back to at least 1950 mostly earlier. I really do see the resemblance to an earlier time here. There are some very, shall we say, slow to accept progress types here.

Escanaba, MI

Found this cute water tower along the way!

At the lumber museum

Anyway, it is absolutely fascinating to take a tour of this part of the country that I have not ever seen before. Tomorrow we head down a road I have been on before in lower Michigan on the way to Grand Rapids, but it will be at a later time of year than my last visit and I am looking forward to seeing the change of season.