Family visit

This week was pretty special because my parents came to visit! I knew they were planning to come out but I had been surprised to find they were coming so early in the summer – last year when I was at Yellowstone, they visited me much later in the summer. But it worked out really well.

They arrived in Munising on Tuesday evening, and we met and had supper at Pizza Hut, then went back to their motel to hang out. We talked about their drive up, and what had been going on at work, and what we might do over the next few days. We decided that they would come to my house for breakfast on Wednesday and we’d go from there.

I immediately decided I wanted to bake rolls for breakfast! I was originally going to make cinnamon rolls, but that wouldn’t work unless I already had some dough mixed up, which I didn’t. (It would need time to rise before I could even shape the cinnamon rolls, and it was pretty late by the time I was back home planning all this.) I decided instead to mix up some dough, let it rise in the fridge overnight, and just make some plain small rolls to have with butter and jam. This was my first time using the overnight rise technique, but it worked out well. The rolls turned out really well Wednesday morning – and I timed it so that they were almost done by the time Mom and Dad got there. We also had scrambled eggs, fried ham, and fruit salad. There’s something very satisfying about cooking for other people!

After breakfast we walked over to Sand Point, so they could see where I’d gone wading. We also went into the park Headquarters building, and they met a few of the other employees – including one of the other two Brenda’s!

From there we drove about half a block’s worth of distance – if that! – and parked across from the Sand Point Marsh Trail. First, though, we had to take some pictures of the beach there – with clouds and fog obscuring half of Grand Island! 

Then we headed into the marsh. It was completely different from the last time I’d walked the boardwalk loop, because there were almost no leaves out at that time. Now there were leaves and flowers, and it was green as far as the eye could see – except where fog was still steaming out over the water, even as the sun shone through.

Wild Lily-of-the-Valley

Bunchberry - also called Dwarf Dogwood, or Creeping Dogwood.

Willow seeds escaping on wings of fluff!

Fog steaming off the marsh.

Tree pollen blown into the water formed rings around the edge.

While some blueberries are just now blooming...

...Others are already forming fruit!

The fog came back just as we were finishing our walk.

We were near the end of the loop and decided to call my sister Joanne and tell her about what we’d been seeing. As most phone calls in our family tend to do, this lasted for quite a while! Finally we headed out of the marsh, and realized it was already lunchtime! We went back to the house and had some leftover pizza before heading out on our drive through Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore.

Our first stop, of course, was Miner’s Castle. When we were at Headquarters that morning, Brenda S. asked me to bring some pins and patches out to the Miner’s Castle visitor center, so we had to go there anyway. We talked to Marc for a minute while the visitor center was empty, and then headed out. We actually didn’t walk the path to the overlooks, because we wanted to get to the other end of the park – and Mom and Dad were planning to come back to Miner’s Castle when I was working on Saturday.

We really didn’t stop much, just enjoyed the drive. Our main destination was the Sable Falls trail. I had been wanting to hike that trail again, since I hadn’t seen much in the fog during training, and I knew they would enjoy the views. We stopped at the Grand Sable visitor center first and got in just before it closed, and talked to Judy, the ranger at the desk there, for a little while, then headed out.

This dragonfly stopped to pose for a photo before zipping off again. Go eat those mosquitoes, dragonfly!

The trail was bright and sunny – but full of mosquitoes! It was impossible to stop and look for very long at any of the overlooks of the falls, but instead we headed down toward the shore. 

View of the stream below the falls, in bright sunlight!

View looking away from the dunes.

Dad and Mom, helping to provide scale for the size of the dunes!

Tiny pebbles create erosion patterns as the waves come in.

The breeze there kept the mosquitoes from being quite so bad, but they still gathered if you didn’t keep moving around. Mom took her shoes off and put her feet in the water; I decided not to because I didn’t want to get all sandy putting my shoes back on. Dad found a few rocks that were flat enough to skip across the water, despite the waves – and got applause from some little kids that had been splashing around in the water! The light on the dunes and on the stones of the beach was beautiful – that late afternoon glow.

The hike back was rough – mainly climbing back up all those stairs, not wanting to push it but not able to rest because of the mosquitoes! We finally got back to the car and headed for Munising.

We were going to go get some hot pasties for supper (a U.P. specialty – pronounced past-eez, sort of a handheld pot pie) but the place was closed by the time we got back. We decided to go to Hardees instead, but first we drove up to a scenic overlook east of town, near the place that was closed. It’s a view from way up on the hill, looking out over Munising Bay. Spectacular!