the end of the tour

We're home! We had kind of a busy couple of days right at the end there. We made Friday our "explore the eastern UP" day, and yesterday was spent driving back home. For once, we made it back from vacation at a decent hour (around 4 p.m.) and didn't fall directly into bed upon arrival. So here's our last batch of pictures from a pretty great vacation.

First, we drove along the Lake Superior coast to find the Two-Hearted River, which Mike wanted to see because of Hemingway's short story of a fishing trip as allegory for the destruction of war ... and also because Mike really enjoys drinking Two-Hearted Ale, which is made by Michigan-based Bell's.

Our next stop was Oswald's Bear Ranch in Newberry, a sanctuary for rescued bears from all over the country. The boys were VERY excited that they could meet George the bear cub up close and personal, touch him, and get their pictures taken with him. (I'm just gonna go ahead and pull back the curtain on that particular magic trick -- the bear cubs are bribed with spoonfuls of jelly to cooperate for the pictures!) After the bear cub meet-and-greet, we spent some time checking out the adults and older cubs in their enclosures.

The next stop was Tahquamenon Falls State Park, billed as one of the "seven wonders of the UP." It was pretty wonderful indeed. It's about 200 feet across and falls almost 50 feet in the upper section; the lower section is divided into several smaller falls. By volume, it's the third-largest falls east of the Mississippi (after Niagara Falls and Cohoes Falls in New York). You get the idea: It's big. It also had nice paved paths and well-maintained viewing areas, and no bugs to speak of, so it gets an A+ from me.

Sadly, readers, this is the part of our story where we end up making the same mistake we always make. We neglected to feed ourselves (don't worry, the boys had plenty of snacks to tide them over) and we were out in the middle of nowhere with extremely limited options. So we decided to just push through to our next stop, Sault Ste. Marie, which was about another hour away. And by the time we got there and went through the border crossing into Canada, we were all STARVING and CRANKY. And it seemed like every restaurant we found had some disqualifying factor. First we stopped at a highly rated diner, only to find out that it's only open for breakfast and lunch (whoops). Then we stopped at another restaurant with good ratings, only to discover that it was much too fancy for our state of dishabille and the probable presence of bear slobber on at least four of us. Finally, we found a burger place that was open, casual, and not crowded (just the way we like it!), so we went in and chowed down. Then we took a poll, and all the kids were sick of seeing new things and wanted to just go to the motel and chill for the rest of the night. So our trip to Canada turned into ... a late lunch in Canada. Oh well.

A word about the motel. We've had great luck with motels on this trip! You may recall that the one in Copper Harbor was directly on Lake Superior. I was very pleased with it, even though two of us had to sleep on the floor since there were only two double beds. This motel in Sault Ste. Marie, though, had something I've never encountered in a hotel or motel: THREE double beds in one room! It was clean, cheap, and had a TV and fridge and even free breakfast. Score!